Housing Standards

I was relatively newly homeless when someone gifted me a membership to Metafilter. It's a bastion of extremely classist rich kids from upper class American families that positions itself as an enclave of morally superior do gooders making the world a better place.

There were other poor people there. I wasn't the only one. Some of them told me privately they intentionally downplayed or hid their current circumstances knowing it wouldn't be well received on the site.

If I recall correctly, one gal was divorced, having fled an abusive marriage, and had a young child. She was in housing because her parents were paying her rent or letting her live in a house they owned or something. 

One day, she talked about her housing making her ill. It was poverty housing and she knew living there was part of why she had serious health problems. 

She made some remark about how she could do nothing about it because of poverty and expected me to simply agree with whatever bullshit she shouted because I was even lower on the social hierarchy than she was. I didn't do that and it didn't go well.

We were both two of the losers who spent a lot of time hanging out in the chat room. I was open about the fact that I chose to go homeless because of my health situation and pointed that out: That if your housing is making you ill, being homeless is an option. 

If she had framed it differently -- "Because I have a small child" or whatever -- and said she didn't feel she could make other choices at this time, I would have been supportive. But I felt strongly her more general framing was intentionally designed to piss all over me and my point of view and start a process of gradually shutting me up about the fact that I was homeless in preference to living in housing making my health worse because I valued my health more than being in housing. 

I'm very big on different strokes for different folks and happy to support someone's right to choose something different from me. That's not what this was about. It was about trying to shut me up because I made her uncomfortable with her choices and rather than wonder why, she was looking to interfere with my right to express my point of view.

This kind of abusive shit from her is why I didn't want her to know I was the person who gifted her a second account. I believed if she knew that, she would just be more abusive and expect me to UNDERSTAND and put up with her shit rather than be grateful, respectful and kind in return.

Another of the chat losers was a well-paid, well-traveled programmer. One day, he told an anecdote about being in a South American country and some guy was laying on the sidewalk and the chick he was walking with, who probably eventually married him, expressed deep concern about someone sleeping on a sidewalk and something should be done about it.

Being American of the USA/Merika variety, he dismissed the idea that any concern was warranted and assumed the guy was homeless and they should mind their own business. She was outraged and told him her country didn't have homelessness. She said "EVERYONE has a home!"

He ended the story with saying "I think the guy was drunk." And we talked about the favelas -- the slums -- in such places and how housing standards in the US drove homelessness. 

I thought that was brilliantly insightful and have long intended to do something with that information. Looking back on it, I think he was really being an asshole and justifying homelessness in the US with "We have homelessness because we have housing standards and losers like you just can't keep up."

The assumption that our housing standards are an improvement over the existence of favelas is wrong and stupid. For starters, it's an assumption that we don't have poverty housing because we have standards and that's not true.

The gal living in housing that was making her sick was in poverty housing in the US. And she's far from the only one.

Approximately 22 million people live in manufactured or mobile homes in the United States.

960 square feet is the average size of a lot plot for a mobile home. 

Nebraska manufactured housing stats suggest an increase of 226% since 2009

My understanding is mobile homes are exempt from some housing standards which helps keep them cheap and is fueling a rise in mobile homes for people unable to afford those North American housing standards. 

For another, it assumes that homelessness is about lack of a physical home when it's really fundamentally lack of someplace to call your own, someplace you are allowed to be. 

The off grid movement suggests that a lot of people want to have a place of their own even if they have to live in a SHACK without electricity or running water. They want to own the land and have the right to live as they choose, not as some landlord dictates, and it's worth a long drive to the middle of nowhere without a hospital or shopping nearby to get that.

Housing standards in the US are often an upper class White means to gatekeep out "undesirables" like people of color. They are fueling a variety of movements and trends, from the rise in mobile home ownership to the tiny house movement to van or RV living and off grid living. 

Many of these options aren't really fit for human habitation. They are a desperate attempt to have a home at all in a country with steadily rising rates of homelessness in spite of the fact that in some cases people know it's making them sick. 

The degree to which this is a health crisis for the USA goes largely overlooked. 

I chose to be homeless because I had briefly lived in a trailer before and stated at the time "Never again. I would rather live in a tent." which is exactly what I did while homeless. 

I lived in a trailer in some small town between Manhattan, Kansas and Fort Riley. After I moved out of it and was living in a house we purchased in Manhattan which had something like 20,000 college students in a city of 50,000 people, I talked to a graduate student at the college who blamed her chronic health issues while in school on Kansas.

At the end of our conversation, she noted she had only ever lived in trailers while in school in Kansas, so it was possible living in a trailer was the real problem, not Kansas per se.

This was an educated woman from a privileged family and it never crossed her mind that her housing might be the problem, not allergies to local flora, until I pointed out that possibility. 

I don't know what needs to change, but American housing standards aren't making American lives fundamentally better than that of poor people in South America. We should revisit what we are trying to actually accomplish with those standards and revise them to support health and quality of life for all Americans, not just protecting upper class assholes from having non-white neighbors. 

Footnote 

If you thinking US housing standards aren't racist, classist bullshit replacing explicit red lining, read up on Black Wall Street. After an angry White mob burned this relatively wralth Black neighborhood to the ground, they tried to use building fire safety codes to prevent them from rebuilding and acted like inadequate building safety standards is why it burned down.

There's no building standard that prevents an angry mob from burning your shit down. You can literally build a stone fort and they can still torch it.

The current hypothesis for the existence of 200 vitrified stone forts across Europe is that they were torched by conquering armies, resulting in melting of the stone structures.