Home is where the heart is. But what if you don’t have a home?

Homelessness is the most pressing issue facing our community. More then 1000 school age children are homeless in just Josephine County, according to a 2019 Oregon Health Plan survey. Together, there are more than 1500 individuals and families in the Senate District 2 community and I, personally, find that unacceptable in a community like ours. When I started to investigate the issue, I, like many others, considered it primarily to be an issue of mental health and drug addiction. But to my great surprise (relief) I was educated to the fact that only about 20% of unhoused people fall into that category, leaving the other 80% to be….the rest of us. It is the elderly, the underpaid, which would be eased by the availability of more housing. Small tiny house communities, are essentially an alternative to an RV, which is a common alternative.

It is all about availability.

• Rural communities have fewer resources to serve the poor and unhoused in terms of medical and
  mental health as well as substance use disorder providers, nutrition programs, and housing.
• Rural communities face restrictive zoning creating greater difficulty in building affordable housing and many of the existing houses are more and more used for vacation rentals.
• Rural communities face a lack of political will to address the issues of homelessness.
  Income-to-rent ratios are more challenging in rural communities as pay is lower, between $14 and $18 per hour in jobs that cap at 30 hours per week. Yet, rents are as high or in the case of coastal
  communities, higher than urban areas.njoy might sir yet one since.
• Income-to-rent ratios are more challenging in rural communities as pay is lower, between $14 and $1 8per hour in jobs that cap at 30 hours per week. Yet, rents are as high or in the case of coastal communities, higher than urban areas.

I had a friend tell me that a developer wouldn’t build a house for less than $245k because it “wasn’t worth it.” If we can build a community of 12-20 that comes together we can create sustainable units for the under employed and underhoused. The Danes have built small communities of a few dozen of units. The model seems to work, so why aren’t we doing that here?