In Oly now - Bill 1474 -Covenant Home Ownership Accounts (section 8, sales)

[margaretBartle]

https://www.king5.com/article/news/l...b-be6b7f96449a

It will charge every homeseller $100, which will go into a fund for subsidizing housing for certain people.

This passed the House, and is now in the Senate.
It might actually get passed!

The proposed new fund, which would be known as the Covenant Homeownership Account, would generate an estimated $100 million a year after the first year.
https://www.kuow.org/stories/wa-lawm...covenants-harm

[Pomelo]

There expect 1 million home sales per year in a state with 7.8M people?

[Glenview94602]

Something like this makes more sense than direct cash payment of reparations and $100 is not that much when compared to the total value of a house.

[texasdiver]

Subsidizing rents is the wrong approach. All such programs (like Section 8) are riddled with bureaucracy, have negative side effects, and only serve a tiny portion of the population.

The VAST majority of poor people actually live in unsubsidized market-rate housing.

A FAR superior approach would be to wipe away many of the zoning laws that prohibit the construction of new housing, or make it far more expensive than it needs to be (single family zoning, parking mandates, square footage mandates, etc.).

And then subsidize if necessary the construction of a wide variety of cheap housing options from small cheap apartments to single sex boarding houses. Everything from micro-apartments like they have in Tokyo to old-school boarding houses and SROs.

Watch any old movie of life in the 1930s or 1940s and you will see that things like single-sex boarding houses were very common. If you were single you rented a room in a boarding house with common kitchens and baths and there was an old woman watching the front desk to make sure people who didn't belong didn't get upstairs. We tore most of those out during the 1950s-1980s. Essentially college dorm rooms for the public instead of college students. We even have places like Concordia College where old dorm buildings are going unused.

That is how you deal with homelessness. Not by creating some new slush fund that will only help a small number of people.

And you know what? If some people end up shooting up in their new public housing? Honestly, so what. At least they aren't doing it on the street anymore and leaving their needles scattered about along with their feces and garbage. Solve one problem at a time.

As the song goes "Rooms to let...50 cents" Let's bring some of that back. Raise of hands. Who here thinks what's pictured below is more humane and civilized than homeless encampments on the sidewalks full of blue plastic tarps and garbage? What is pictured below wasn't some government program paid for by tax dollars. It was the private sector filling a need. Which we currently outlaw anyone from doing today.



Roger Miller really did get it right.

[texasdiver]

OK I see I responded without reading the actual linked article. The purpose of the fund would be to help Black, Asian, Hispanic, etc. home buyers who's ancestors may have been affected by racial covenants.

So basically anyone non-White who can trace ancestry in WA back to 1968 or before would get a cash subsidy on a home down payment.

It seems like all this would accomplish is raise the price of homes for everyone and then give a bit back to everyone non-white whose family has lived here a long time. I'm not sure that is really a solution to high housing costs.

I think a lot more people would be helped if we actually lowered the cost of housing rather than farting around on the edges of the problem.