Last week, the two astronauts who have been stuck at the international space station for nine months made it home. Their mission was supposed to last nine days, but the return trip got cancelled because the Boeing spacecraft that was going to bring them home was deemed unsafe.  It had been assembl ed with left over parts scattered around the 737 Max assembly line, so it should have been completely reliable, more or less, but NASA wasn’t taking any chances.  So they’ve been squatting in space for 286 days. I’m sure there will be lots to tell about their adventure, beginning with how quickly they ran out of underwear. The space station had enough food on board that they were fine in that regard, and just waited for what seemed like an unreasonable time before NASA had a scheduled re-supply flight on Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket that brought them home.They splashed down in the ocean and were taken for a medical checkup, reunited with their families, and will spend a few days in the hospital making sure they are all OK after that long in space. Rumor has it that as soon as they saw the news from their hospital rooms, they assessed the political situation, and have been urgently trying to book a flight back to the space station. All flights to deep space are booked solid. Even the middle seats are sold out. So they will have to tough it out with the rest of us.The latest DOGE move is on Social Security. They know they can’t get Congress to kill the immensely popular program that millions of people rely on. So they will leave it entirely intact, and make it impossible to access. Functions that used to be accomplished on-line or on the phone now have to be done in person in a Social Security field office. And then they are closing the field offices.“Yes, Widow Smith, you and your now-fatherless children are absolutely entitled to survivors’ benefits. But there’s no place to apply for them. The office is closed. So sorry for your loss.” Brilliant. You don’t have to take the furnace out of the house to save energy; just smash the thermostat. The Summit County Council has decided to set an aspirational goal of building 1,500 units of affordable housing in the next 10 years, not including what is supposed to happen in the Dakota-Pacific project. Even spread over 10 years, that’s aggressive.  I have no idea where that fits. Maybe Richardson Flat or spread out along the east side of Highway 40. The visual of a mountain modern-style Cabrini-Green next to the gate to Promontory has some appeal, but there really isn’t space for it. Even digesting 150 a year is a lot. The county has actually lost a little population, not that it has slowed building any. So 150 a year on top of all that’s happening — well, that’s a lot of cement trucks.Maybe the problem isn’t a lack of units, but we have a lack of occupied units.  We keep building the wrong kind of housing. It’s too easy to demolish functional “normal” housing like Park Meadows and replace it with mansions that drive the price of everything else up. How many units that used to be primary residential, whether single family houses or condos, are now vacation rentals and second homes?   Is it a shortage of housing, or a shortage of occupancy? Admittedly, the huge second and third homes aren’t going to go on the market as workforce housing, at least not without subdividing them. And some were built expressly for the short-term-rental market and we need some of them for visitors. But in what used to be real neighborhoods there are a lot of mostly vacant properties that could be put back into the local housing mix without driving a nail.State law doesn’t let local government shut down short term rentals. There’s not much regulation there at all, but eliminating every VRBO and Airbnb isn’t possible. The real estate community howls at the very suggestion because such a move would probably lower property values. Which is kind of the whole point of affordable housing.  Lowering property prices is a great idea, just don’t mess around with the value of my house.Those 1,500 new units mean thousands of new neighbors. They will have cars, and kids who expect to go to school, and will need to buy groceries somewhere. So when you build houses, you also build (or further congest) roads, parks, schools, and commercial space. And the additional schools and commercial spaces will need more employees, who will need even more affordable housing that isn’t there. We can’t build our way out of the problem.Which brings me to my favorite news story of the week. A local man was arrested after squatting in an otherwise empty Deer Valley mansion for some period of time. The housekeeper discovered him, and he later stole the owner’s Land Rover. He’s since been arrested and was held without bail on several felony charges because he apparently has a history of squatting. But he’s resourceful, even if stealing the Range Rover seems to have crossed a line.Anyway, the housing is already there, it’s just not getting used.Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.The post More Dogs on Main: Squatters in the news appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less