“Low income renters face long waits for public housing. What happens to those who can’t wait?” That question is posed as the headline of the article linked below.
‘Wait,’ like many other words, requires context. We may ‘wait’ a moment before stepping off the curb into traffic, ‘wait’ a longer moment as our tourist spacecraft travels from Earth to Jupiter.
These days, the word ‘wait’, as in a social housing ‘wait-list’, leans more towards the journey to Jupiter. We are told the social housing waiting list in Toronto has more than 80,000 households on it. We recently published a post about a single mom, now a Chicago City Alderwoman, who waited 26 years to move to the top of the public housing wait list in that city1.
So . . . you can’t afford anything but public housing. And waiting for it carries the same kind of meaning as waiting to win the lottery. You have to live somewhere or become homeless. What, if any, are the alternatives to something as inexpensive as public housing?
They do exist.
A story from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) provides a personal experience of finding one kind of solution. It features a single mom and her struggles to find an affordable place to survive in housing rather than be defeated into homelessness. It includes a fortuitous interaction with would-be housing investors who have stumbled out of the gate with the purchase of a decidedly unfixed fixer-upper.
Read more at the CBC: Low income renters face long waits for public housing. What happens to those who can’t wait?
