Are you financially resilient? If you lost your job tomorrow, how long would it take for you to face the threat of losing your home? In this time of expensive groceries, high rent, unattainable home-ownership costs and general uncertainty about the future, most of us wouldn’t last long. In the last few months of 2025, the Lakewood City Council passed a new zoning code that has the potential to be a game-changer for helping residents like me build financial resiliency.
Those updates are headed to the ballot in April and are at risk of being blocked.
Towards the end of the pandemic, a friend and I purchased a four-bedroom, split-level home together with the explicit goal of sharing expenses across his family and mine so that we could have the benefits of home ownership — having a garden, a place for a workshop, and space that we can customize to meet our needs — without the massive financial risks of doing so on our own. Since buying the house together, we each got married; he lives in the upper level with his wife, and I live in the basement level with mine, with just a sliding barn door separating us to keep my dogs from terrorizing his cats…