Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

Middle-density housing is all the things that are in between a single home and an apartment building: duplexes and triplexes, row houses, dense townhouses, multiple small cottages on a single plot of land, etc. They're typically all both cheaper to build than apartment buildings and better liked by the residents, but zoning in most US cities doesn't allow any of it.

Then let's build something that's appropriate for the location with the highest land price and not tiny shoeboxes.

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. Usually big cities have access to a port, a railway, things that make moving goods cheap. New York has ports, Boston has ports, SF has ports, and part of the reason housing is so expensive is that being next to water constrains the space available for development. Building towns in bumfuck nowhere may be cheap in terms of land but that’s because actually living there results in high prices for daily living. A MASSIVE part of what is driving housing prices is energy prices, because it can make sense to spend more on housing and less on energy.

What makes more sense is a hub and spoke model. You don’t nessecarily want people living in a big city, but you can still efficiently move goods from the big city to “spoke” cities, and then you have these “spoke” cities adopt things like high/medium density housing like apartments, townhouses, and mixed vertical commercial/residental. Have some residents with cars, some without, so the latter can bum off the former. Take advantage of shared transportation options like package delivery (shared truck) or ride sharing (shared cars). Also by doing things in this way, you have to ensure people have services they need locally available and can easily afford to access them even if they have no car.

If your solution requires everybody to have a car it’s no solution at all because we literally cannot afford to buy a car for everybody especially given 50 years from now we’re likely going to run dry on cheap oil and we have no replacement available that can scale to the entire US population aside from maybe light EVs like e-bikes. 50 years isn’t that long of a time when we’re talking infrastructure. We really need to prioritize our transportation energy usage and focus it to applications like shipping goods and construction, not use it to move residents around because we designed towns in a way that they’re unviable if everybody does not have a car. In fact, we should be planning for this future NOW by making livability without a car table stakes for development of middle/low income communities.

> 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?

I am homeless and I am permanently disabled with bipolar disorder schizoaffective type.

I want to say first that housing first works. The stress of me being homeless is worse for my mental illness. And I applaud Austin for actually doing something.

Secondly, the biggest mistake they make is that they want to segregate low income people out of society. this is part of the problem. I don’t know if the solution to this, but I know it’s the problem. It makes us feel alienated and lesser. This is the most likely reason why these communities always seem to fail.

Also, putting these far outside of the city takes people away from resources like other people said. I’ll tell you when my depression is bad it’s much much harder for me to take a bus for 45 minutes than it is for me to walk for 10 minutes.

There is no fix for housing because the problem is not housing. It’s financial capitalism and individual greed. I lost my housing because I was kicked out of the studio. I was renting after my lease came up and they listed it as an Airbnb making twice as much then when I was living there. They did not have to do this, they chose to do it.