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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

#91

Post by hamandcheese »

faeriechangling wrote: post #56
lr4444lr wrote: post #33

I never understood why even though homelessness is concentrated in the U.S. cities where car ownership is difficult (NYC, SF, some parts of Boston), when said areas only account even collectively for a fairly small portion of the country's overall population. Wouldn't it make more sense to help these people get a vehicle, and hwlp them resettle in areas that already have much cheaper housing and are desperate for wor…

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.

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

#92

Post by at_a_remove »

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 those are inherent to the housing like the inability to re-shape the interior much. And I think vermin infestation will move up the rankings with bedbugs. But most of the rest seem fixable.

In fact, most of the rest have been fixable for a very long time. We could totally do a lot better with the ventilation and the HVAC in these larger buildings. We absolutely could have a lot of soundproofing so your upstairs neighbor who juggles bowling balls at three a.m. (but he's not good at it) can do his thing, or maybe you wouldn't have to tiptoe for the guy under you who works third shift. Fixable.

But the fact that they are fixable and that we haven't fixed them is a very, very strong signal that We're Not Going To. In short, we could build some nice multifamily housing where you wouldn't have to deal with cooking smells, or cigars, or the catbox, or whatever, but collectively we just refuse to do so. I think that will continue. And so some people will go on to not like that kind of living situation.

Perfectly possible. We're just not gonna.

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

#93

Post by cyberax »

JeffSnazz wrote: post #45
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…

> 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.

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

#94

Post by dmos62 »

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…

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.

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

#95

Post by thfuran »

nox101 wrote: post #71
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-C0100888…

A single family home is a detached building that isn't broken up into multiple isolated units like a duplex or apartment complex. They're not complaining about small dwellings, only a tremendously inefficient mode of housing people in small dwellings.

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

#97

Post by faeriechangling »

alamortsubite wrote: post #58
faeriechangling wrote: post #24

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. 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 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 generally going to be fine at getting you from suburbia to whatever downtown core efficiently maybe adding 25%-100% extra travel times mostly because the buses need to frequently stop and let on new people. Moving from suburb to suburb on the other hand often doubles to quadruples trip times. There isn’t enough demand for such trips to make improving this fiscally viable, but this is something you will likely want to do a fair bit in practice.

>It’s not rare for a 30 minute bus trip to take longer than if you used a bike while also being more expensive. So transit often isn’t doing anything besides long trips downtown faster and providing transport to those who can’t use a bike for whatever reason. So they’re a bit of a non-solution for many problems caused by low density.

>you are generally constrained in how much cargo you can keep on your person, so these have limited utility in terms of allowing you to bring goods back to your home. If you drop the car and rely on transit, you need to work out some solution for moving cargo in an affordable manner.

I have many strategies to compensate for this, but really, what you want to do is ensure as many services are possible are in walking, biking, or e-bike distance to reduce the need to lean on the public transit system and reduce how frequently one needs to use it. If things are in bike distance, people can load more cargo on a cargo bike and get it back to their homes than they can using a bus. At the same time, such densification will also mean more robust public transit systems as increased ridership means more money for improvements to the system. Increased densification also makes things like package delivery, ride sharing, car sharing, and so on cheaper/more available/faster which you will want to lean on if you don’t have a car.

Low density and public transit really do not mix.

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

#98

Post by lolinder »

dmos62 wrote: post #94
lolinder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 definition in my area) are not an efficient solution for homelessness unless you have many roommates.

I have a suspicion that what OP calls a townhome is something I would just call a small apartment building.

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

#99

Post by rossdavidh »

IAmNotACellist wrote: post #4

Homeless people often aren't homeless because they lack homes. It's a very loaded and misleading term. There are usually many other problems that they need help with, and homelessness is often just a symptom.

This works both ways, though. Once you're without a home, it is harder to keep the rest of your life together. Lars Eighner's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Eighner) book "Travels With Lizbeth" mentioned that one of the things that was so attractive about spending the little money he had on alcohol, was that it was an achievable goal. Getting enough money for a down payment on an apartment, was (or at least seemed) completely out of reach. Getting enough to buy a bottle of booze seemed achievable. Once you're homeless, it is difficult to get or keep a job, and the downward spiral of mental health issues, etc. can be self-reinforcing.

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

#100

Post by rossdavidh »

brudgers wrote: post #86

As intended, I read the headline and the beginning of article picturing tiny houses. Which sounds like treating the unhoused like I would want to be treated. Then: most of its homes lack bathrooms and kitchens And then: The tiny homes that make up two-thirds of the dwellings go for slightly lower rent but have no indoor plumbing. And it all made sense, it’s a campground. Though the village is open to people of any re…

...which is way better than a trash-filled tent site in the woods, which is where the homeless in Austin who aren't at this site, often are.
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