Small Housing Solutions for the Wicked Problem of Housing Affordability

What, you may ask, is a wicked problem? Wicked problems like climate change have many causes and, thus, no one solution. The silver bullet doesn’t exist. When faced with wicked problems we need solutions that effectively target and chip away at each specific driver. The lovely part of addressing wicked problems with many, varied solutions is that we’re afforded the opportunity to walk the talk of a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion mindset by identifying the unique needs of smaller segments of the population like older people who are precariously housed and developing interventions that meet their unique needs—that movement, from recognizing the unique needs of diverse populations to developing interventions that meet those unique needs, is the path to a meaningfully inclusive community.

Scale is of the essence in addressing a wicked problem. Some drivers of the housing crisis like the lack of capital to build subsidized affordable housing infrastructure must be approached through regional, state and federal levels where the billions of dollars needed can be generated. Other drivers—be it the growing gap between social security and the cost of living that is driving more and more older people into housing precarity, displacement and homelessness or the growing gap between wages for essential workers like IHSS caregivers and the cost of living that is driving supply and retention issues in the labor market—can in part be addressed at local scales like towns, cities and counties through funding innovative ‘small housing’ solutions like ADU development, shared housing and shallow rent subsidies.

Shared housing comes in many forms—from programs like Home Match that connect older people with an extra room in their home or apartment/ ADU on their property with community members seeking housing to programs like Abode’s Housing Location Assistance Program in San Francisco which matches recipients of funds from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s problem solving program so that they can pool their resources and access the more affordable rents available when two households split the cost of a two-bedroom apartment rather than seeking independent studios or one-bedrooms.

A growing number of cities in Marin including Mill Valley and Corte Madera have started funding Home Match services at roughly $20,000 per 10,000 residents, and a number of other cities in the county have included home sharing services in their housing element and are considering how best to support implementation once their housing elements have been approved by CalHCD. The pools of funding these cities are using to support home sharing services are not large enough to fund brick and mortar projects—‘big housing’—but they are sufficient to implement more targeted ‘small housing’ initiatives like Home Match. Small housing solutions are by no means a silver bullet for the housing affordability crisis, but they do effectively chip away at drivers of the housing crisis like the growing gap between income and the cost of housing for older people and low-income members of the local workforce like IHSS caregivers and teachers.

Shallow rent subsidies—small, long-term payments of roughly $300-1000/mo that are designed to address long-term financial barriers to stable housing—are another ‘small housing’ solution rising to prominence in conversations about how to stabilize housing for populations whose housing instability is tied to populations with permanent financial barriers to housing stability. People who should have a housing voucher and cannot get one. 

While we wait for shallow rent subsidy funding from the state through bills like Caballero’s SB37 and regional ballot measures like BAHFA’s upcoming affordable housing bond, local actors are already at work. For example, the Community Housing Foundation of Mill Valley (CHFMV) has partnered with Home Match to pilot a shallow subsidy program where employees who work in the City of Mill Valley and earn less than 60% of AMI can receive up to $1,000 a month in rent support so that teachers, employees at restaurants, caregivers and other integral members of the city’s socio-economic fabric can benefit from the amenities of the city their work makes possible.

Freedom, autonomy and a sense of empowerment are to be found in addressing seemingly insurmountable problems like climate change and housing affordability as wicked problems. When we break such crises down to their individual drivers and circumvent sense of powerlessness that arises from the futile search for a silver bullet at a scale whose processes are beyond our power to effectively influence we discover that there are many ways to chip away at the drivers of these problems right here, in our communities.