Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Ideas for rent

Few aspects of U.S. society need innovating more than the housing market. News about reckless subprime lending, bank failures and toxic assets has dominated the news for months now, but most of what we’ve heard has been focused on homeownership – who shouldn’t have been encouraged to try it, who has lost it and what to do with the thousands and thousands of foreclosed houses now unoccupied and decaying in every American city.

But another problem exists: the lack of affordable rentals for people who now can’t, or never could, consider owning a home.  Not only do we always have lots of people in need of better, safer, more convenient apartments, but now we also have big crowds of former homeowners in sudden need of places to lease … and local governments are tearing down dwellings as fast as they can.

Turns out the John D. and Catharine T. MacArthur Foundation has already recognized the need to convert foreclosed houses and rundown properties into decent rental homes and has gotten creative about it. The foundation is funding projects that aim to preserve rentals while assisting displaced military personnel and the homeless, increasing energy efficiency and improving public transit to make rental home locations more usable and desirable. Twelve states and cities – Denver, Florida, Iowa, Los Angeles, Maryland, Massachussetts, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon/Portland, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Washington/Seattle - have received grants totaling $32.5 million, part of the foundation’s larger $150 million Window of Opportunity Initiative to preserve rental homes.

This sounds to me like an excellent opportunity to create an even bigger public-partnership between foundations and the federal government’s Job, Artists and green-job corps. Not only could our roads, bridges and other shared infrastructure be repaired and updated by the thousands of American workers in need of jobs, as the Obama administration has planned, but many distressed homes and apartment buildings could be, too. Construction, electricity and plumbing experts could make the dwellings solid and functional while artists of all kinds could make them and the lots they’re on safe and attractive through design and decoration.  

Maybe a sidecar program could allow the corps workers to coach new tenants on upkeep and repair of their improved abodes.  We sure need more efficient ways of creating a safer, better-housed and -employed nation – why not all three simultaneously?