My Humble Abode

SIPPING MORNING coffee on the porch of my 40-year-old aluminum box in the Sonoran Desert, I’m pondering the cost of housing.

My affordable unit sits on cement piers at the end of a street within an age-restricted park, at the sparsely populated edge of Tucson. Few jobs exist nearby. Civic amenities are modest. Summer weather is challenging, with heat, thunderstorms and seasonal rattlesnakes. Still, these conditions have created a financially comfortable place for a retiree to live.

There isn’t enough affordable housing in the U.S., a problem that’s now affecting my children in high-cost-of-living California. That isn’t a problem at my desert property in Arizona, and there’s a lesson here for other states.  

My one-bedroom park unit cost me less than $50,000 for a home on a spacious lot in a high desert landscape worthy of an army of selfie-seeking visitors. I have a covered double driveway that also serves as a ramada-like shelter for neighborly potlucks and other uses beyond protecting my car from sun, rain and hailstones.

There’s a small patio, a workshop for retirement hobbies and an attached laundry shed. Utilities are included in the lot’s rent, except the electric bill, which has been modest despite summer cooling costs. I’m experimenting with pay-as-you-go internet access since I’m not yet a year-round resident.

Why isn’t there more affordable housing like mine? Explanations and accusations abound as politicians argue over what’s to be done. Housing is a major expense whether we buy or rent, live alone or together.

Our sense of well-being is tied to finding suitable digs that don’t stress our finances. We all want a home where cost increases can be absorbed by pay raises or the returns on our retirement investments.

In 2000, California’s first-time buyers could purchase a house for under $100,000, with a monthly mortgage payment of $826. If housing prices had risen at the rate of inflation, those homes would cost $180,000 today. Instead, the lowest tier of housing in the state runs nearly $500,000. At that price, monthly mortgage payments hit $3,630.

Wages have not risen at this rate, increasing pressure on the government to improve housing affordability. Since 2020, mortgage payments in California have risen by over 80%, while rents have increased more than 40% most everywhere in the state.

Affordable housing projects in major California cities cost the government as much as $1 million for a one-bedroom unit. Market rate apartments rent for $2,000 a month, and higher downtown. Even with roommates, rents derail well-intentioned spending plans and leave little or nothing for retirement savings.

You don’t live in California? This problem affects you, too, as California’s stressed population leaves for elsewhere. Even some Texans and Floridians are moving to places that suit them better, feeding complaints that these new arrivals are boosting the cost of living in their new states. Among these nomads are many retirees moving to stretch their dollars. I never thought this would include me, but I’m now a part of this story.

In my 55-plus community, trash is picked up curbside twice a week. I grab a small trash bag from under the sink and put it a few steps away at the edge of my lot.

Back home, trash day is a weekly wrestle down a long driveway with giant, wobbly-wheeled, government-issued trash cans sporting broken lids. Three cans in all, for ordinance-required sorting into green waste, recyclables and ordinary rubbish.

Here in Tucson, for the virtuous, a community recycling site is within a 10-minute drive. I still sort my trash, storing recyclables in the shed. I visit the recycling bins every couple of weeks on my way to other places, dog in tow. He enjoys the car ride over, the smells of the recycling and the hustle-bustle of fellow recyclers.

The RV park’s onsite property manager oversees compliance with its lengthy rulebook. Rules can be annoying, even worrisome at times, especially after decades of living free and wild in my home city. Was my dear old family dog barking at passersby while I was at the grocery store? Not allowed here.

On the other hand, rules can help keep properties clean and orderly, and neighbors behaving neighborly, despite close quarters and turnover. This orderliness is something I value.

There are cheaper places to park an RV: small campgrounds or on public lands. In Quartzsite, Arizona, a million snowbirds descend every year. They winter in RV parks, the Bureau of Land Management’s long-term visitor area, or the Bureau’s free dispersed camping. I prefer the security of a structured community.

The $1 million spent for a one-bedroom apartment in government-produced housing in California would buy 20 one-bedroom units like mine. It’s frustrating to see government efforts to increase housing result in so few new homes.

My rent is $500 a month, which even funds a community center where seasonal residents lead clubs and activities most days of the week. Most folks are capable of paying $500 a month. But not enough parks like mine exist. In cities like Los Angeles, unauthorized RV parking is a major concern, since there’s nowhere to park at a price people can afford.

I’m trying to resolve the housing question with my young adults. Our hometown doesn’t present so much as a studio apartment with easy access to mass transit that’s affordable to a young worker, even with a friend or two to share expenses. If it did, the one kid who didn’t move away might yet establish her own household, as she starts a career in the public school district.

Her sister seeks her first post-college job elsewhere and my third has left California for the Mountain West. With many working-age adults leaving the state, the consequences include schools with fewer students and a projected perennial structural deficit in the state budget, with costs to be picked up by the remaining taxpayers.

“Pay rent or buy a pizza?” my brother remembers thinking when he was young. Maybe we are victims of our technology, as financial wizards use computer algorithms to wring every cent possible from rental properties. Landlords can opt for market pricing every unit or, alternatively, repurpose longtime rentals as Airbnb properties.

Meanwhile, government rules regarding minimum housing standards have resulted in tearing down both old single-room-occupancy hotels and mid-century high-rise public housing. Gentrification in genteel city neighborhoods has taken older houses, which once might have been split into several cheap apartments, and replaced them with single-family homes.

Overall, millions of low-cost units have disappeared and not been replaced. This is the nature of the current housing crisis—a problem for the next generation of business and government leaders to tackle.

Catherine Horiuchi is retired from the University of San Francisco's School of Management, where she was an associate professor teaching graduate courses in public policy, public finance and government technology. Check out Catherine's earlier articles.

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