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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

#121

Post by seanmcdirmid »

lolinder wrote: post #78
crooked-v wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> absolutely not be a more efficient The listing you linked looks like a much more efficient a use of land and resource than the tiny homes from the article: about the same amount of land per unit but able to hold substantially more people per unit, plus all the economies of scale that go with shared utilities, heat conservation from shared walls, and so on.

Scale is hard to judge, but my gut sense is that land per unit is at least double in that listing—these units go back pretty far to make up for minimal street frontage. Housing units is what matters for solving homelessness, not number of people housed. These tiny homes aren't intended to house whole families. Yes, you could fit 8 to 10 unrelated homeless people in a single family home or townhome, but there's a reas…

Tiny homes also work well for housing people that are difficult to house normally. Like, they have an addiction problem and are likely to trash or burn down a unit they are given, a tiny home isolates that problem a bit.

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

#122

Post by at_a_remove »

thfuran wrote: post #103
at_a_remove wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay so I have a condo right, I bought it, it's mine. Can I add an extra room? Maybe a patio? An outbuilding?

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

#123

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

apapapa wrote: post #59

What's wrong with trailer parks

How much time do you have? The short version is that while there's not necessarily anything wrong with them in principle, in practice there's a pretty impressive amount of exploitation at nearly every level of the industry. It more closely resembles the dynamics of car sales and financing than it does a downmarket version of conventional real estate.

https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/w...

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/03/1033910731/why-are-investors-...

https://www.denverpost.com/2022/03/23/mobile-home-park-rent-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCC8fPQOaxU&pp=ygUebGFzdCB3Z... (~16-minute Last Week Tonight segment)

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

#124

Post by lotsoweiners »

thriftwy wrote: post #29
johnnyanmac wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, but many cities do not have reliable transit. Hourly busses that stop after 9pm doesn't help at all. And thars the case for a lot of the western part of the US. Also, thst grocery store may not exactly be profitable and be worth keeping up. Especially if Walmart or something use to station there and then left.

I believe this is an unique US situation where you are unable to scale down Walmart. Just make a Walmart Lite with no jeans or TVs but only food. Then these can be built practically everywhere, offering the same competitive prices. There are half dozen of chains like this in Russia and they often open on the other sides of same street.

Those have already existed in the US for a decade or two. They are called Walmart Neighborhood Market and they are basically just a regular grocery store.

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

#125

Post by wolverine876 »

thriftwy wrote: post #29
johnnyanmac wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, but many cities do not have reliable transit. Hourly busses that stop after 9pm doesn't help at all. And thars the case for a lot of the western part of the US. Also, thst grocery store may not exactly be profitable and be worth keeping up. Especially if Walmart or something use to station there and then left.

I believe this is an unique US situation where you are unable to scale down Walmart. Just make a Walmart Lite with no jeans or TVs but only food. Then these can be built practically everywhere, offering the same competitive prices. There are half dozen of chains like this in Russia and they often open on the other sides of same street.

Are there places in Russia without grocery stores nearby?

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

#126

Post by wolverine876 »

porkbeer wrote: post #81
thriftwy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is an unique US situation where you are unable to scale down Walmart. Just make a Walmart Lite with no jeans or TVs but only food. Then these can be built practically everywhere, offering the same competitive prices. There are half dozen of chains like this in Russia and they often open on the other sides of same street.

They have these, they are Dollar General and they are gutting rural and low income area mom and pops. They are not a better solution.

Also, they have poor selection, especially of healthy foods.

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

#127

Post by seanmcdirmid »

mulmen wrote: post #6
TexanFeller wrote: post #2

Looks like this housing is built outside of town, so it might actually work! One things cities do wrong is trying to house homeless people near downtown. It's dramatically more expensive to do it there, so there will never be enough housing or will to pay for it. The housing that was built for "low income artists to be able to live here" was even more of a joke. A bunch of condos downtown that were priced uncomfortab…

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…

Artist housing usually happens accidentally. Like some city overbuilds and suffers a real estate crash, or Detroit. It could also be a shutdown factory complex that doesn’t make for very good housing but works for artists (like 798 in Beijing)…until it becomes popular enough to gentrify and prices the artists out again.

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

#128

Post by wolverine876 »

thriftwy wrote: post #116
wolverine876 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What is all that based on? There is plenty written about food deserts that could be a good starting point.

Food deserts exist in relatively dense cities.

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

#129

Post by GaryNumanVevo »

While I appreciate the sentiment, can America move on from these "solutions" for unhoused people? This is more like a 21st century garden hermit situation [1]. They don't have plumbing or kitchens, they're effectively Home Depo garden sheds. It's vastly cheaper and more humane to prevent homelessness in the first place via rent control and allowing more housing to be built. It's not flashy or sexy, but it's actually a real solution.

I'm glad to live in a country where there's very little homelessness, and if you'd hear about someone putting up garden sheds for people to live in, they would be laughed out of the town.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit

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

#130

Post by Gibbon1 »

faeriechangling wrote: post #118
at_a_remove wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I think about this I think there are two ends of this spectrum. On one end you can argue the merits of quiet detached housing on a large tract of land vs things like town housing. The other end the merits of living in an efficiency apartment vs sleeping on cardboard in a doorway.
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