Wednesday November 20, 2024 12 Noon WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org

Everyone has a place to live, but here in Connecticut and Long Island the costs of our places to live are extreme – so extreme that the culture around us is inundated with Real Estate Media: House sales and market rate rentals are now part of our daily media diet. What about the huge number of us who simply cannot afford the homes shown in all those ads, magazines and websites?

Creating affordable places to live is a mirror image of effort to the Real Estate Marketing Machine all around us. Rather than making a profit, those creating housing that is accessible for everyone search for funding from every imaginable source. Every level of government has ways to finance and organize the creation and management of homes. Private not-for-profit institutions seek those funds and generate private donations – and help organize thousands of volunteers to create the homes our economy does not.

The two systems of home creation – for-profit and not-for-profit – have the same outcome: creating homes for people – but the motivations are opposite to each other. We live in a world that celebrates the high value of market rate home investment for those who can buy a home or those creating market rate apartments, while millions find housing only because others focus on limiting the costs required to create those homes.

Two worlds of houses – and this month HOME Page focuses on those in the largely uncelebrated world of creating safe affordable places to live here in Connecticut and on Long Island. We will have Paul Bailey an architect who has toiled in the field of housing for everyone, Dennis Michaels, Construction Director of Habitat of Greater New Haven and Jim Paley is the Executive Director of Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven.