Most of the comments on this article, remind me of why they had to go outside of Austin to do this.
Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness
101–110 of 176 posts
Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness
#102I’ve volunteered to build a tiny home in Seattle and have seen this deployed in my neighborhood and a few other sites. It is a feel good thing, but the reality is… These are a fraction of what is actually needed. It is symbolic. The residents are removed from mental health and other services and plopped into a suburban neighborhood without community or resources. The host families are not trained social workers, but…
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Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness
#103Definitely not against this, since any housing is good, and I hate letting perfect be the enemy of good, but not sure why we are so intent on scaling the concept of a single family home down to 200sqft. Townhouses in NYC have existed for over a hundred years, and generally across the world are an extremely viable concept for dense and cheap housing. It's perfectly possible to build cheap townhomes that can house 6 or…
I was thinking about this last night, what with people currently obsessing over "walkable cities." First, we need to understand why some people don't really like dense housing. Let me try a rough list without a great deal of order. Noise, smells, having to not make noise, crime, vermin infestation, inability to re-shape the property, the lack of permanence (you can be kicked out) ... that's a good starter. Some of th…
>inability to re-shape the property, the lack of permanence (you can be kicked out) ... that's a good starter. Some of those are inherent to the housing like the inability to re-shape the interior much.
Those are not density problems; they're renting problems. You can rent a single family home or purchase an apartment.
Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness
#104Tiny homes reduce housing density and effectively necessitate car usage to connect people to services which is already unaffordable and will only become more unaffordable. Electric golf carts and public transit do not solve this problem. Sounds like an awful plan to me. Increasing energy costs mean we need to densify instead of sprawl. I’d be thinking apartments, townhouses, vertical mixed use developments. Things wh…
No they don't. Austin has plenty of density in its urban core and has been knocking down single family homes for high rises on a constant basis for the last 20 years. Either way, this is a homeless community that reduces tents from underpasses, it has nothing to do with density.
Looks sort of like a shantytown to me and it may be a great short term solution but it doesn’t fix the long term problem of affordability.
Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness
#105Tiny homes reduce housing density and effectively necessitate car usage to connect people to services which is already unaffordable and will only become more unaffordable. Electric golf carts and public transit do not solve this problem. Sounds like an awful plan to me. Increasing energy costs mean we need to densify instead of sprawl. I’d be thinking apartments, townhouses, vertical mixed use developments. Things wh…
"Tiny homes reduce housing density and effectively necessitate car usage . . . " Compared to what? Most of the USA, and ESPECIALLY Texas, is full of single-family homes at 4-7 per acre. Tiny homes can easily be 20-24 per acre. Zoning and banking prevents building tiny home communities. We are awash in suburbia and you claim tiny homes reduce housing density?!?
Compared to say townhouses or low rise apartments, which is the level of density I believe is needed for suburban living without a car to not be miserable.
I don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of good, so if a town can be convinced to replace larger lots with smaller lots of tiny homes, I guess that’s an improvement but calling it a solution is a bridge too far.
Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roommates? This discussion is perplexing. Don't you have apartment buildings where you're from? An apartment in a multi-story house is more space efficient than a single-tenant house is what the observation was, unless I'm missing something.
Yes, we have apartments, but this conversation is about townhomes and the different definitions of townhomes people use. Apartment buildings are absolutely the most efficient use of space, but the original poster on this thread was arguing for townhomes, and what is called a townhome in my area is just a single family home with shared walls with the neighbors to the left and right. Hence roommates—townhomes (by the d…
Sorry, we definitely have different definitions of townhomes. Where I am from (NYC) a townhouse is typically a 2/3 story build, narrow. With 2/3 units or sometimes split down the middle giving you 4 or 6 units or as high as 12 usually, often with an english basement and a back yard.
This is what I am talking about https://streeteasy.com/blog/types-of-townhouses-in-nyc/
DC is full of them too, so is boston. Googling NYC Park Slope Townhouse would get you tons of images of nicer ones, but there's tons of cheap vinyl sided ones that are just fine.
Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, when I hear “artist housing” I always assumed they meant “interesting people who make music and maybe paint”. But “interesting” is too subjective to be real. Freestyle watercolor is no foundation of an economy. We should not judge other humans by their ability to make rent. Some of my best friends struggle to do that. But for a city making rent is all that really matters. They don’t care if you literally create…
There's always a funny tension on the city trying to draw in artists to make a downtown area more palatable, too, in that good artists and good art is often intended as a challenge to the status quo - the goal is to make people uncomfortable. I say this as a Berkeley-living lefty: the left often seems to espouse policies whose practical outcomes far exceed their actual appetite for discomfort or willingness to engage…
I suspect the art itself is a red herring. When a city planner says "artist" what do they mean?
Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tiny homes reduce housing density and effectively necessitate car usage to connect people to services which is already unaffordable and will only become more unaffordable. Electric golf carts and public transit do not solve this problem. Why would tiny homes necessitate car usage? What's the issue with public transportation?
Having been a long time user of public transit in medium to low density areas, the issues are: >there’s no fiscal case for stuff like heavy rail or light rail in the burbs, so you’re using buses until you travel somewhere more dense. >the buses have limited geographical availability and it may be a long trip to or from a bus stop >the buses have limited frequency and may run way every half hour or hour. >Buses are ge…
Almost all the problems you've listed are implementation issues with bus routes. Adding more buses, stops, and/or express routes is a slam dunk compared to what you describe. I agree on your vision, but until it happens it seems unreasonable to dismiss attempts to help the homeless like the one Austin is taking.
Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
People, including unhoused ones and artistic ones, need to live near downtown because that's where jobs and services are, including needed social services, and transportation to the rest of the city, as well as community. In typical cities, the art galleries, museums, schools, etc. are downtown. If you have a family and spend your time with them and at work, a home away from the city center makes sense. If you need t…
Well, provide jobs outside of misery centrals (downtowns). This is coincidentally the ONLY way that will actually help housing affordability.
And public transport.
Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> putting these far outside of the city takes people away from resources like other people said Thanks for sharing your experience. What are some examples of these resources?
Grocery stores, doctors, coffee, shops to socialize. The truth is that socializing, with all the other people who are having financial trouble lessens the probability that I’ll connect with someone who can possibly help me.
It's an interesting perspective. I've been lucky enough never to experience homelessness, but I'm very familiar with living in cities and using public transportation to access resources like supermarkets and doctors. I wonder if, in addition to providing housing to those who need it, the best solution is simply making sure such resources are readily accessible to the same people via public transportation.