How does the current economic climate affect housing and homelessness?
One direct effect is the wind-down of COVID emergency measures that saw “everybody indoors” safety measures which provided temporary housing assistance for millions of people worldwide.
However, the world is emerging from a health crisis to face new problems that are shrinking family budgets, even as free-market owners and landlords resume profitable ‘business as usual’ housing price-hike practices.
Meanwhile, the war in the Ukraine has licensed oil companies to reap trillion dollar profits by hiking their bite into consumer finances.
What other insults to family take-home pay lurk on the horizon? What might we do about them? The wide-ranging scope of these kinds of problems, and indeed possible solutions, is reflected in an article from Lyon in France. There a scheme to mitigate bleeding from citizen pockets is designed to counter increasing fuel costs and price hikes for essential vehicle travel.
‘Socially fair’ and ‘environmentally just’ community charges will soon apply to parking fees.
Socially fair? When applied to parking, it apportions charges so that vehicle owners with greater wealth will pay more for their parking, while those with battered household budgets will pay less.
Environmentally just? This refers to the cost of replacing oil/gas driven transport with green solutions such as electricity and hydrogen ‘fuels.’ Again, parking charges will reflect that some are in a better position to shoulder the burden to prepare for a ‘green’ future. Read more at the MAYOR.eu: Lyon makes parking fees socially fair and environmentally just
‘Socially just’ solutions appear to offer a fundamental fairness that seem always to elude ‘free market’ explanations that seem fine in theory, but often do not work out in practice.
Like Lyon, California is preparing to take a ‘socially fair and environmentally just’ approach to charging for electrical service — a cost that will grow in importance as hydrocarbon-based fuels are phased out to control climate change. In California, free-market for-profit suppliers produce and deliver electricity. To provide ‘socially fair’ and ‘environmentally just’ electrical power will be an immense challenge in a corner of the continent where homelessness itself is slowly becoming more and more a desperate and dominant crisis.
Read more about the difficulty of finding fair and just power supply solutions at CNET: California Electricity Bills Will Soon Be Based on Income. Here’s How It Might Work
