Future Here Now: Alternatives in housing, humility and self-funding
Signals
Buddy Up: Solving the Housing Shortage…ish?
https://standtogether.org/stories/the-economy/padsplit-is-improving-access-to-affordable-housing
This article looks like it was written by a funder. Which I think is a little squishy ethically. But it’s an interesting, and potentially useful concept. And also problematic in itself.
We all know that we have a housing crisis in the U.S. And while there are a lot of tangled reasons for that, one of them is that too much of the land available for housing in the U.S. is covered in low-density single family houses — houses that are financially and functionally impossible for the increasing number of single people. This is a strategy that might help address that mismatch - and possibly provide a higher level of security for people who aren’t attached to the conventional family that these houses were designed for.
That said, I can envision situations where this might work, and contexts where this could become miserable at best. Roommate difficulties aside, one of the key challenges may be the number of private cars required by a household with several adults, especially in a typical residential context where public transit is almost nonexistent. Squabbles over the number of cars permitted per household, along with on- and off-street parking, already bedevil a lot of communities, especially those with large numbers of adult individuals per house (your favorite college town can tell you about that). On the other hand, micro-apartments with shared public amenities are doing well in many markets, and enable social connectedness for many who would otherwise live along.
From a Future Ready perspective, this Signal might give us a couple of insights:
A lot of the challenges we will face in the next few decades will have to do with adapting the detrius of the Industrial Era to our contemporary needs. Housing demand is changing, and almost certainly will change. How will traditional single family homes be best adapted? Will these houses need more lockable doors, more bathrooms, multiple kitchens, larger garages? And when an “Uber for Roomates” model like this doesn’t address the changes that people need to make to the structure to make it work for this new reality….who does?
Unintended consequences can pop up all over - this need to adapt traditional single family homes to different uses is itself a consequence that we didn’t anticipate when we were building millions of these structures acrss the countty based on a pretty uniform mental image of who would be living under these roofs. How we adapt them will also have unintended consequences - for the residents, and for the communities that they live in. What might those be, and how can we head those off?
What do you think?
What You Know, and What You Know You Don’t Know that you know…
We all know that a person who flaunts their knowledge often isn’t fun to be around — but take comfort, that might indicate that they’re not very good thinkers, either.
Social scientists know that possessing a high level of intellectual humility is associated with multiple positive outcomes, like having more empathy, more prosocial behavior, reduced susceptibility to misinformation and an increased inclination to seek compromise in challenging interpersonal disagreements.
If you want to focus on one trait to promote good thinking, it seems that intellectual humility is hard to beat. Indeed, researchers, including those in my own lab, are now testing interventions to promote it among different populations.
The author spends the rest of the article examining how this is just one dimention of being a good thinker, but it remains an important one.
In The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived, I dedicate a couple of sections to the fact that having a lot of knowledge can blind us even more than it shows us, especially in an era where a lot of the conventional wisdom gets stood on its ear by new expectations, new contexts, new technology. In such a world, having knowledge but not having the humility to see what new insights might be arising is like putting your brain in a lead box. It won’t be able to do anything of value.
What do you think?
Nonprofits aren’t businesses. There’s a reason for that.
This isn’t a new article, but no one shines a flood light on the blind spots we have when it comes to nonprofits like Vu Le of Nonprofit AF. This article does a great job of summing up both the philosophical and the very practical reasons why nonprofits cannot and should not be expected to live off of earned revenue.
And there’s another inherent reason that’s embedded in what Vu writes:
Nonprofits exist for the purpose of addressing the externalities of a capitalist economic structure. Classical capitalism deals with the side effects of economic transactions — side effects like environmental damage, unmet human survival needs, etc. — as externalities: literally, things that fall outside of the economic transaction. In the framework of classical economics, externalities can be ignored. In reality, of course, that’s not the case, but our inherited intellectual lack of tools for dealing with externalities in our economic thinking leads to conclusions like “a nonprofit should run like a business.” Or that a nonprofit should rely on earned income.
That’s not a failure of nonprofits. That’s a failure of our Industrial-era mindset that has no adequate economic tools for addressing the externalities of our systems.
What do you think?