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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

#71

Post by nox101 »

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…

Is it a single "family" home? Japan has tons of studio apartments of 200sqft or less. They're about the size of a college dorm room but usually have a bathroom/shower, kitchen sink, and a single burner stove.

To an American they're small. To a Japanese person who's used to them, they're normal. They're not "family" homes though. They're "single person" apartments.

Here's one

https://www.chintai.net/detail/bk-C0100888800000109404795300...

Maybe not everyone needs 800sqft+ per person?

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

#72

Post by noirbot »

roughly wrote: post #49
mulmen wrote: post #6

Earlier 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…

This does strike me as an innate tension to all of this. I grew up in a really diverse neighborhood, and at this point, as a decently successful person, if I moved back into that neighborhood, folks at the orgs I used to volunteer with would probably decry me as gentrifying the area. I've seen this with my own family, who have lived in the neighborhood for decades, but because it's now a majority minority neighborhood, they're seen with skepticism, even by people who moved there recently and are often more well-off than them.

I'm unsure at this point if I'm supposed to want to live in a diverse area, or if doing so would mean I'm ruining the area and driving out the diversity. What is the amount I'm supposed to want to engage in another culture without imposing on an "authentic" space for that community or appropriating it. It's a really tight line to walk.

Is it reasonable to try to have a community of people who make 100k+, and people who think it's generally unhealthy for anyone to make that much money?

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

#73

Post by crooked-v »

lolinder wrote: post #37
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…

From a bit of googling I think that there are different conceptions of what a townhome is across different regions, so it might be helpful to describe exactly what you're referring to. Where I live, a townhouse/townhome is more or less just a single-family home without space to the left and right—it has a front door and usually at least a second story (sometimes three), it most often has a garage, and the left and ri…

> 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.

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

#74

Post by AlbertCory »

lolinder wrote: post #37
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…

From a bit of googling I think that there are different conceptions of what a townhome is across different regions, so it might be helpful to describe exactly what you're referring to. Where I live, a townhouse/townhome is more or less just a single-family home without space to the left and right—it has a front door and usually at least a second story (sometimes three), it most often has a garage, and the left and ri…

Exactly. In CA, "townhome" just means "condo with no upstairs or downstairs neighbors, and shared walls."

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

#75

Post by crooked-v »

wyldfire wrote: post #30
crooked-v wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason you don't see those is that middle-density housing is indirectly or directly illegal in almost every major US metro area. Developers would love to build that kind of thing because it gets snapped up immediately wherever it's available, but they're not allowed to do so.

Townhomes are present all over the city of Austin and surrounding areas. At least in this case it's not an obstacle.

Philadelphia is another of the rare counterexamples, as the zoning there allows new row houses and townhouses almost everywhere.

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

#76

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.

Sounds good to me, but that's the issue with relying on corporate autocracies for societal need. Wal-Mart's goals aren't necessarily aligned with society, so unless some government contract is made there's no incentive for a Walmart-Lite

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

#77

Post by crooked-v »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #48
akira2501 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just like communism in that it entirely ignores the needs and capacity of an individual and makes them slaves to the idealism of the state. They're no better than a homeless encampment because you can't give people a house and then expect them to act like a homeowner overnight. It was the wrong problem to solve, and I think people rush to solve it out of self conscious guilt and a desire to quickly make the _app…

I have found that many people who receive housing benefits are very poor stewards of their personal resources. The first thing someone does when they get housed is to invite all their homeless friends over, to shower, to eat, to crash, to do drugs, to play games, whatever. So your typical Section 8 housing recipient is not just a single person/family benefiting from housing, they're dragging in their entire circle of…

> to shower, to eat, to crash ... to play games

I'm failing to see how those items in your list are supposed to be a bad thing for society.

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

#78

Post by lolinder »

crooked-v wrote: post #73
lolinder wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a bit of googling I think that there are different conceptions of what a townhome is across different regions, so it might be helpful to describe exactly what you're referring to. Where I live, a townhouse/townhome is more or less just a single-family home without space to the left and right—it has a front door and usually at least a second story (sometimes three), it most often has a garage, and the left and ri…

> 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 reason why that's not pushed forward as a solution—people don't generally want 9 strangers as roommates.

I definitely agree that the economies of scale that come with the shared walls make a huge difference for general practicality, but I was only speaking of land use per housing unit.

Edit: Here's a link to the satellite image [0] so you can see the depth of the property. The unit alone is about twice as deep as it is wide, and then it has a backyard per unit in addition to that. My very rough estimate with the Google maps ruler suggests about 1000 sqft footprint per unit.

[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/cqLLmbU3Rtufkfx78

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

#79

Post by CapitalistCartr »

bequanna wrote: post #44
crooked-v wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason you don't see those is that middle-density housing is indirectly or directly illegal in almost every major US metro area. Developers would love to build that kind of thing because it gets snapped up immediately wherever it's available, but they're not allowed to do so.

This rings false. Townhomes are seen in large numbers in almost all suburbs and I don’t think they inspire the same NIMBY fury that apartments do.

Here in Florida they're not "seen in large numbers", they're dwarfed by the ordinary suburban single-family dwellings, both already built, and new developments going up like wildfire. Every other form of housing combined is dwarfed by them.

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

#80

Post by xienze »

crooked-v wrote: post #75
wyldfire wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Townhomes are present all over the city of Austin and surrounding areas. At least in this case it's not an obstacle.

Philadelphia is another of the rare counterexamples, as the zoning there allows new row houses and townhouses almost everywhere.

I don’t think townhouses are anywhere near as rare as you’re letting on. I’ve can’t recall the last time I haven’t seen them in any decent-sized (50k+) city.
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