Muncie Working On Housing Shortage - Reports from the West Coast

 City View Groundbreaking Announced for May 17came in from The Muncie Journal:

City View Homes, a city-led effort to revitalize vacant lots and provide new housing stock, has been making steady progress since it was first announced in 2021. The original project involved building 48 new residences, in a combination of town homes and single-family houses. The project was then expanded with City View 2, which would transform 37 lots owned by the Muncie Redevelopment Commission into single family homes.

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The City of Muncie will collaborate with CPM construction and Pivotal Housing Partners to host a groundbreaking ceremony on May 17^th, at 1 pm. The groundbreaking will be held at 1500 E. 8^th street, one of the City View sites. Members of the press and public are invited to attend.

The Guardian's ‘It’s hell’: life under the American mobile home king who calls himself a ‘grave dancer’ makes me think life in a mobile home might not be the solution:

Residents like Gartner complain their dreams have been dashed by the park’s billionaire owner. They say they face hikes in rent and fees, while amenities like the pool and clubhouse are intermittently closed, there are few ramps or other accommodations for the elderly, and property maintenance has been neglected.

The man they blame is Sam Zell, the property mogul who is the largest landlord of mobile homes in the US. He styles himself as a “grave dancer” for his business habit of buying up distressed assets, and serves as chairman of the board of Equity Lifestyle Properties (ELS), which owns Down Yonder and more than 400 other mobile home parks across the US. Residents at other ELS properties across the country tell the Guardian that they have raised similar complaints.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles seems mired in red tape. It took him two years to get his homeless friend into housing. Mayor Karen Bass, he’d like a word. is a guest video editorial from The Los Angeles Times.

Up the coast, The food court rising above San Francisco’s ‘doom loop’: ‘We’re breaking down stereotypes’ is from The Guardian:

“I don’t believe in the doom loop,” said Robbie Silver, the director of Downtown SF Partnership, which concentrates on improving a 43-block area around the Financial District. “But for downtown San Francisco to really thrive as an inclusive neighborhood again, it needs to have a more diverse portfolio.”

“We are not giving up on office space, but we need to mix it up with residential, hospitality, with arts and culture, education, and with life sciences. That will make it much more resilient against, God forbid, any future pandemic or economic crash.”

The group has been organizing community-spirited events to draw people from other parts of the Bay Area in, including a planned “Drag Me Downtown” event, during San Francisco’s Pride celebration in June that will feature pop-up performances by drag queens around various downtown bars and restaurants.

The city supervisor Dean Preston said business was booming in San Francisco’s many quirky, residential neighborhoods that spread out in other parts of the city, such as Haight-Ashbury, which still draws visitors based on its history as the counterculture capital of the 60s Summer of Love; the Castro, long a beacon of gay communities; and Japantown, with its five-tiered pagoda and shabu-shabu restaurants.

He thinks that instead of relying on dreams of a big money tech transformation, the city’s commercial core needs to cultivate some of the same types of community spirit that make other SF neighborhoods, like Noe Valley, North Beach and the Haight, thrive.