Last night I went to a Community Building workshop on affordable housing here in Lincoln. To be clear, I personally have affordable, well-maintained housing. My landlord is cool. He fixes stuff. But apparently that’s not so true in the Near South Neighborhood. Probably other neighborhoods too.
I heard about code violations, landlord retaliation, rising housing costs, and mold aplenty. So very much mold. Everyone in that room knew about the problem, but was looking for a solution. That’s where Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows comes into play.
That was the first comprehensive book I read about systems thinking. In a nutshell it says what we all know to be true: one things affects another, which affects another in a big, messy cycle. In this case, housing structures are designed and built decades ago. Funding is raised for building and construction, but all houses need repair eventually. The landlords who own the units do not always have funding for costly repairs, like extensive mold damage or updated plumbing. Some just plain don’t seem to care. I could go on. It’s just turtles all the way down.
Thinking in Systems talks about how to bring some order to the chaos. I read this book many moons ago, but it was one of the things that inspired me to make this Affordable Housing Map that shows what it takes to tackle the problem statewide. View it on a desktop. Maybe a tablet. It’s too big to see on a smartphone.
The map is one way to visualize a system, but that gets paired with root cause analysis to dig deep and make sure efforts are addressing the right problem. Finding new and different ways to bring people together to share ideas, innovate and collaborate are good tools too , among others.
All in all, it turns out I like to think in systems. Who knew? I’m a systems nerd! Give this book a read if you want to find out what it takes to solve the big, messy problems of the world.
