21st Century Housing--foreclosure article featuring Pierce Co. discussion group

21st Century Housing: Is it Time to Scrap the American Dream?
http://www.thepierceprogressive.org/21stcenturyhousing

The “New” Salishan on Tacoma’s Eastside has won several architectural and urban design awards. As a federally funded Hope VI project, it has been frequently studied, though the focus is seldom on the people. The folks who live there are ordinary, working class folk - no awards for that. There is a house in the New Salishan that has been unoccupied since late April as the result of a foreclosure. A sale is pending at the time of this writing.


This particular foreclosure was avoidable. It happened against the back drop of the housing collapse, but there was no job loss, medical emergency, or shady mortgage broker or lender involved. The house, built in 2006, was overpriced and purchased based on a notion of the “American Dream” that is undergoing serious reassessment. I called that house home for more than six years.

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Now I wonder out loud if we are building the right kind of housing for the “new normal.” Or are most of us still holding our breath while waiting for the housing market to return to the seductive, hot mess it was prior to 2008? Does it still make sense to promote home ownership as the primary means for building wealth? Do we live in a city that puts the needs of its citizens ahead of the exuberant profit-seeking of big developers who just build and move onto to the next project without concern for the quality of life in the communities in which they build? What really constitutes “fair housing”?


For those of us examining the choices we made that led to a foreclosure, I recommend doing this critical thinking communally. This is the best antidote to the shame provoked by a foreclosure regardless of how common the experience has become. In the months just before the auction notice arrived, I found it helpful to be a part of a group committed to asking critical questions in the context of the everyday stories of everyday folk. That group is a social justice organization called The Conversation. In our Oct. 6 gathering we talked about what kind of housing and housing policies we need for the 21st century if we are to have vibrant, just communities and sustainable lifestyles. We only scratched the surface of this subject; so we will continue the conversation.

You can get involved by joining The Conversation every Sunday at noon at the Tacoma Urban League, 2550 South Yakima.