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Thanks for writing and speaking up.

I have to wonder if our concept of minimum acceptable housing is fundamentally inadequate for small towns with low personal incomes like Port Townsend.

Not nearly enough people will ever be willing to work extra and pay extra for someone elses cheap place to live to ever solve homelessness through charity and publicly funded programs. Americans don't feel that kind of collective responsibility for other people's homelessness. We don't have a subsidy ethic or desire to go there.

Constrained by that value system, what constitutes minimum acceptable housing in the minds of people who have stable self funded housing is way out of sync with what we are willing to fund, or what people at risk can reasonably afford. We have to give up on the idea that everyone is going to live in an apartment or house funded with personal debt. There is a chasm between that idea and the reality of being unsheltered on the street. And there are lots of viable stepping stones for transitional housing in between the two that we have arbitrarily outlawed for reasons that are detached from reality.

The biggest obstacle to keeping people from moving from the street, to a tent, to a camper, to a tiny house, to cohousing and finally to single family housing is our disdain for anything that reminds us that some people are poor. And we pay a huge price in taxes and lost opportunity to hang onto all that NIMBY contempt.

Eric