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 uncomfortably high for entry level tech workers. Nothing say artists have to live downtown! City planners just can't think outside the downtown box.
This is a funny thing. I recently looked into living in a central location downtown, and all the rents are far beyond my means as a Section 8 participant. But if you put "affordable housing" way out in the boonies, then how do residents access any services at a reasonable price? If we need to run all over town for stuff, why live in a God-forsaken location like that?
Downtown in my metro area is not only a transit hub, but a central location for goods and services. I could easily walk around, catch a bus or an eScooter, and have everything I want within mere blocks. Instead, these "affordable housing" developments are in suburbs where you've got one bus line and a Starbucks 3 blocks away, and your grocery stores are nowhere to be found, and your place of employment is way across town. Just not making sense.
I'm just not sure how you get these problems unironically.
What's so hard about having a grocery store and reliable transit to downtown?
The notorious St. Petersburg's Murino district is located outside city's boundary but it has a metro station, several grocery stores, bakeries, bars and other shops. It's not like US poor have no disposable income at all. Kudrovo has worse transit options but features an absolutely huge mall you can walk to.
Of course, if having choice everybody would prefer living in walkable distance to downtown, this is why normally it is so expensive, and you can only make it affordable by making it a miserable experience.
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
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.
Our Downtown area is replete with miniaturized grocery stores, pharmacies, and other amenities that are built into the landscape there. They have sprung up commensurately with the addition of loft-type housing and other developments which are actively luring middle-class workers to live there again, after a long period of rather blighted and lifeless downtown environs.
Back in 2008, my fiancée flew out from Catalonia to visit me, and we went on many outings using rented bicycles and public transit. One Saturday, I took her to see some museums near Downtown, and we transferred in Central Station, which was more or less deserted, except for some very brave pigeons. She looked around and she was downright incredulous about the lack of passersby. I told her this is totally typical because nobody views Downtown as a place to hang out or be entertained, it's a financial and business district where people go to work and then GTFO to their suburbs.
In Europe it is very different for her: typically people live and work right in the city center, and the suburbs are something else entirely.
And groceries from the grocery store downtown will cost 2x what the grocery stores outside of downtown will. Basically every good or service you buy downtown doubles in price so is it really a benefit to have poor people try to live there and wonder why they fail?
"you can only make it affordable by making it a miserable experience." This hurts because it's so true. We need to get over car-centric cities, but that's only happening slowly and those areas are the most expensive areas. That housing won't be going to those who need it the most.
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.
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.
> Of course, if having choice everybody would prefer living in walkable distance to downtown, this is why normally it is so expensive, and you can only make it affordable by making it a miserable experience.
Well, yes, you answered your own question right there.
The US has a massive shortage of housing in desireable areas. Because of that, as soon as an area is at least a little desireable, people will start moving there in droves, driving the prices up and pricing out any attempts to put cost-efficient housing there. You can see exactly the same pattern in small towns that suddenly become popular for one reason or another and go through massive increases in pricing.
The only really practical solutions here at this point would take state- or national-level action to override the decades of municipality-level bullshit that's kept enough housing from actually being built to meet demand.
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 art. They care if you buy coffee and pay sales tax.
So, do city planners look at “artists” as a revenue stream?
This is the same demographic that stereotypically spends the better part of a million bucks on an undergraduate education with no expectation of return.
Does “artist” mean “liberal artist”? As in “willing and able to buy in to and comply with a middle class lifestyle?”
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 with real diversity.
(Standard HN disclaimer: if the above doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to you - but look me in the eye and tell me you don't know what I'm talking about.)
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?
Isn't the classic example of this something like NYC's Hells Kitchen or East Village or Meatpacking District that was, at some point, the cheap neighborhood that artists and musicians could live in on their irregular low salaries, but then when some of them inevitably get famous, that mystique turns it from the bad/cheap part of town into the hip part of town that rich people go to for underground clubs and wild art shows, and in 10 years none of those people that made the area cool still live there because it's now the most expensive place in the city.
I think city marketers see "artist" in the same way that a nightclub sees women, but with less power or follow through on giving them anything free that would attract or keep them there to attract the other people.
Everyone wants to live in a city with good live music _and_ listen to Spotify all day in their 1k/month apartment.
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.
What, building outside the expensive areas of a city? That would just make too much sense.
The politicians give tax breaks and in many times, outright pays $$$$$ for these private services to those in need. The owners of those services in turn donate part of the profits back to the politicians. It's just a hidden way for the politicians to transfer wealth from the tax-payer base back to themselves in a clever cloak of woke-ness. I mean, who hasn't heard of the 700K+ single bedroom houses for the needy in Los Angeles. I'm sure this happens everywhere. It's really unfortunate, and brazen tbh, that such fleecing occurs in plain site. Meanwhile, those who really need the help don't get it because it was never really about them. It was just about the optics.
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 to do a lot with people outside your home, then you want to be where the people are.
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.
It sounds like it would be miserable for you, a preference you are entitled to, of course.
At the same time, many, many people love it. In NYC alone millions of people pay astronomical rents and mortgages for the privilege of living in tiny spaces in close quarters, no yards, etc. They have for generations. And then we can add everyone in all the other cities, all over the wealthy part of the world, doing the same. As comparison, I wonder what the highest-demand suburban location is in the US and in the world, and where it ranks for housing costs?
It's not 'misery central', just something where you have a different preference.
> no city in the US managed to increase affordability by either building transit or increasing density. Not a single one.
Where does that come from? I understand we won't all have data all the time (I sure don't always), but until then, it's words.
P.S. Why are so many people using all caps in the last month or two? I hadn't seen much of that every on HN, iirc, and now it's all the rage. :)
Sure. That's what people tell themselves. Realistically, most people would prefer to live in a less dense area, but they can't do that because there are no jobs for them there.
> In NYC alone millions of people pay astronomical rents and mortgages for the privilege of living in tiny spaces in close quarters, no yards, etc.
Exactly. And it's getting _worse_ with every generation, right now NYC is at 530 square ft. per capita, down from 700 in 1980. It's even worse for Manhattan.
> It's not 'misery central', just something where you have a different preference.
Yes, it's misery central.
> Where does that come from? I understand we won't all have data all the time (I sure don't always), but until then, it's words.
I analyzed a database of all real estate sales in the US for the last 25 years. There is plenty of other research that found similar results. The _best_ outcome was something like transient single-digit percentage decreases in rents near new construction.
I don't have the links on my phone, but you can google the "Supply Skepticism" paper from the Furman Center. It's a nice overview of the literature, and it's written from the viewpoint of pro-density (to prevent questions about bias).
> Realistically, most people would prefer to live in a less dense area, but they can't do that because there are no jobs for them there.
Do you have evidence? I have the evidence of millions of people and the demand for downtowns. Otherwise, you possibly are assuming that people must feel like you do.
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?
> Well if you build them elsewhere you're not going to do much about the unhoused population downtown.
Newsflash: neither would tiny houses. On the West Coast, the downtown homeless population is almost 100% drug addicts these days. No amount of housing can fix that.
And for the sane population (i.e. not fentanyl addicts), being AWAY from downtowns is a blessing.
> 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?
We stopped building highways, and switched from Moses' model of building enough roads to the "urbanist" model. Where we put in transit that makes it easy to go to the downtown ONLY.
> We stopped building highways, and switched from Moses' model of building enough roads to the "urbanist" model. Where we put in transit that makes it easy to go to the downtown ONLY.
I don't think we've switched out of the Moses model yet, or we only did in the last twenty years or so—the urbanist model is still idealistic in most cities. And frankly the urbanist model probably still won't be sufficient without public housing—I'm guessing a popular push for that is still about 10-20 years out.
Obviously, prioritizing driving around a city isn't going to do jack-shit for anyone who isn't trying to prioritize driving around a city. Public transit works well enough for most folks!
> I don't think we've switched out of the Moses model yet, or we only did in the last twenty years or so
We did. Most large cities stopped building new roads, and are instead sabotaging existing ones ("road diets").
The inflection point was some time in 1990-s. October 1992 is the date of the completion of the last Interstate freeway.
> And frankly the urbanist model probably still won't be sufficient without public housing—I'm guessing a popular push for that is still about 10-20 years out.
The thing is, we don't have a housing crisis. We have around 20% more units per capita than in 1980-s, and way more square footage per capita. What we have is an over-centralization crisis.
No amount of band-aid fixes will make it better. By forcing (via economic forces) more people into misery centrals (now with housing projects to generate generational poverty!), you'll only make centralization even worse.
> Public transit works well enough for most folks!
It really doesn't. Transit is a result of city growth, you simply _have_ to build transit once the city becomes dense enough.
And I get it, in the 1970-s and 1980-s people were still worried about overpopulation. So, urbanism was born as a way to make it more bearable to live in dense cities. Now we have an opposite problem, the native US population is peaking right now and whatever growth we're going to have will be only from immigration. We don't _need_ dense cities.
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.
And I'm no expert, but I imagine there's a circular relationship between the issues that homeless people have. Not having a home often means no address (unless they're able to access a PO box or similar?) so difficulty receiving mail or getting a bank account; it can mean less physical security so a higher risk of being a victim of crime (e.g. theft, assult); a higher risk of problems with the police; probably greater risk of ill health due to living conditions; and far less psychological security - to name but a few.
Things like drugs and mental health make things worse, but "at the margin" as economists say, if your housing is cheap, you might be able to hold on to it even if you have some problems with an addiction. There are plenty of wealthy people with drug habits who are not homeless.
That’s only relevant if you’re trying to prevent homelessness. The article is about people who are already homeless. They may not have had these problems when the became homeless, but being homeless ain’t easy.
That’s not to say housing costs aren’t a problem, they are but they have to be prepared for other problems as well.
The majority of homeless people are homeless for economic or relationship reasons like loss of job/income, insufficient income, breakups and divorce, and lack of affordable housing[1].
The fastest growing demographic of homeless people are entire families.
From your own link.. that's only the top cause for families, which is only 30% of the total population. The causes for individuals are different and they represent the majority.
Finally.. this is all from a survey from the "U.S Conference of Mayors" which is mostly a lobbying organization as far as I can tell.
Right, depression and other mental health conditions, various addictions, heath problems, lack of basic numeracy and literacy. These need to be dealt with as well.
It certainly makes things easier, actually. You can be homeless because you were priced out of the market. Homelessness can be both the cause and the effect of other issues. My partner works in mental health / AOD, and repeatedly exclaimed how much pressure was ‘accidentally’ taken off so many people when lockdown-era economic incentives gave people in my area a better shot at just getting back on their feet. Housing matters an awful lot.
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.
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 12 families each, without being oppressing mega apartment complexes. Townhomes in NYC were a working class concept originally. We could be erecting thousands of cookie cutter townhomes in somewhere like Austin for dirt cheap housing. The density would bring better benefits in terms of infra scalability, mixed use, and public transportation. All these solutions feel like they're silly middle school solutions for a problem that was solved hundreds of years ago
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.
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.
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.
There is another reason - single-family dwelling housing.
As an example I proposed to the City of Alameda a few years back to develop a tiny-home community on the base end of the island...
I was working with tiny home manufacturers but the city had their zoning laws set that tiny homes would not work - even in a planned area:
the zoning requirements were that each lot must be 2,000 SF min. for any dwelling - and can only have one primary entrance... but here was the reason that is important:
You could not put more than one unit on anything less than 2,000 as multiple units in that area cannot have separate entrances and shared utilities - otherwise its condidered an apartment building and would require a single entrance, cannot share power, water, etc.
Sothe zoning laws (and permitting process) need to be overhauled in most municipalities to accomodate tiny home groups - regardless if the intended residents are from the homeless population or single/couples that want that lifestyle irrespective income/career style.
In my experience, they do, but they're marketed as luxury housing so the stigma isn't as apparent to your typical person who is sympathetic to NIMBYism.
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.
Townhomes are seen in large numbers in the form of townhome developments i.e. pave a parking lot off a major road and throw up several rows of townhomes in it. What is less often permitted is for an existing city grid to have a mix of single-family and townhomes, or for older single-family homes to be replaced by townhomes as an area becomes more in demand.
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 right walls are shared with the next unit [0]. Typical total living area between all the floors is 1000-1500 sqft.
Judging from the picture in the article, the kind of townhome that I'm thinking of would absolutely not be a more efficient use of land per housing unit than what they're doing here with these tiny homes.
I'm assuming that you're referring to something different?
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.
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.
Sorry, we definitely have different definitions of townhomes. Where I am from (NYC) a townhouse is typically a 2/3 story build, narrow. With 2/3 units or sometimes split down the middle giving you 4 or 6 units or as high as 12 usually, often with an english basement and a back yard.
DC is full of them too, so is boston. Googling NYC Park Slope Townhouse would get you tons of images of nicer ones, but there's tons of cheap vinyl sided ones that are just fine.
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.
Similar opinion here. I'm for just about any kind of added housing, but it seems like it'd be a lot more land efficient to do something higher density.
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.
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.
Society would be better served, but the whole system is stacked against it. Zoning, banking, and buyers. When a developer builds a luxury single-family suburban development, they make good money for less complexity, less risk. Marketing is easy, contractors in all the trades are easy, customers are easy, mortgages are easy (party due to federal gov't), etc. Everyone from masons to marketers to moms are comfortable. Change requires the gov't at all levels to put a metaphoric thumb on the scale.
In the interests of full disclosure, I despise doing resi new construction, but many guys do it exclusively.
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.
>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.
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.
Sounds like "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded". Obviously the high-density places are providing something, or they wouldn't be high-density.
1) We not only can, but we do build high-quality multifamily housing. Not enough, but then again we're not building enough of any kind of housing
2) Sure, some people don't like dense housing, but it's obviously preferable to the alternative for a lot of people, otherwise not so many people would live there.
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).
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.
You cannot build anything on-site "dirt cheap". Check out labor and materials costs in construction. This is why all these "tiny houses" are brought up, apparently they are built off-site and do not cost nearly as much as the traditional construction. Can you ship a townhouse overseas in a container ship? If not, it's not going to be dirt cheap even if the land, and planning and permitting are free.
“Housing First” is such a bit like communism - perfect in theory. The problem is you need “second” and “third” things too, and the political will often just doesn’t exist.
I lived near a “housing first” facility that was no better than a homeless encampment.
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 _apparent_ parts of the problem disappear from common view.
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 loser friends who don't have those benefits, and so now you've got a cluster of mooches who aren't invested nor responsible for disruption or damage in that community.
It's really an unfortunate thing, and I just saw it over and over again. So many people lose their benefits very quickly because they can't resist helping other folks out, but that's not what you do with welfare and entitlements.
What experience do you have with that? I've known plenty of Section 8 beneficiaries and none matched that description. Particularly the description of 'loser friends' is sickening - a stereotype of poverty. The people I know hold down multiple jobs while raising kids, or are elderly and can't work; all just like you and me.
I also know people who work for urban housing authorities that administer it, and I've never heard them describe that problem (most problems seem to be with landlords).
IIRC, Section 8 has requirements for conduct (that is, as a tenant), but I'm not sure.
Oh, it happens all the time. My closest friends got on assistance and then got dumped because they couldn't resist flouting the simplest rules.
The places where I live are rife with crime, vandalism, and disruption, and it always turns out to begin with people who don't live here at all. They're just crashing at a friend's place.
The people who do get on federal assistance are the most stable and trustworthy. The people they drag into their lives are not eligible for that stuff, due to criminal records, mental illness, really intractable problems.
In the other place I lived, there were raucous parties, vandalised fixtures, scummy people just hanging around. One Holy Saturday I was about to leave for church, when someone was stabbed and left a trail of blood at my doorstep. There were numerous drug-related arrests. Once I came home around 8pm to meet a cop with an assault rifle, who advised me to hang back awhile because they were raiding the place across the way. I was eventually subpoenaed to a court case because I'd supposedly witnessed some dude damage property, who of course didn't live there.
The recertification process is full of checks on this behavior. Currently, they have a questionnaire with essay questions like, "What is fraud?" "What is the definition of a "visitor"?" and suchlike, because people just don't understand the difference between a temporary visitor and a live-in roommate who keeps their stuff there and sleeps on your couch or whatever.
It happens all the time, and in fact it's often the reason people become homeless in the first place, because they dragged over their loser friends, for a shower, a meal, some games, to crash on the couch, and the family of this person said to stop bringing drama and crime into our home. So the guy gets kicked out from an otherwise good home, because they are trying to keep the peace.
I was on the other end of this, in fact; when I was homeless, I would sometimes be invited over, you know, to shower, eat, crash or whatever, and my host would get in trouble, because I was not known and hadn't had a background check, or signed on to a lease or anything. Couch-surfers are often living in largesse of friends who informally vet them and those friends often risk eviction, because your typical lease agreement (not even Section 8, just a standard lease) prohibits long-term "visitors" who turn into "roommates" without legally signing on.
Do you have any real-world basis for that? Have you heard unhoused people express that?
Reality is the other way: Research, and people with expertise that I read and talk to, say that what people need first is stable housing. When they have that, they can work on their other problems.
Imagine life is overwhelming for you, for whatever reason - so overwhelming that you haven't managed to hold a job, relationships, stay sober, etc. for many years. That's a pretty scary hole to find yourself in.
Then you lose your home. You have no shelter - you need to find some every day. You don't get sleep, you freeze, you overheat, you get drenched. You have no safety and no personal space. You already have problems in life, and now you have that burden.
Again, the research says so, but I also completely buy that without steady shelter, even healthy people will be under so much stress that they aren't going to straighten out their deep, long-term problems.
I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum as communist but let’s be honest, the well run communist regimes got all their people housed, and quickly.
The real answer is not tiny homes, it’s prefabricated apartment blocks that can be put up cheaply (in master planned super blocks where people can walk to stores and work).
It's hard to imagine a socialist solution working in the context of the United States of America, though. The more viable solution in this context is allowing the free market to build abundant housing.
Totally agree. This type of development would appear naturally if it weren’t illegal. There’s no middle housing in America because it’s not allowed by law.
Community First, which the article references, has hundreds of these tiny houses and homeless residents. They have on-site activities, farming, a clinic, an outdoor movie theater, and a rotating staff of volunteers that contribute time and assistance.
I volunteered there about 5 years ago. One of the residents I met told me not everyone thrives there and they churn out back to the streets, but it's still 400 fewer homeless people as a result.
Cities can't politically organize to build housing because the payoff is after any of the politicians being in office. It's too long term.
You'd think developers would be the most powerful lobby in terms of local politics. But the collective defense of housing value inflation is almost stronger than social security in terms of uniting boomers
I'm starting to think that sometimes the biggest, strongest developers actually support and benefit from the policies that make it harder for mom and pop developers to build.
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 which generally make commuting on foot or light transit more viable.
No they don't. Austin has plenty of density in its urban core and has been knocking down single family homes for high rises on a constant basis for the last 20 years. Either way, this is a homeless community that reduces tents from underpasses, it has nothing to do with density.
> 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.
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.
"Tiny homes reduce housing density and effectively necessitate car usage . . . "
Compared to what? Most of the USA, and ESPECIALLY Texas, is full of single-family homes at 4-7 per acre. Tiny homes can easily be 20-24 per acre. Zoning and banking prevents building tiny home communities. We are awash in suburbia and you claim tiny homes reduce housing density?!?
Compared to say townhouses or low rise apartments, which is the level of density I believe is needed for suburban living without a car to not be miserable.
I don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of good, so if a town can be convinced to replace larger lots with smaller lots of tiny homes, I guess that’s an improvement but calling it a solution is a bridge too far.
You can certainly have a housing crisis of the form that incomes are too low relative to the construction materials and labor involved in normal amounts of built square footage using normal methods. Most urban housing crises, though, are about increasingly stiff competition for land. Only the vertical axis can save you there.
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 workers? Such places might even have local government incentives if these new arrivals could commit to staying for a certain period.
Surely a large number of them are working low barrier to entry jobs that exist widely across the U.S.
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.
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.
You seem to be ignoring their words and also reality. Yes, there is not a good solution in America that doesn't involve a car. That's the problem they are trying to speak about. Applying short term bandaids to the problem will absolutely help the people current experiencing struggles but isn't going to make it any less important to solve this at a societal level.
I remember seeing the Mobile Loaves and Fishes trucks constantly handing out food around Austin in the early 2000s and hearing about them trying to get this community off the group in 2008.
Pretty incredible to see what has come of faithfulness and persistence over 26 years.
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.
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.
Grocery stores, doctors, coffee, shops to socialize. The truth is that socializing, with all the other people who are having financial trouble lessens the probability that I’ll connect with someone who can possibly help me.
It's an interesting perspective. I've been lucky enough never to experience homelessness, but I'm very familiar with living in cities and using public transportation to access resources like supermarkets and doctors. I wonder if, in addition to providing housing to those who need it, the best solution is simply making sure such resources are readily accessible to the same people via public transportation.
This is one of the main rhetorical techniques that 'progressive'-type nimbys use to suppress housing. "This new housing isn't good enough. We should treat our homeless better than this."
Completely failing to see that the fact that people are choosing to live in these houses is proof that they were the best available option to at least some people, and that for many the alternative is homelessness.
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 religious background, it is run by Christians, and public spaces are adorned with paintings of Jesus on the cross and other biblical scenes. The application to live in the community outlines a set of “core values” that refer to God and the Bible.
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.
A displacement-prevention measure, not a housing affordability measure
> allowing more housing to be built
That's what they are doing, building houses, and you are pushing against it. You may not like the houses, but they are the best available option for many people, as proven by the fact that they are choosing to live there.
Housing affordability _is_ a displacement-prevention measure.
> building houses
These are not houses, they lack basic plumbing, kitchen, food refrigeration, etc.
> as proven by the fact that they are choosing to live there.
Most literally were unable to afford other forms of housing, especially the elderly living on social security. Calling this a choice is intellectually dishonest.
The solution to the housing affordability crisis is clear: allow the free market to build abundant housing where people want to live. Solutions like the one described in the article are great, but nowhere near as effective as simply allowing people to build.
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