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Eric G. Welcome to the around the House show, your trusted source for home improvement.

I'm Eric G. Thanks for joining me today.

Sorry about my cold, guys.

Working through that.

So my voice is a little bit scratchy today, but on the back end of this.

And it's always nice when I can get through that without having to do any best of episodes for you guys so we can keep the show going.

It's the middle of the week.

It is already December 3rd.

I don't know what's going on this year.

Seems like it's blasting past.

And a couple things I wanted to bring up in our kind of midweek special here that we do, or the midweek update, depending on what I call it each week.

When your city is asking for more affordable housing, which I agree, many places need it, we also need to look and see what is the city doing when they have it.

See in our area here, we've got, in the Portland metro area where I'm at, we have to start asking these kind of questions because we'll have the city building all these buildings.

Like right now we've got a lot that are empty.

Here's the story.

So they were opening up some new stuff this week here in town, some new affordable housing units, which I love.

It's great.

The people from Apartments.com came out with a study in Portland and they said that we have almost 8% of those affordable housing units are vacant, which is 1900 vacant units.

Now for these affordable housing units, they basically run through the city, the county, many times, and they will have to go through there and meet the qualifications to get there.

But it looks like that the city, the county, the state is doing such a horrible job of getting people in there that right now there are 1900 vacant units in the city.

So if they turn around and build another 10,000 more, we already got 1900 empty.

Do we need that?

I'd say we do, but I also think we need to get them out of the renting business and keep them out of that.

So how do we do that?

I think we're gonna have to have a bunch of smart heads get together to figure it out.

But it's like trying to work with the dmv.

I don't want to be working with somebody like that.

Can you imagine the hoops trying to get through affordable housing where they have to verify your income or your low income or what you do have as income and all of that?

It's got to be a nightmare.

And I tell you what, when you're working that slow, it's not like private business where if you've got an apartment complex, they are working on getting that place filled here, they don't care.

It doesn't matter to them.

So that's where I think we need to be asking some questions of our local governments when they're like, hey, we need to have a bunch more low income housing.

Awesome.

What's your rental rate right now?

Do you need more or do we need to fix the system first before we get into that?

Because that seems to be the problem in certain cities.

I think this is something that we should privatize.

I think that if we have funds coming out, they should be giving grants, they should be watching over that.

And if there is stuff like that, they need to work it out where we can get people into those homes quickly.

We've got almost 2,000 units empty as of this date.

With more coming online.

I think we've got some bigger problems out there.

And just like anything with government, it's always the lack of systems or the ones that are really broken that cause the problems.

So I think it's going to be one of those things that here in my area they're going to have to figure out.

But it's just abysmal to see that these affordable housing units can't be filled up.

We've got the beds for people.

They just don't have the paperwork done right to get people in them.

And that's really sad because the money's been spent, the buildings are there, but they're sitting empty.

And that is just absolutely crazy to me.

As far as recalls out there, not a lot unless you've got little ones around the house.

There are a ton of baby related things, kids things from dressers to bassinets to car seats, everything else like that clothing.

One I did notice today, Spartan mowers and utvs recalls writing mowers due to crash hazard.

So this looks like on the zero turn mowers, the riding mower steering arm dampers can be installed incorrectly which can result in an unexpected bouncing motion and loss of operator control posing a crash hazard.

So you can go to cpsc.gov recalls find out more information over there and or if you've got a Spartan like that.

Just get a hold of your Spartan dealer and see what they have to say for you.

And other than that, just a lot of different recalls, a lot of packaging, things like that where somebody sold a dresser and it didn't have the tie to the wall kit, things like that.

So pretty basic right there.

I tell you what, we see a lot of those coming out now where stuff that's being sold maybe online or something like that where it's just really they're not doing the research and figuring out that it actually has to be sold using some standards here in the United States, especially for kids stuff, it's not happening.

And if you've got one of those Walmart Ozark Trail tabletop one burner butane camping stoves, looks like those can explode or catch fire.

About 200, 1000 of them.

Return it to Walmart retail store for a full refund.

That sounds sketchy.

Nobody wants to have a stove that is going to burn off on its own.

And our last little story here, they had an uninvited tenant.

We've heard of rodents in the crawl space, things like that.

But oh my gosh, these guys, I felt bad.

Had a full grown bear in their crawl space.

Yep.

This bear had been hiding under the house and going under and living underneath the house down in California.

Can you imagine jumping in a crawl space, go down and take a look to see why you've got a leak and there is a grown bear in your crawl space.

That makes us spiders and snakes look pretty basic to me.

Anyway, I put that video up and the news story from Fox 11 LA Tom up on the around the House show on Facebook.

Make sure you follow us on social media.

We've been doing a lot more on that.

So you're going to see a lot more coming up in the coming weeks as well.

We're going to have some new buyer's guides and things like that for great gift ideas and you can find that all over at around the house online.com I better save my voice, guys, before it totally goes out here.

But I wanted to give you out a quick message and we got an amazing show coming up this weekend you're going to really enjoy and it's going to be fun.

So you want to tune in there.

We'll give you a tease on that on Friday.

I'm Eric G. Thanks for tuning in to around the House.

We'll see you on Saturday.

Make sure to follow us on social media.

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We will see you next time.