Start of project 2

this is the email i sent to (the revised) team antfarm on Tuesday am, before learning of the new, more efficient, grouping method for project #2. I'll most likely stick with and jump from one of these ideas as I move forward.

side note - a shout out to Dr. Todd Beck, DDS. I (heart) root canal. Love you, man.


Howdy Rock stars,

Doubt any of you will necessarily see this before today's class, but as a reminder, I wont be able to make it to either of the classes this week. (whee! dental work! Ug)

I am though, really excited about this one, as it touches on a lot of my areas of concern so I have some ideas for the project that I wanted to share with you.

I suggest that as a first step, we really hone in on what segment of homeless/transitional population we want to be looking at. The issues and challenges facing a 50 year old man with a lifetime of alcohol and/or drug problems is going to have different resource needs, and challenges, than a 25 year old single mother, or a 14 year old runaway.

Once we've decided what segment we want to hone in on, and have a few ideas about what our question is, we should gather our research data. It's the research data that will drive our mapping options. A traditional map of the city, with sample housing prices for inner city and outlaying areas, plus transportation costs and food access points could be interesting as a starting point. There's a lot of potential meat to this assignment, and I get teh idea that Luke would ultimately like us to produce something that would be relevant to City Hall as a part of a campaign to affect their legislation.

On the transitional housing/general info/affordability side, one shooting off point we could attack this from is by looking at how expensive housing in portland. By calculating average wage -- for example, pre and post tax income at full time minimum wage - (which comes out to 1456/mo Gross 1092 net, and doesn't even begin to address the difficulty in actually getting full time employment in this economy / for these populations, which we could map by itself) then looking at teh average cost of, say, a studio apartment in Portland (search craigslist/housing term = "studio apartment" and compute the mean price listed, lets say, @ 500/mo) we already show that the housing costs alone ( no utilities, transportation, or food, or god forbid - daycare) puts our sample person at a 50% debt to income ratio right off the bat... which is not classically affordable.

That's just a start, there are many organizations in pdx that offer transitional housing, and we could research how many applications they get, compared to how many units they have to offer. How long the period of transitional support lasts, and what percentage of their clients 'make it' through the program and come out with secure housing at the other end. What are the challenges they face, adn what can we think of that might improve/impact those ratios?

Another, more fanciful route we could take, (this idea comes out of a conversation i had with a grad student in the Urban Studies Dept -- i think they could be a good resource for research sources) is looking at access to utilities for homeless populations. Water, electric, heat, etc. How do they plug in their cellphones and other electronic devices (many do have cellphones) How much could better access to power sources improve their quality of life? is this enough of an issue that we should design some sort of public power strip (solar powered?) As i said, this one is fanciful.

Those are my initial thoughts, please, if you have a minute, fill me in on yours, and on what transpires in class this week. I'll be in touch.

Best,

Jana