This BOOK IS about housing
Everyone needs it, but a lot of people don’t have it, and a lot of those who do are still miserable. Considering how long humans have been putting roofs over our heads, you’d think we would have this figured out by now.
I am not going to solve all the problems. That said, I’ve been reading, researching,
experimenting, and advocating about issues related to housing for over a decade. Since 2019, I’ve been a member of Coulee Tenants United (CTU), a renter advocacy, organizing, and education group; and since 2022 I’ve been the primary contact for CTU’s Eviction Intervention Project, in which we send basic know-your-rights information to La Crosse County residents facing eviction and invite them to contact us for help. Those calls and emails have mostly been answered by me, and as a result I’ve heard hundreds of nightmarish stories of poverty, emergencies, abuse, and bad luck.
In 2018, I got a history degree from UW La Crosse, writing my capstone research project about the history of La Crosse grocery stores. Along the way, I learned about food deserts, population density, suburbanization, and car-oriented infrastructure.
To talk about housing, we’re going to have to talk about all of those things. They all tie into each other in a set of feedback loops, government interventions, and cultural baggage. As much as possible, I’m approaching this with data and evidence, especially in the form of what used to exist in specific locations. For example, my favorite historical records are the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, which show extremely precise snapshots of building sizes, shapes, and locations in specific years (they were created for the purpose of calculating fire insurance, so they had to be exact).
This text is not as thorough as it could be. Most paragraphs could be expanded into several pages. A section about the cultural inertia and psychology of suburbs and car ownership had to be cut for space and relevance. I didn’t go into any detail about non-car transportation methods and infrastructure. Instead, think of this more as an overview, probably relevant only in the mid-2020s, describing some of the infrastructure problems that exist and have previously existed in La Crosse, which solutions probably won’t work, and which should be seriously considered.
Kevin Hundt
