Tag: #homeless

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Gentrification as a Threat to Cultural Diversity in San Francisco

Within its 47 square miles, San Francisco is home to numerous thriving ethnic groups and cultural districts. While these neighborhoods host global tourists who come to enjoy the foods, arts, and culture, they have also persisted through generations as living, breathing communities where residents can feel at home with groups they identify with. For example, my friend’s parents lived and raised their family in Chinatown for 50 years and still can’t speak English. Before I became an advocate for affordable housing, San Francisco’s cultural diversity and the topic of gentrification were separate topics in my mind – I didn’t believe one had anything to do with the other.

The lack of affordable housing and the city’s prioritization of profit over people is erasing these communities. The irony is that while the cities rake in huge profits from tourism in these neighborhoods, they don’t provide support for these groups to survive. For example, tourists from all over the world come to enjoy the architecture, art, and cuisine of Japantown and spend money at Japanese-centric businesses, all while the city allocates its shopping districts for new Chipotles, Gaps, and Sephoras. How can Japantown make it if the city’s planners and policy-makers choose businesses that maximize profit rather than preserve the spirit of the residents? Also, these neighborhoods need more affordable housing so that families can move in and sustain the community over the long term. Instead, city planners and policy-makers allocate new housing developments for market-rate luxury units that the average family cannot afford. According to a recent report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an individual needs to earn four times the minimum wage to be able to house their family in a two-bedroom market-rate apartment in San Francisco.

San Francisco’s city planners, officials, and policy-makers must understand that their decisions to prioritize profit over people are cannibalizing the city. They cannot keep boasting of San Francisco’s rich diversity, inviting the world to enjoy Chinatown’s New Year’s Parade or the annual Pride Festival while making decisions that essentially erase the communities behind them.

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Cob, a Cheaper Alternative to Lumber

We at Care Association have been trying to stay on top of issues concerning affordable housing for lower and middle-class Bay Area residents. We worry about the psychological cost of high rents and the growing rates of homelessness. At the same time, we are also actively participating in the discussion around innovative ways to bring down the costs of new structures.

One of the developments we have been following is the growing interest in cob as a (much!) cheaper alternative to lumber in North America. Cob is a mix of clay-soil, straw, water, and sand, used to build walls that alone are strong enough to support a roof. Cob was used for thousands of years in ancient times throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, and the Middle East. Here in Northern California, the stringent codes regulating seismic strength, fire resistance, and insulation have made cob a tough sell.

Cob’s growing visibility

The soaring housing costs led Bay Area architect John Fordice to revisit cob in the late ’90s to see if he could address those deficiencies. He set up The Cob Research Institute (CRI) in 2008 to ramp up visibility and research efforts into the viability of this cheap and clean alternative. The CRI began working with local university engineering labs to build cob wall prototypes and develop solutions to address its structural weaknesses. They compiled the results of their years of research into a guideline to help others overcome the common hurdles that past cob projects have faced when trying to get approval from their local planning departments.

We are delighted to share that this guideline has been formally approved for inclusion into the International Residential Code (IRC) just this year! It is now accessible to any interested builder as Appendix U, the Cob Construction Appendix, in the 2021 IRC. We were also excited to hear that the appendix was accepted by an overwhelming 93 to 6 majority. A lot of people are as excited about cob as we are!

Remaining obstacles to cob-based housing

Inclusion into the IRC is not a green light to start building cob housing for human habitation, but speeds up the permit process for other types of buildings, like storage units. Nevertheless, it is a very encouraging sign that we are getting closer to the possibility of cob-based homes. Other types of earthen building solutions, such as strawbale and light straw hay, also started as appendices in the IRC and were gradually adopted into local building codes. “Then why hasn’t Care Association started promoting strawbale or light straw hay?” you may ask. Strawbale will result in a sturdy home, but the walls will need to be 2 feet thick to meet the insulation requirements. If we are looking to build at volume, the area requirements will be prohibitive. Cob, we believe, can be as narrow as 12-16 inches with proper insulation. Straw is also difficult to find locally, and there is concern that straw is environmentally unclean.

Cob will result in thinner walls, but we don’t know how thick or thin the final product will be. Cob alone can not pass the requirement for an insulation R-value of 13 in Northern California. In layman’s terms, a cob wall is not “breathable” enough; vapor needs to be able to pass through the wall with some quantifiable measure of ease. The CRI and other organizations are working on this problem. They are researching possible solutions, such as replacing the heavy components of the cob mixture with lighter substitutes, adding more straw/hemp, or wrapping the outside of the cob wall with less dense mixes of clay or straw/hemp. Our CEO, Kiai Kim, has also been attending cob workshops to stay up to date on the latest research and help pose some solutions.

Our vision

Because cob is heavy, the labor costs to build cob structures will be high. If cob gets adopted into Bay Area building codes, our initial vision is to use a volunteer force of builders to provide labor. Luckily, building with cob is easy to learn. The savings from volunteer labor and the cheaper materials will offer an affordable housing solution for those in immediate need.

There are a lot of people rooting for cob. It is non-toxic, can be molded into beautiful shapes, environmentally friendly, and so fire-resistant that some make ovens out of cob. This is a great advantage in this new era of yearly wildfires. (Imagine fleeing a wildfire and returning to see your walls fully intact!) At Care Association, we are thrilled with cob’s newfound recognition and have great hopes for its future adoption, especially with lumber’s skyrocketing costs. With 21st-century engineering advances, perhaps the cob structures that housed our distant ancestors can also provide safe, warm, and affordable places for us to sleep as well.

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Homeless Shelters are not Enough

In all honesty, I didn’t give much thought to the issue of affordable Bay Area housing until my brother Ted became homeless. He had received a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety, and schizophrenia but refused to take his medication. After a particularly bad fight with my mother, he left the mobile home in which they lived, saying that she always opposed anything he wanted to do and felt that the relationship was toxic.

The next few years were very stressful. We would plead with Ted to come back, but he always refused. I was constantly wondering where he was, whether he ate lunch, whether he found a place to sleep away from the cold in the winter, and whether he was able to escape the baking heat in the summer. Another question I grappled with was whether I should move out of the Bay Area. If I could afford a tiny studio for him, then we would worry a lot less. But I already had to pay a mortgage on my current home, and at today’s prices, even a tiny Bay Area studio would be twice more than what we paid for the house in the early 2000s.

Fortunately, Ted didn’t go completely silent. Once a month, he would call back and allow us to take him to dinner. I asked him so many questions over these dinners and learned a bit about how the homeless get their basic needs met. Before Ted left home, I always thought that homeless people could just go to shelters and get food, showers, and safe places to sleep. This is true, but only if they can get a bed at all. The shelter that Ted attended most often would allow people to assemble starting at 3 pm, hold a random lottery at 4 pm, and then let the winners in at 5 pm. Unfortunately, the number of those seeking refuge increases in the winter, so the chances of getting a bed become slim. In San Francisco, the number of homeless without beds is around 6,800, but officials say the estimate is closer to 18,000 (!) as the pandemic has incurred heavy job losses.

My brother often slept on bus 22, a 24-hour bus route in Santa Clara County nicknamed “Hotel 22” because of the large numbers of homeless people that use it as overnight housing. Unfortunately, like the shelter, this option became less reliable in the winter. So every afternoon became a race to find a place to sleep for the night. Many nights he ended up sneaking back into an empty bedroom in my mother’s house through an open window and then climbing back out in the morning. He was fortunate to have this option, but many homeless don’t.

As if the homeless don’t have enough to worry about already, there is also a high incidence of theft. It is not uncommon to fall asleep only to find that what little you have is gone. This is an issue on the bus as well as in the shelters. We once had to replace Ted’s entire suitcase with fresh clothes, toiletries, and cash. We also had to replace his phone five times.

We finally got Ted to move in after trying many things, including having my mother move back in with me. But I believe what ultimately worked was installing a new treadmill in the garage. Ted’s biggest fear is getting cancer or diabetes, so he runs every day for an hour. After his gym canceled his membership and stopped letting him enter (because his disheveled state was disturbing customers), I purchased a treadmill. He started to come over more and more often until he decided it was more trouble to leave than to stay.

I am beyond relieved that he is back home, but it troubles me that he couldn’t get proper support. Shouldn’t Ted have been able to find a place to sleep if he wanted? Returning home is not an option for many of the homeless. So many are evicted, some children, and many leave toxic situations or families that cannot properly care for them. And with the Bay Area housing prices skyrocketing, the problem will only worsen as a growing number of homeless compete for a fixed number of beds. Nobody should have to battle through a frigid night … not even once.