One of the biggest things that struck me during my housing tour was how different lower income housing appears in Kalamazoo compared to my hometown Los Angeles. All the houses we saw in a low income neighborhood in Kalamazoo looked very nice (perhaps even middle class) to me. Back home, low income neighborhoods look very different. One of the main diffrences was the amount of people living per house. Most houses in poor neighborhoods have more than one family living in them or have been partitioned. This is evident because most houses have multiple addresses attached to them like 135 1/2. 135 1/4.
I realize this difference comes from the disproportionate housing prices in Kalamazoo and Los Angeles. When considering low income housing I assumed that most communities would seek to lower living costs by having more people per property, but I learned that this is not the case in Kalamazoo.
I noticed an interesting thing that goes along with the condition of low-income neighborhoods as well. We went driving through the Northside of Kalamazoo in poor neighborhoods. Surprisingly, we only saw one house that was foreclosed. Usually i think of foreclosures as being extremely common in low-income neighborhoods. If you think about it though, most of the houses that get foreclosed on are in middle and upper class neighborhoods because low-income families try to buy nicer than they can afford and buy these big houses in these neighborhoods. I was expecting to see a lot of foreclosures but only saw one.
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