Starter Homes Are The Answer

Through a powerful socioeconomic tool, the entry level starter home, children in Oregon went from growing up in poverty in second-world shanties to their children growing up in middle class standards.

My Chickasaw mother grew up in a one-room dirt floor shanty. I grew up in a starter home.

 In 1982 my friend, the master burger flipper earning $3.50 an hour, purchased a larger three-bedroom starter home than the one I grew up in.

 I came to Eugene in 1985. I was a 21 year old transient living on the streets, destitute. I hustled up an entry level job, and the next year I purchased a starter home with $4.25-an-hour wages.

 For over 40 years starter homes had lifted three generations of Oregon working poor and our youth coming into adulthood to middle class standards. In the case of my Chickasaw family, this socioeconomic tool had ended generational poverty.

 In 1986 liberal Democrats outlawed this affordable housing to increase property tax revenue through market manipulation at the development stage, and bypassed the voters in the ultimate contempt middle finger given to our democracy and rights of the working poor.

 High density planning, the uniform codes and urban growth boundaries are what created a poverty, affordable housing, homeless crisis. They are preventing proven solutions to this human suffering from coming to fruition.

 This liberal no-growth agenda has accomplished what racist stipulations in housing contracts could not, and has restored generational poverty.

Christopher Dunn

Eugene