Eureka's Low Cost Housing Plan

The Times- Standard reports the Eureka Housing Authority is asking the city to participate in a plan to upgrade the low cost public housing in the project just south of the Eureka Mall. This won't be renovating. It will be tearing down the old apartments and building new ones in their place. 

This is a surprising development. Tearing down the old apartments a few at a time and moving tenants into new ones as available. Most homeowners do renovations as they can afford. I'm not sure I've ever heard, barring some disaster, of someone tearing down their house and putting up a new one in its place. Whatever. When it's only taxpayer money, I guess it's fair game.

This is the sort of thing I think about when plans are floated for a legal campground or some other sort of free housing for the homeless. Doesn't seem like too big of a deal, at first. Then all sorts of requirements and expenses start coming into play. Before you know it, it costs a lot more than you'd first imagined and becomes a way of life for those being housed.

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I actually had occasion to go into some of those apartments to meet a couple different girls through some dating service they had up here back in the late '70s. I'm not suggesting all apartments had the same sort of cases in them, but wouldn't be surprised.

The apartments those girls lived in were a bit of a shock to me in their lack of normal living amenities. Maybe a couch, but not all that much else in furniture. Little to no carpeting, or much of anything else. What really got me was that the girls didn't seem to think much of it. That was their home, their lifestyle. That's all they knew.

Quite an awakening to the other side, and I wasn't too well off myself at that time. Maybe it's different now. I saw one of the girls years later. She'd moved into public housing in Arcata. That place didn't seem so barren. I recall it did have carpeting, but she still didn't have a couch.