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Ask HN: Tiny Home for $5k USD?

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Re: Ask HN: Tiny Home for $5k USD?

#41

Post by michaelt »

alphabettsy wrote: post #38
michaelt wrote: post #34

There’s already an industry making cost-optimised, factory-built tiny homes - you should look at the travel trailer/caravan industry. Perhaps you could talk to some rough sleepers an get their opinion - and if they agree with you, as an MVP you could give them such a home, and see if it keeps them off the streets?

Travel trailers/caravans are overwhelmingly poorly made and they have many compromises made for the ability to constantly be moved/towed.

Well, there are two questions:

1. Can you make a travel trailer that can’t be towed, with higher quality, for $5000?

2. Can a travel trailer solve rough sleeping?

On my opinion, the second question has much more uncertainty than the first one.

Re: Ask HN: Tiny Home for $5k USD?

#42

Post by vimy »

somid3 wrote: post #16
bushbaba wrote: post #15

My shed cost me 3k in building supplies. It is 160sqr ft and has flooring…etc. We could easily build enough units to house homeless but they won’t meet our zoning and permitting process. City’s like San Francisco don’t actually want to solve the problem. Instead they just want to profit off of it. The issue is government, not available funds or land.

Well then, have each $5k sponsored by a celebrity and give them to the homeless to set them up instead of living in tents

Already happening. https://www.instagram.com/p/CX2AXu-vzpN/?utm_medium=copy_lin...

Re: Ask HN: Tiny Home for $5k USD?

#46

Post by gremlinsinc »

I've read of a couple that dug a huge hole with bulldozer.... then dropped 2 shipping containers and buried them back up... cost like 20k... mostly for the welding done to connect the containers, add rooms and windows...

being impacted by earth is a natural insulator... and it faces south...

I'd love to do something like this... team up buy land then place yurts and things while we build earth bag or container homes... maybe we use some of the land for Airbnb rentals to pay for supplies for the rest of what we want to do ....

ideally next to Zion national park in kanab.... could easily make 150 per night for our glamping spots...

Re: Ask HN: Tiny Home for $5k USD?

#47

Post by gremlinsinc »

somid3 wrote: post #3

I’m fking tired of seeing human beings sleeping in tents on sidewalks. I don’t care what they did, what drugs they’ve used, who/what they are escaping, many of them are regular people who weee eaten and chewed up by the machine. We have to engineer a dignified a solution. I make about $1mil a year and I can’t believe I haven’t done this sooner.

want to team up?

I have a plan to buy land, on that land we add like 5 to 10 glamping spots, one of which is a yurt for us to live in temporarily.

we Airbnb the spots... to pay for building supplies and other things... maybe earn some income too...

we create a big building that is a warehouse basically for common goods that households really don't need to own .. like tools, cleaning supplies, recreational vehicles, etc... the rec vehicles we can also rent to Airbnb's... the idea is every house needs tons of extra space to duplicate things like drills and saws... when you might use those things once a month or year or decade....

if you could just walk down the street and check out some tool... like a library... then maybe we have 3 drills per ten families or whatever we deem necessary to ensure needs are met...

the warehouse could have a commercial kitchen too for community meals etc or people could reserve it for special occasions...

we then could build cheap housing using containers (easier but a little more costly), or earth bags (very difficult work but affordable... also takes longer) then maybe we charge like 200 per month rent per family member, and if we could duplicate this we could create a share system so people could stay at the Zion Utah one when traveling for free, or Disney land... etc...

there might be an opportunity there to also help intentional communities set up glamping camps that maybe keep 50 percent vacancies so it's like a free travel network or plan for residents to travel cheaper so everyone can afford to have more and better experiences via vacations instead of focusing on things and owning more crap we don't need....

Re: Ask HN: Tiny Home for $5k USD?

#49

Post by rsfern »

anm89 wrote: post #39
hazza_n_dazza wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't pay more than 50% tax. No-one in SF does. THe article linked explains how it costs the gov so much to 'house'the homeless.

There are absolutely empirically people paying a 50% percent of their income in taxes in SF. The highest federal income tax backet is at 37%. the highest california state income tax bracket is 12.7%. San francisco residents pay a .38 payroll tax. This is going to get you pretty darn close to 50% effective tax rate right there but we haven't even started to look at property taxes or sales taxes. So yeah, there are def…

Those are the marginal tax rates. You can’t just add the marginal rates and come up with your actual tax burden, at least in the US. (Can’t speak specifically to property tax in CA)

Honestly surprised to see this misapprehension of progressive income tax on HN

Re: Ask HN: Tiny Home for $5k USD?

#50

Post by drivingmenuts »

michaelt wrote: post #25
throwaway3b03 wrote: post #18

I honestly don't think that the "physical structure" or actual shelter is the main problem w.r.t. homelessness. The land itself is a lot more expensive. And the legal framework. Where I am right now, it's illegal to sleep in a car for instance. And similarly, a lot of alternative housing solutions are highly burocratized, require lots of permits etc. Almost like politicians are protecting their real estate investment…

This is the case in my country - any land within commuting distance of a middle class job that one can build a house on costs a fortune. And shipping rough sleepers to parts of the country with low housing costs doesn’t seem politically popular.

If you start shipping them around, you’re dehumanizing them, treating them like objects instead of people with agency.

Furthermore, what happens when they get there? Low housing costs are a symptom of little to no economic opportunities, so you’re essentially just warehousing them like parts on a shelf.

What do you do with the inconvenient people, the mentally ill and those who cannot easily participate in society? Yeah, you’ve shipped them somewhere where they’re not in your way, but will you also provide for treatment or just wait and hope they solve the problem by dying or getting killed?

People are not things, despite what economists may say. You can’t just ship them around and utter thoughts and prayers at them. I guess you could but you’d be joining a select group of history’s biggest assholes.

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