A tiny home village opened in the Cole neighborhood in late 2020 The researchers’ latest assessment compared village residents to a control group of people experiencing homelessness over a year that ended in October and included the pandemic. The researchers found that villagers were four times more likely to be working or in school and reported lower levels of anxiety, …
America’s hollow middle class. Life as in the Simpson’s is no longer attainable. Plus, the super rich and how to tax them and what we’ve learned during Trump.
The cost of living has risen, wages have not, and debt just keeps on accumulating. By Anne Helen Petersen Dec 15, 2020, Vox Delia did everything right. She went to college, she got a teaching degree, she found a reliable job, and she got married. She and her husband had two kids. “We followed the traditional path to middle class and economic security,” …
Great ideas…
Great ideas: Rights of streams, nature, all… Universal health care and right to healthy food…Universal Child Care: The Scandinavian country was one of the first to adopt the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and it now offers universal child care to all families with children from ages 1–12. Subsidized in part by national and municipal taxes, …
Faster, more affordable rooftop solar
Town homes and condos were treated as commercial property with a higher level of review and a permitting process which took “two-and-a-half years on average.” Low- and moderate-income residents are being inordinately hit by this “difficult and cumbersome” permit process. The new ordinance establishes an online permitting process for all clean energy projects with permits acted upon within 14 days, …
Mississippi Power plans ‘smart neighborhood’ with Tesla Solar Roofs
Nov. 2020, Utility Dive. The Southern utility also hopes to learn about the impact of solar roofs and other smart technology on the grid and reliability, and on energy consumption and related costs, according to Shepard. The Mississippi smart neighborhood represents one of the latest moves among cities and communities looking to roofs for energy-saving opportunities. New York targeted its over 1.6 …
Best ways to close the income equity gap in solar adoption: Leasing and LMI incentives had the greatest impact, and PACE helped too
Researchers from Clean Kilowatts and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed software that predicts the most important business model interventions for closing the gap of residential PV adoption between high-income and low-to-middle-income areas. The researchers concluded that LMI incentives, leasing and PACE increase PV adoption equity. The model showed that these intervention models shift deployment into underserved markets with lower …
Community land trusts allow West Denver homeowners to stay in place, in their communities, build an ADU or pay down their mortgage
Help is available for west Denver homeowners struggling to stay in their homes, Donna Bryson, Denverite, Nov. 19, 2020 A new program, Stay in Place, allows them to sell the land under their homes into a land trust and use the cash to pay down their mortgages said West Denver Renaissance Collaborative Director Renee Martinez-Stone. They can sell the land …
President Trump told suburban voters that affordable housing would hurt property values and increase crime. The story of one Wisconsin community challenges those assumptions.
Residents Feared Low-Income Housing Would Ruin Their Suburb. It Didn’t. Research has shown that tax-credit properties generally do not increase crime in affluent communities. They also tend to have little effect on property values in wealthy neighborhoods Most working-age, able-bodied people receiving government assistance for housing have jobs or were recently employed, according to a report by the Center on Budget and Policy …
Utility shutoffs should be a rallying cry for justice
Even before COVID-19, many households that were low-income, Black, Latinx, Native American or seniors were struggling to pay their debts, and now these unaffordably high utility bills will likely lead to disconnections or shutoffs. Data from the 2017 American Housing Survey states that nationally, 67 percent of low-income households (25.8 million) are facing a high energy burden and these are the families …
Re-thinking housing and commuting in Boulder
Abigail Bradford and James Horrox, Frontier Group; Danny Katz, Copirg Foundation; Travis Madsen and Mathew Frommer, Southwest Energy Efficiency Project August 8, 2019 https://frontiergroup.org/sites/default/files/reports/FINAL%20-%20Boulder%20Growing%20Greener.pdf By combining policies that encourage compact development, sustainable transportation and green building practices, Boulder can help to address global warming, improve the quality of our air and water, and protect Colorado’s undeveloped areas from sprawling development. The inability …