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These before-and-afters will make you question everything about how our economy works

You'd think it was some sort of natural disaster. Nope. Totally man-made.




Images via GooBingDetroit.

Yup. These images were taken only two years apart. And what you're seeing was not an accident.

When the economy crashed in 2008, it was because of shady financial practices like predatory lending and speculative investing, which is basically gambling, only the entire economy was at stake.


When the recession hit, it literally hit home for millions of people. And Detroit was right in the middle of it.

I spoke with Alex Alsup, who works with a Detroit-based tech company that's mapping the city's foreclosed homes to help city officials see the bigger picture and find solutions. He also runs the Tumblr GooBingDetroit, where he uses Google Street View's time machine to document the transformation of Detroit's neighborhoods over the last few years.

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"There's a common sentiment that Detroit's looked the way it does for decades, but it's just not true," Alsup said.

It's astonishing to see how quickly so many homes went from seemingly delightful to wholly unlivable.

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When the recession went into full force, home values took a nosedive. But the city expected homeowners to pay property taxes as if they hadn't.

Not only does the situation defy logic, but it's like a brass-knuckled face punch to the people the city is supposed to be looking out for. Alsup explains:

"You had houses — tens of thousands of them — that were worth only $20,000 or so, yet owed $4,000 a year in taxes, for which very few city services were delivered (e.g. police, fire, roads, schools). Who would pay that?"

Indeed.

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A local group calls what happened to Detroit a "hurricane without water."

And like a real hurricane, homeowners aren't the ones to blame. They're even calling for what is essentially a federal disaster response.

Here are the three strategies they want to see in action — and they can work for basically anywhere in the country that's struggling with a housing crisis.

1. Stop kicking people out of their homes.

They want the city to end foreclosures and evictions from owner-occupied homes. Many people aren't just losing their homes — they've lost jobs, pensions, and services because of budget cuts. Putting them on the street is like a kick in the teeth when they're down.

2. If a home is worth less on the market than what the homeowner owes on their loan, reduce what they owe.

Those are called underwater mortgages. Banks caused this mess, and governments ignored it. It's only fair that people's mortgages be adjusted based the current value of their home.

3. Sell repossessed homes at fair prices to people who actually want to live in them.

Selling to banks and investors only encourages what led to the financial crisis in the first place. Wouldn't it make more sense to sell to people who are going to live in them and have a genuine interest in rebuilding the community?

Housing is a human right. And an economy based on financial markets doesn't care about human rights. Maybe it's time for a new economy?

Click play below for a silent cruise down a once lovely residential block in Detroit.


This article originally appeared on 12.15.14

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What one man's anger can teach us about the way we treat welfare recipients.

The possessions of welfare recipients are not our business. Period.

Here's a sweet Christmas story for you: Timmy* really loved his big sister. So one year, he decided he was going to give her a big surprise for Christmas.

*Not his real name, but this story is inspired by a real Tumblr thread.

Photo via marcisim/Pixabay.

He wanted to buy her a Nintendo DS Lite. Since their family was poor, Timmy knew he would have to work really hard and save money to get her the gift.


For months, Timmy worked hard to earn money. He was so determined to treat his sister that he pushed past his social anxiety to ask neighbors if there were any chores he could do for them.

After nine months of counting his earnings every day to track his progress, his hard work paid off.

He had earned enough to buy a DS Lite and a Pokémon game to go with it.


Awww. <3 GIF via "Pokemon."

But that's where the story takes a turn.

A few weeks after Christmas, a neighbor saw Timmy and his sister with the system outside their house. He approached them and yelled at them. Why?

He felt entitled to comment on their possessions because their family was on food stamps.

According to his sister — who told this story in a Tumblr thread — the neighbor's words stayed with Timmy for years. He started to withdraw from friends and avoided going outside for fear of running into the neighbors.

But a person's possessions only tell a small part of someone's story.

What does being poor look like? The truth is that there is no one answer.

Many people have assumptions about what living in poverty should look like, but it's important to remember that every situation is different. And there's an infinite number of possible paths to poverty. One possession does not cancel out financial hardship, whether it's a designer purse, refrigerator, or a Ph.D.

We're taught that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover. That rule still applies when we're talking about people living in poverty.

Imagine how much better our world would be if we took the energy spent judging people on social assistance programs and put it towards fixing the problems that led them there in the first place?

Read the screenshot of the entire Tumblr thread that inspired this piece below:

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We rarely hear the voices of actual small business owners. Syd's is one to remember.

This is a warm-up-your-heart local business story about how local businesses warm up the hearts of our neighborhoods.

True
CNBC's The Profit

This is Syd. And his sandwich shop.

Syd Wayman launched his shop after winning a business plan competition. His cheesesteaks and hoagies were making foodies' top-10 lists and providing jobs to people in Crown Heights, a historically low-income neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Images from "The Best Cheese Steaks in Brooklyn"/Vimeo.

These are a couple of Syd's customers.

Small business ownership? It's rough.

Syd's had an investor back out and has had to shutter temporarily. And the neighborhood has been changing. Rents are shooting up. In his words:

"Crown Heights is gentrifying and attracting residents who are looking for that "new Brooklyn aesthetic" in the businesses they patronize."

That's a lot to keep up with.

But it's worth it.

"People walk up and say, 'Hey ... what happened? How you doing? What's going on?'
And it's because over the past four years, I was able to establish relationships with people. And that's interesting and unique. It's different.
It's not like there's some corporate store, with some corporate manager, and some corporate employees, just here to achieve their third-quarter sales numbers or whatever.
... That locally owned business that caters to the local needs and desires of the residents, I think, adds a lot of value to a community."


Small businesses do a lot for their neighborhoods:

  • Provide great-tasting cheesesteaks — or whatever unique local need they're meeting
  • Contribute to economic vitality for the community
  • Provide job opportunities to local residents
  • Purchase goods and services from other local merchants (not always, of course, but far more likely!)
  • Help define the community's character (sorry, Starbucks, you're not really doing that)


Love your local spots. Go buy a sandwich. And here's Syd, telling the savory story in his own words.

Family

He had an epiphany while living in a dumpster. And it could help change the future of housing.

He was living in a dumpster when the idea first came to him.

His name's Jeff Wilson — Dr. Jeff Wilson, actually. He's a professor at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas, known fondly on campus as "Professor Dumpster."

Photo by Jeff Wilson/Wikimedia Commons.

Wilson made himself the guinea pig in a year-long experiment on sustainable living.

He traded a 3,000-square-foot home and most of his worldly possessions for a spartan 33-square-foot living space created in a big green dumpster.

Wilson's experiment eventually became a nonprofit called The Dumpster Project that "invites learners of all ages to rethink sustainability through the quirky task of turning a dumpster into a home." Photos (exterior, interior) by Unilarity/Wikimedia Commons.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Wilson said the experience made him happier than he's ever been. He was unburdened by the weights of adulthood, saving big on rent and utilities, doing less housework, cutting his commute down to near-nonexistence, and just having less stuff to clutter his space and mind.

Living in a dumpster may not be for everyone, but Wilson thinks smart home engineering can yield the same benefits.

Case in point: tiny houses. They're exactly what they sound like — homes of varying tininess, often pictured in bucolic ruralities.

Photo by Benjamin Chun/Flickr.

Some are craftily adapted from materials not typically used with home building.

Photo by ROLU/Flickr.

And some are designed to go with you when you want to move.

Photo by Guillaume Dutilh/Wikimedia Commons.

Tiny houses are gaining more attention as a viable housing alternative, which is great news for a few reasons.

They're an option — for the crafty and willing — withaffordable housing growing scarcer as cities sell out their locals for higher bidders. Then there are some, like Wilson, who just want to live simpler, less materially crowded and wasteful lives.

Wilson's verve for simple living became an entrepreneurial mission — to build a new generation of smart homes.

His company is called Kasita, but they're not building homes for country living. They're bringing the tiny house movement to the city — although, in a press statement, they say they don't call what they're building "tiny houses":

"The Kasita completely reimagines the home with industrial design at its core. There's nothing quite like it out there. The Kasita does not contain a loft, Murphy bed, pitched roof, or wheels. It's designed from the ground up as opposed to an adaptation of an existing structure intended to store and transport merchandise (but we have lots of love and respect for our friends in the Tiny House and container communities!)."

Their 208-square-foot design slides into multi-level structures called "racks," which connect to municipal utilities like electricity and plumbing.

The first rack is scheduled to open in Austin in 2016, and plans are underway to build them in 10 more cities by 2017.

With Kasita, you can move your entire home to any city with a rack. All you have to do is make a call, schedule a big-rig pickup, and off it'll go to your next destination.

Kasitas are equipped with all the amenities of a modern home, including a kitchen with a cooktop, convection oven, and dishwasher; a bathroom with a walk-in shower; and a combined washer and dryer unit.

The walls use a special tile system that lets you customize the space to your needs.

Plus, they'll have voice-activated components like lighting, entertainment, and a hidden queen-size bed that rolls out on your command, like a boss at bedtime.

To make Kasita an affordable housing opportunity, they're building community partnerships for creative land use.

They haven't yet announced pricing for buyers, but one of their stated goals is to offer rentals at half the market rate of standard studio apartments. In the country's most rapidly gentrifying cities, that could add up to serious savings.

Housing may be an internationally recognized human right, but not enough is being done to ensure everyone has access to it. Until then, it's encouraging to know there are businesses out there like Kasita that aren't just in the business of making things worse.

Kasita won't stop the housing crisis dead in its tracks. But if it proves successful, it could help inspire the kind of innovation we need to eventually send it flying off its rails.

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