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Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

nytimes.com

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Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

#111

Post by faeriechangling »

hamandcheese wrote: post #91
faeriechangling wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not make sense, vehicle usage is expensive, becoming more expensive due to energy costs increasing over time, and car owners are not paying for the true cost of their cars because externalities like the environmental impact of cars isn’t priced in. A major policy objective is to get climate change under control, sprawl directly makes that problem worse. Also think about why it is that some cities are so big.…

You seem to be ignoring reality. In most of America, a car is the only form of reliable transportation, and there is little to no bike infrastructure. Even if there was good bike infrastructure, everything is too damn far apart. A 50 year plan for infrastructure to change that doesn't do anything for homeless today. But a car might.

I understand it’s the only viable means of transortation. That is why it is an extremely bad idea to build more communities where a car is the only viable means of transportation.

If you transition to walkable/bikable communities now, you will be able to keep wealthier people in the car centric communities while allowing poorer people to use the newer more walking/biking centric communities. If you go “but cars are the only option because we are America and we can’t ever change our ways, anything that doesn’t immediately solve our issues in the short term is bad” you are going to end up with a fucking catastrophic poverty in 50 years.

You are the one ignoring reality. The reality is either America changes or there is a terrible future ahead. The idea we’re all going to have minimum wage workers using cars in low density suburbs is a fantasy. A dream. An illusion. It’s NEVER going to happen. If you continue building car centric communities, people will have to use them without cars, and it will be terrible, that’s just the reality.

Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

#112

Post by wolverine876 »

> most of its homes lack bathrooms and kitchens

That seems unacceptable to me, especially the bathrooms. How much does it cost to install plumbing (a genuine question)?

Do they have no refrigerator to store food or a way to warm it? It's not a house, it's a hard-sided tent.

> Austin’s homelessness rate has been rapidly worsening

Reading the news, I would have thought that only happened in California.

Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

#113

Post by faeriechangling »

alamortsubite wrote: post #108
faeriechangling wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, it’s not just implementation problems, these are trade offs. You can increase frequency but might need to reduce geographic coverage. You might increase geographic coverage by using more buses but might need to increase fares. You might be able to tweak things and improve efficency but you can only do so much, it’s not like the people planning this stuff are all incompetent.

There is one and only one way to improve every aspect of the bus system at once and that is to increase ridership by increasing density. There is a reason public transit downtown is so much better than public transit in rural areas. It’s not because city folk are smart megageniuses who know how to run a bus system.

P.S. there’s often ways for citizens to get involved with planning things like bus routes if you look into it… I knew one guy who did this.

Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

#114

Post by wolverine876 »

thriftwy wrote: post #85
wolverine876 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the GP describes is a generally accepted need by planners, etc. Regarding grocery stores, look up 'food deserts'. Also, when you are working multiple jobs, you have even less time for overhead like commutes to distant jobs and services.

You do not have to have food deserts, that's self-inflicted. If you are working multiple jobs, at least you should afford to live somewhere near. If you work multiple jobs and is forced to live very very far away/in ghetto, then you should realize people live better than you in third world countries, and relocate to Laos to teach English and lie on the beach. Seriously.

> You do not have to have food deserts, that's self-inflicted.

How is that self-inflicted? Should people with no money be opening grocery stores?

The rest of the ridicule - of poverty, from apparent ignorance - seems to show you have nothing more substantive to say.

Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

#115

Post by wolverine876 »

cyberax wrote: post #89
wolverine876 wrote: post #41

Earlier 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.

> misery centrals (downtowns)

What makes downtowns "misery centrals"? In most cities, they are the most expensive places to live - they are the most expensive, nicest places to live in the world. That's part of the reason we have homelessness - $1700/month in Manhattan gets you something like 225 sq feet.

There's no substitute for downtown - we can't, somewhere else, rebuild the transportation, infrastructure, buildings, services, etc. that make it central to the community (if we did, we'd be back where we started with another downtown).

Argument through condescending dismissal isn't persuasive, and doesn't prove anything.

Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

#116

Post by thriftwy »

wolverine876 wrote: post #114
thriftwy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not have to have food deserts, that's self-inflicted. If you are working multiple jobs, at least you should afford to live somewhere near. If you work multiple jobs and is forced to live very very far away/in ghetto, then you should realize people live better than you in third world countries, and relocate to Laos to teach English and lie on the beach. Seriously.

> You do not have to have food deserts, that's self-inflicted. How is that self-inflicted? Should people with no money be opening grocery stores? The rest of the ridicule - of poverty, from apparent ignorance - seems to show you have nothing more substantive to say.

They still have all kinds of incomes, nothing that Lidl-like discounter grocery store could not use. I attribute this to bad urban planning where these poor districts are kept small, too sparse and isolated, and shops are actively zoned out. But, you know, for the rest of the world this is non-issue.

Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

#117

Post by JeffSnazz »

cyberax wrote: post #93
JeffSnazz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One things cities do wrong is trying to house homeless people near downtown. It's pretty critical to build housing where there's actually need, or it won't do much.

BS. New housing in dense centers only increase the overall amount of human misery. It sucks jobs away, and it drives up the housing cost.

Well if you build them elsewhere you're not going to do much about the unhoused population downtown. That just leads to using police violence to forcibly segregate by class....

Anyway, housing is kind of fucked so long as americans consider it a private investment rather than a common good. How do you think we got in this mess to begin with?

Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

#118

Post by faeriechangling »

at_a_remove wrote: post #92
cglan wrote: post #12

Definitely 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…

All of those are good points. Living high density sucks.

The thing is, something has gotta give. It’s simply not possible for everybody to have a front yard and backyard and standalone dwelling. Density is likely the lesser evil.

Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

#119

Post by seanmcdirmid »

cglan wrote: post #12

Definitely 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…

Townhomes take up a lot space for stairs. If you want efficiency, you really want apartment buildings full of flats that can amortize shared stair and elevator costs across lots of units.

Tiny homes or…even single wide trailers can work well as housing when land is not so expensive or on land that can’t be built up on right now (the land isn’t typically sold with the tiny home in that case).

Re: Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

#120

Post by adrianmonk »

cglan wrote: post #12

Definitely 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 am really not a fan of tiny houses either, but I wonder if detached houses (even if they have to be tiny) might be a good fit for formerly homeless people.

After years of being homeless, it's probably nice psychologically to look at a house, an individual object, and think, "I have that all to myself." And detached homes allow more privacy, something you can't get when you're homeless.

Also, there are probably people with mental health or behavioral issues. Having the separation and noise isolation might make it easier to get along.

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