Daily Grind

Things have been busy over the last week or so. While it seems like yesterday was Bike & Build orientation, I feel like I've known these people and have been doing this forever. The days have blurred together and every hill looks the same. I have no idea what day of the week it is or what the date is, but I'm happier than I've been in a while. I may even be becoming a morning person.

5:15 am - Snooze alarm.
5:20 am - Switch alarm off. Remind myself that "I'm biking across the country today."
5:25 am - Stumble bleary-eyed to the bathroom to brush teeth and/or wash face. (I                         decided today that morning face-washing is pointless.)
5:30 am - Squeeze all the air out of my thermarest so that I can then roll it up as                             tightly as possible to stow away in my suitcase. Change into biking gear,                         pack pajamas and overnight belongings, and roll and pack my suitcase                           (read: shove it into the spaces in my suitcase).
6:00 am - Drag my bag out to the trailer so that trailer crew can pack it awaywith                           everyone else's.
6:01 am - Desperately hope that the host has provided coffee for breakfast.
6:02 am - (Hopefully) Prepare and sip coffee while helping with breakfast and/or                           cleaning up from the night before.
6:30 am - EAT. I am always hungry and I can eat more than you.
6:40 am - Wonder if I've forgotten anything or lost another sock.
6:45 am - Clean up after breakfast and make sure I've finished all my chores.
6:50 am - A.B.C. (Air Brakes Chain) Prep and clean my bike for a ride of 35-120 miles.
7:00 am - Route meeting: When the leaders tell us where to go and what to expect for                  the day. Half-way through the ride we stop for lunch (leftovers that we've                       packed into coolers).
5:30 pm - Arrive at the host and SHOWER. (Yesterday, I literally smelled like an entire                   hockey team. Not just one player, a whole team.) Usually we get in between                   3 and 5 depending on the ride.
6:00 pm - Dinner. So far, dinner has been provided by our hosts (most often churches                   and  a few dorms) and usually comes in potluck form. If the host doesn't                         provide dinner, we Donation Magic* it from local restaurants and                                     supermarkets, eat leftovers, or break into our emergeny PB&J stash.
7:00 pm - Dinner crew (a group of four or five riders) gives a brief presentation on                         Bike & Build and the logistics of our trip.
7:30 pm - At this point, we usually mingle with the hosts, go over logistics for the next                   day, explore town, or go to sleep. Or some combination of all of the above.
11:00pm - Lights out. I'm probably already asleep.

Things differ only slightly on build days. We usually can get up a little later (genearlly closer to 7am or 8am), and rather than biking from 9am to 4pm, we work on a build site.

*Donation Magic - Asking businesses for free items (most often food or giftcards) to reduce expenses on our trip. The more we DM (eg. the less we spend) the more money we can donate to affordable housing at the end of the summer.

Findings Thus Far

On Friday, I finally got around to reading Out of Reach. It's a journal/magazine put out annually by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) that addresses the state of affordable housing in the country for the previous year. It was dense (chock full of charts and tables and graphs about housing data) but really informative. I mean REALLY informative. Out of Reach is where affordable housing advocates get their data. That said, I'm an idiot for not reading it sooner. Here I was struggling to find information and Out of Reach was just sitting there in the B&B Rider Manual!

To start with, there are a lot of acronyms:

• AMI (area median income): the average income of a household for a given region
• ELI (extremely low income): a household making less than 30% of the AMI
• FMR (fair market rent): what you could expect to pay for an apartment with basic utilities in an area

Then there's the jargon:

• Affordable Housing: when a household spends 30% or less of its income on rent/utilities
• Cost Burdened: when a household spends more than 30% of income on rent/utilities
• Severely Cost Burdened: when a household spends 50% or more of income on rent/utilities
• Housing Wage: the necessary hourly wage for someone working full-time to afford an apartment at FMR
• Renter Wage: estimated hourly wage of renters in a region

Then there are the graphs and charts and maps... (Like this one about how many hours you have to work at minimum wage to afford an apartment per state!)

Quick Facts:

Berkshire County

2 BR apartment at FMR: $804/mo (That's how much my apartment is! It's technically a 2 BR but easily fits three)

Housing wage for a 2 BR at FMR: $15.46/hr

AMI: $71,800/yr 

ELI: $21,540/yr

Lowell Area (includes Dracut)

2 BR at FMR: $1,157/mo

Housing wage for 2 BR at FMR: $22.25/hr

AMI: $90,700/yr

ELI: $31,298/yr

What Is Affordable Housing Anyway?

Over Thanksgiving dinner, seated at the "kids table" (aka, the table for those of us without kids) I heard my mom way over at the "adult table" mention my Bike & Build trip. Of course my ears perked up! As I eavesdropped (What's a little eavesdropping among family?), I was disappointed. Of all the people I've talked to about this trip, my mom has been the least excited. I get it, it's scary to see your baby do something like this. She's my mom, she worries. As she told my family about (what I consider to be next big adventure) she sounded flippant, dismissive. I thought, "I'm about to do something super cool AND actually important! How come she acts as if I just dyed my hair green and am going through some sort of phase?" 

I've thought about this quite a bit in the last few weeks. When it dawned on me, it was my turn to be disappointed with myself. In addition to fundraising and biking, I am responsible for educating those around me on the state of affordable housing in this country. The reason my mom acted as if this trip wasn't that important is because she didn't understand that it IS important. So, let's talk about it.

The point of this whole endeavor is to raise money, awareness, and support for affordable housing, but what is affordable housing? Affordable housing is housing that is affordable. Sounds simple and obvious, but this is the aspect of my trip that seems the most difficult to explain.

Officially, housing is deemed affordable IFF ("if and only if" Anyone remember this from high school?) rent/mortgage plus the cost of essential utilities (heat, water, electricity) add up to no more than 30% of a person's income. This is not yet even taking into consideration of that housing is clean or safe! (Because affordable housing also means that this is a place in which you want to live, a place that will provide physical and emotional shelter.)

Fun fact: In 2012, 40.9 million Americans were paying more than 30% of their income on housing (living in unaffordable housing).

What happens then? These people are still in homes, right? Sure, they have a roof over their heads that they struggle to pay for. That means money not going into healthcare for the family. That means money not going towards food. That means money not going towards daycare or education or cello lessons or sports teams or new clothes. That means scrimping on all of the frivolities and actual necessities that I, personally, have taken for granted most of my life.

This trip is about that, about giving people the opportunity to take better care of themselves and their families. It's not about all the wonderful opportunities I'll have this summer. It's just not about me.