Housing crisis causing employment crisis
Sophia and I are nearing the final draft on a story about how a shortage of housing is causing a shortage of labor.
There’s a prayer run going through Moab tomorrow. We reported on the same run last year. Personally, it’s bad timing. I have a meeting at 9 a.m. to cover and a meeting happening right now that I will write up in the morning. I guess I’ll just pass it off to Doug and see what happens.
I currently have one story fully written that is sitting in the publication folder. It’s pretty frustrating. I have all these stories in my head and in my notes that I can write and even more on my to do list, and only a fraction of them will make it into print unless I stay up all night working.
The county commission is hearing from Fehrs and Peers tonight, the contractor helping with the design of the local transit system, about that transit system. The discussion is around four scenarios for how the thing could be designed.
One of the ideas in the discussion is to use what is called microtransit — literally just suburbans that people can use an app to call up. I think it’s basically full-time Uber. You have a fixed number of vehicles driven by a fixed number of employees.
There’s also no fee for users, meaning it’s funded by taxes.
The biggest question I have right now is: What is going to be the cost of operation per rider? The riders are not going to pay, so it’s taxes that will fund it. Will the cost per rider annually be less than the current cost of transportation for locals? If not, what’s the annual cost overrun?