By Matt Mahan, San Jose Mayor : mercurynews – excerpt
After the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco quickly constructed over 5,600 cottages to house those made homeless by the catastrophe. City leaders didn’t say “a cottage isn’t good enough” or “someone else is to blame” or, worse, “this is unsolvable.”
They recognized that in an emergency, you take emergency action — such as building simple, decent shelters for everyone affected.
They placed these cottages on public land and then, as the emergency ebbed, residents were allowed to relocate them. They were the first homes for thousands of families. You can still find them across the region.
We’ve seen elected officials offer excuse after excuse for our state’s failure to adequately address homelessness. We’ve blamed the courts, we’ve blamed the cost of building housing, and we’ve blamed the homeless…
We don’t have the money to build enough “affordable” housing units at the nearly $1 million per door local governments pay now. But we do have the resources to build secure individual cottages, casitas or safe sleeping units on public land. In San Jose we are building these units at a fraction of the cost and time required by traditional approaches…
The answer is in our history books — and right in front of us. Build low-cost shelter now on public land and then require that everyone live indoors…(more)