Home Ownership Blog

We want to hear your take on recent interest rate and foreclosure issues.

I learned this a long time ago, maybe when I was in the fourth grade. There are four things that people require to live and to flourish.  People need air, they need water, they need food, and they need shelter.

The first is easy to get and it’s free.  We just need to remember to inhale once in a while.  The second, water,  is also easy to get and it’s practically free.  Now food, food is more expensive, but still plentiful and available. But shelter, that is decent, safe and affordable, in the City of Pasadena, is almost impossible to get today.

Our communities cannot flourish if some of our residents are not able to afford proper and adequate shelter.  Decent, safe and affordable housing should be as easy to get as air, water, and food, and with your help we can make sure it is.  Thanks for Supporting Pasadena Neighborhood Housing Services.

It is my feeling, based upon my 30 years of housing-related experiences with the City of Los Angeles, City of Pasadena and HUD, that there needs to be a fundamental change in how our communities deal with housing issues such as affordable housing, slum housing, foreclosures and homelessness. 

There are many programs that address housing issues, such as homeowner financial literacy and first-time home-buyer programs and there are many organizations that provide tenant advocacy and homeless outreach.  To my knowledge there is not one program that is all-encompassing and views traditional education as a way to prevent housing problems when children become adults.  Most programs or organizations center on mitigating a situation after the fact and their housing policies and solutions are created through a crisis-driven mentality.  It becomes obvious after many years of helping individuals deal with their own housing crises that if they had the same basic knowledge about housing laws and available housing resources as the person giving them housing information, be it tenant rights from a legal aide counselor, landlord responsibilities from a building inspector, mortgage information from a loan broker or homeless resources from a homeless advocate, that in most cases, they wouldn’t have made the choices that placed them in a housing crises.

One of the easiest and cost effective ways that communities can mitigate these issues is through Housing Education.

In the City of Pasadena, especially among our children attending public schools, their knowledge of housing related laws, rights and responsibilities is close to nil.   In order to prepare the youth of our neighborhoods to embark upon their own great adventures and be successful, it is important that they have the basic knowledge of how to survive in an urban environment.

Pasadena residents, like the residents in communities throughout the state, do not live in a farm community, but many of the customs and teaching that are fostered in our public schools are agricultural-related.  Like our parents, we were taught math and English through agricultural examples.

Basics of Housing Education
There are seven key elements that form the basics of a housing curriculum that should be integrated into existing methods:

1. Definition of common housing terms and their legal definitions.
2. Basics of credit/financial literacy
3. Steps to renting your first home.
4. Steps to buying a home.
5. Rights and responsibilities of being a landlord.
6. Getting help if you become homeless.
7. Math and reading programs that are centered around urban housing life skills and not about agricultural issues.  Instead of using apples in math problems, use housing examples.  (If the city’s housing occupancy code allows 3 people per bedroom, how many people can live a 3 bedroom apartment?)

An Urban Housing Educational Program would prepare today’s youth for the eventuality of becoming a renter, a homeowner, and a landlord and arm them with the knowledge to avoid homelessness.  This would exponentially increase the quality of life for all of our residents.