Decades ago, I read a study that suggested that less than 1/2 percent of Americans were living in poverty if measured not by income but by quality of life metrics, such as meals per day and adequate housing, used to measure poverty in India at the time. This project aims to provide a high quality of life for all residents in a way that reduces the negative impacts of income inequality.
As things stand in the US today, if you can't afford a big house in the 'burbs and one or more newer cars, you probably have a poor diet, lack of adequate access to medical care and myriad other problems that get attributed to "poverty" but could more reasonably be attributed to poorly designed infrastructure in the US.
If you have no car but can still get to work, keep yourself adequately fed and so forth, you aren't necessarily suffering privation for having no car. For most Americans, if you can't drive for any reason, you are suffering privation.
Not being able to eat healthy on a regular basis actively causes or worsens health issues. A first line of defense against health problems is proper diet, not medical care per se.
If you give up your car, whether to economize or for other reasons, you can further cut expenses by cancelling your parking space. This makes it less likely that a short-term challenge, such as temporary unemployment, will cause your entire life to come unraveled with little to no hope of rebuilding it again.
This is causing ordinary Americans to have no place to go. If the fast-paced, high priced big city is not your cup of tea, moving to a small town doesn't get you out of the rat race. You still need a car and the ability to spend a lot on gasoline to simply go grocery shopping and if you can't do that, you will end up with high medical bills from a terrible diet or simply die if you can't get the medical care you need.
Far too many people think of medical care and health care as synonymous. They aren't.
Basic health and welfare starts with basic, decent housing and adequate access to a healthy, varied diet. This project aims to provide both those things.
A large part of the appeal of these residential units is that they are designed to help residents keep themselves well-fed by being able to walk or take public transit to a grocery store, order in food and get healthy vending machine meals on site. When combined, these myriad details should solve the challenges faced by people whose dietary challenges may include time-stress, limited cooking skills, living in a food desert and budgetary limitations.
I can readily find that the official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5 percent, but I am failing to find a similar nice, neat one-line summary of chronic poverty rates in the US. The best I can come up with is this bit which sort of agrees with my recollection that poverty rates bounce around between about 10 and 16 percent of the US population but the chronically poor are just two percent of the population:
So as a baseline estimate of how many of these units a given community can soak up, you could multiply number of households by three percent as a very conservative estimate.
But this is NOT poverty housing. It is mixed income housing designed to appeal to all socioeconomic levels.
The intended market is singles, seniors, students and single parents with some units set aside as pied a terres (vacation homes). Thus if there is a college, if it is a retirement destination or a vacation destination, I would also multiply number of households by ten percent to get an idea of a potential upper bound.
Math is a wonderful thing but it has its limitations. People sometimes misuse math, trying to use calculations to provide "data" that it can't really provide.
These figures are estimates, NOT hard numbers you can count on.
I would shoot for building at least enough to hit the lower bound, SEE HOW THE UNITS DO and if all your projects are wait-listed and people are standing in line out the door and around the block trying to get in, buy more property and build more units.
See also: A note about demand calculations on this site
Homeless people tend to go where the services are. If they can arrange to get into housing, they don't necessarily want to stay in the place they chose to go to get enough free meals and other essential services to survive.
I will add that I personally knew an elderly retired couple living in a big four-bedroom house in a suburban neighborhood locally who wanted to move to a smaller place, like "a condo" in their words, in or near downtown and this type of housing was simply NOT AVAILABLE. So they stayed in their big house, even though it had become a burden for them to clean and maintain, because what they wanted simply didn't exist.
As things stand in the US today, if you can't afford a big house in the 'burbs and one or more newer cars, you probably have a poor diet, lack of adequate access to medical care and myriad other problems that get attributed to "poverty" but could more reasonably be attributed to poorly designed infrastructure in the US.
If you have no car but can still get to work, keep yourself adequately fed and so forth, you aren't necessarily suffering privation for having no car. For most Americans, if you can't drive for any reason, you are suffering privation.
Not being able to eat healthy on a regular basis actively causes or worsens health issues. A first line of defense against health problems is proper diet, not medical care per se.
Residents of impoverished communities often have reduced access to resources that are needed to support a healthy quality of life, such as stable housing, healthy foods, and safe neighborhoods.One of the goals of this project is to improve housing stability.
If you give up your car, whether to economize or for other reasons, you can further cut expenses by cancelling your parking space. This makes it less likely that a short-term challenge, such as temporary unemployment, will cause your entire life to come unraveled with little to no hope of rebuilding it again.
Persistent and chronic poverty are different; the former focuses on places with a long history of high poverty while chronic poverty is used to identify people consistently in poverty. Research suggests people living in high poverty areas experience significant barriers to well-being whether or not they’re poor themselves.A central theme of my work generally, not just of this project, is providing planning resources and tools for small towns across the US. Many American small towns have lost essential infrastructure, such as a local grocery store.
This is causing ordinary Americans to have no place to go. If the fast-paced, high priced big city is not your cup of tea, moving to a small town doesn't get you out of the rat race. You still need a car and the ability to spend a lot on gasoline to simply go grocery shopping and if you can't do that, you will end up with high medical bills from a terrible diet or simply die if you can't get the medical care you need.
Far too many people think of medical care and health care as synonymous. They aren't.
Basic health and welfare starts with basic, decent housing and adequate access to a healthy, varied diet. This project aims to provide both those things.
A large part of the appeal of these residential units is that they are designed to help residents keep themselves well-fed by being able to walk or take public transit to a grocery store, order in food and get healthy vending machine meals on site. When combined, these myriad details should solve the challenges faced by people whose dietary challenges may include time-stress, limited cooking skills, living in a food desert and budgetary limitations.
I can readily find that the official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5 percent, but I am failing to find a similar nice, neat one-line summary of chronic poverty rates in the US. The best I can come up with is this bit which sort of agrees with my recollection that poverty rates bounce around between about 10 and 16 percent of the US population but the chronically poor are just two percent of the population:
Finally, government benefits were shown to have a substantial impact on both chronic and transient poverty rates, reducing the overall transient poverty rate from 23.9% to 18.9%,a difference of 5.0 percentage points, and reducing the overall chronic poverty rate from 10.8% to 2.1%, a reduction of 8.7 percentage points.I think you need to provide enough affordable housing to house all of your chronically poor residents plus pad that figure to account for some people experiencing transient poverty needing a cheap place to live as well. (Some people experiencing transient poverty will not move and will just muddle through a rough patch of temporary poverty in the same home.)
So as a baseline estimate of how many of these units a given community can soak up, you could multiply number of households by three percent as a very conservative estimate.
But this is NOT poverty housing. It is mixed income housing designed to appeal to all socioeconomic levels.
The intended market is singles, seniors, students and single parents with some units set aside as pied a terres (vacation homes). Thus if there is a college, if it is a retirement destination or a vacation destination, I would also multiply number of households by ten percent to get an idea of a potential upper bound.
Math is a wonderful thing but it has its limitations. People sometimes misuse math, trying to use calculations to provide "data" that it can't really provide.
These figures are estimates, NOT hard numbers you can count on.
I would shoot for building at least enough to hit the lower bound, SEE HOW THE UNITS DO and if all your projects are wait-listed and people are standing in line out the door and around the block trying to get in, buy more property and build more units.
See also: A note about demand calculations on this site
Footnote
I am reluctant to suggest that a place with a high per capita rate of homelessness should have that factored in. Most likely, that figure can be brought down not by building a ton of local affordable housing but by spreading affordable housing throughout the region.Homeless people tend to go where the services are. If they can arrange to get into housing, they don't necessarily want to stay in the place they chose to go to get enough free meals and other essential services to survive.
I will add that I personally knew an elderly retired couple living in a big four-bedroom house in a suburban neighborhood locally who wanted to move to a smaller place, like "a condo" in their words, in or near downtown and this type of housing was simply NOT AVAILABLE. So they stayed in their big house, even though it had become a burden for them to clean and maintain, because what they wanted simply didn't exist.