And why were they homeless?
Why were they homeless???
I’m of two minds.
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shitty bungalows are what is killing infrastructure costs and perpetuating urban sprawl. We have a generous home in a hyper-dense housing area and - thanks to triple paned windows and concrete - no claustrophobia.
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tiny homes for people returning from homelessness may be a good idea. The unfair concerns are mitigated by very repairable units separated from neighbours.
We need to keep these as transitional housing, though, and a feeder into a “starter” unit in proper dense mixed-use: every block (hectare) taken for tiny homes is 3 million cubic meters of space taken from a land budget we’re already overdrawn on.
I think thats always the hope that they are first steps of stability to move up. None of the projects like this I’ve seen have been intended to be life time residence.
There are tiny-home dwellers but they’re often highly educated professionals who decide to live Buddhist for a while. Some of them wind up enjoying it.
The better analogy for homeless folks would be living in cars, aka the invisible homeless - is this better than that? Fuck yes. Even if it WAS permanent it’s better than that.
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Good for him, but this is pretty much an Orphan-Crushing Machine moment.
Hell yeah we’re bringing back shanty towns
Has he tried paying his employees a good wage and benefits?
He sold his company for eight figures and used that wealth to build these communities for the people most in need, not (just) his (now former) employees.
But even if he was still CEO, the fact remains that it’s not just for his employees and pay is still just half the equation: he doesn’t control the price of rent, and the real solution is rent control. Otherwise nothing stops landlords from just raising rent higher ans higher once they figure out that employers will just pay their tenants more.
So yes, good pay matters, and we need comprehensive minimum wage laws and worker protection, but we also need rent control. And preferably to banish all landlords to the shadow realm.
Rent control is a stopgap measure. Without enough supply, it doesn’t matter how controlled the rent is if your odds of obtaining a unit are miniscule. Adding to the supply as a response to rising rental rates and property prices is the correct way to keep things stable. Which should be the govt’s job, but…
Spacing looks a bit odd. Would a communal park and then less space between each be better? Not really enough space around each one to be much use beyond a few plant pots anyway.
They’re probably parking spaces. It doesn’t look like a bad set up. Parking is behind your little studio apartment style trailer.
So cars are given more space to live than humans?
Lemmy sad sacks, man…
They look like toilets with a cute small porch
Solar powered, too.
i think there’s an area in project zomboid that looks like that
I see no reason to believe that letting this guy make unilateral decisions is somehow better than taxing him appropriately and using the revenue to build public housing.
Did anyone say that it was better this way? He could just go buy another yatch instead.
Dont let perfection be the enemy of better
This statement might be true, but we’re not taxing him. Should he just donate his money to the government?
Sure there are lots of failures to the way we govern ourselves. This shouldn’t be a need. The reality is that it is a need and that person did what he could. Have you?
If every billionaire did this and ended homelessness perhaps they would have a point about their wealth hoarding. I won’t be holding my breath for this to happen though. Tax the rich!
Absolutely. We don’t need kings making decisions like this. The downside is the difficulty in forcing government and the anti-help-anyone segment of our society to spend such taxation correctly to actually help people.
I’m also angry he did a good thing despite the government’s abject failure to tax the rich.
What makes you think Trump’s administration will make better use of that money?
Especially because his unilateral decision is optional. Someone got lucky with his choice vs someone was guaranteed an outcome.
Corruption could make that money go to some people’s 3rd, 4rd or their relatives houses UNFORTUNATELY . The question here is: what about those who pay a rent???
Corruption already makes most millionaires’ and billionaires’ money go to that anyway. At least if it’s taxed some of it will actually go to toward necessary housing, maybe even frequently enough that it’s not newsworthy when it does, the way it is now.
I did not understand what you said, sorry
You’re worried that if we collect money from the wealthy through taxation, it might not be used to reduce homelessness. However, if we don’t tax the wealthy, they’ll spend the money on their own goals, which definitely won’t be to reduce homelessness. While you’re right that taxes are largely wasted, they do still fund important things such as fire departments, medical research, and yes, government housing. It’s true that we need to implement better tax management systems, but we also need a wealth tax.
So we’re so scared of corruption that (checks notes) we stop even trying for fairness and instead just let rich fucks make all the decisions and hope for the best?
It’s clear that a lot of people switched to that way of thinking, thanks to those corrupted people.
That’s what current voting results say all around
99 is not nearly enough but it’s a start at least
I would say that this particular millionaire did his part to help out. If every millionaire/billionaire spent the same percentage of their wealth on similar projects we would be in pretty good shape as far as homelessness goes.
Not nearly enough? How many homeless people were in this guy’s town?!
99 would take in every homeless person in a wide berth around here. WIDE. And I’m next door to the second poorest county in Florida.
one thing most people don’t realize is: most homeless people don’t look homeless… they actually go out of their way to not look that way.
the people that look homeless to you are just the most extremely disabled homeless…
i mean depends how big the town is
Millionaire? Nice. Billionaires should follow suit, but 1000x
(With ~800 billionaires in the US, that’s 79,200,000 homes)
They didn’t become billionaires by being charitable.
Quite the contrary. You CAN’T accumulate that much money except by exploiting others, creating issues like homelessness.
How many homes do we actually need?
Funny story, we actually have enough housing for everyone. It just isn’t always where people want to live, and corporate landlords would rather leave a space vacant to drive up rents than make all of their inventory available, so there is a shit ton of residential (and commercial) property that is basically abandoned.
Some estimates say there are as many as 12 vacant homes per homeless person
this countryin the United States.
Edit: millionaire in OP is from Canada
Last estimates I saw before the pandemic had the rate above 30:1. I haven’t looked since then, but I’m certain it’s only gotten worse.
Yeah, we were gonna do that anyway. After covid, I lost faith in humanities ability to be decent.
What we need is tax on vacant property. Make it a ladder system so its worse based on number of vacant units and value.
And eliminate corporate ownership of residential property. Tax the shit out of anyone owning more than three residences, and bring property values back down to earth. Bail out homeowners who owe mortgages for more than the value of the properties, and let the market self-correct.
I’d go so far as to attack the idea of a corporation. Letting a business own property or act as a liability shield for human choices is clearly bad for society.
It goes both ways though. I have a corporation for my contracting business to shield possible frivolous lawsuits from unscrupulous people. I do my best to screen clients and not work for wackos, but that’s not necessarily enough to protect myself and family.
The official homeless number for 2024 in the US was 771,480. That’s probably just reported and not actual.
Analysts think we’re about 4.5 million homes short of what we would need to a well-functioning housing market. I’m not sure exactly how they’re defining that.
How many stories have I seen about billionaires building housing? Zero. Though, to be fair, I’ve only seen a meme about a millionaire doing so. No verification that it happened.
https://themindcircle.com/millionaire-builds-99-homes-to-reduce-homelessness/
Seems to be true :).
There’s someone in Kelowna doing something similar.
Good start, weird that it’s built like a CPU heat sink. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to build duplexes or quadplexes? Fewer walls, less insulation per person…
These are tiny homes that are built in a shop and just dropped onto the little concrete pad once they’re done. A small crew was able to build them out over time, so I can’t say which option exactly is cheaper. One advantage was they were able to move people in as they were built too.
Edit to add a word
Even lower income people want a places they can call their own. Even lower income people prefer not to deal with other people’s noise or stomping or flooded sink. Even lower income people don’t want to deal with a building manager for repairs. Even lower income people want to be able to make choices in their living accommodations.
Plus these are probably all factory built and I see a simple gravel foundation. Cheap and fast to set up, but it’s still a house. Probably much cheaper than full scale houses
probably zoning laws. that’s a HUGE part of why we don’t just build more apartments in many places. it’s why people get so passionate about the “white flight” as it’s known and nimbyism. everyone wants to fix homelessness, but in any of the places that one could effectively build community housing it is illegal to make anything that provides housing to more than 1 or 2 families. the people that live there want homelessness to go away, but when it’s proposed to build low income housing nearby they freak out and say “poor people and drug addicts? they do crime. low income housing is cool, but not in my backyard”.
being poor in america has such a stigma that homeowners consistently vote to ban them from living nearby by banning apartments. to be perfectly honest, I’m just waiting for zoning laws to try and make these tiny homes illegal now that people are building them for the poor.
And building codes. The foundation alone can be the reason. A regular full scale building requires a concrete or piered foundation or slab depend8ng on the area, which is fairly expensive and time consuming. These look like simple gravel foundations, which is fine for that size structure
What !? Sharing a wall with someone else because it’s more efficient in terms construction and maintenance costs?! Get outta here you commi!
Source? Did it actually work? Very cool if so.
I used to live in a town that did something very similar to this. It sorta worked but mostly did not. But as another commenter pointed out you need more than just homes. Obviously they help a ton but a lot of people need more help than just a roof over their head. Financially, medically, mentally, employment… It’s a bigger, more complicated problem.
But it goes without saying that this is a step in the right direction and absolutely better than collectively shrugging our shoulders and walking away.
Housing is the basis for addressing most of those other issues.
If you give a homeless person a home, then by definition, they are no longer homeless.
On a less pedantic note, yes, it should. Some countries (like mine) provide a secure place to live as step one, when helping the homeless. Having somewhere safe to sleep, keep your property, etc. makes all the other steps involved in solving your problems much easier, leading to a better success rate in getting people back on their feet.
Further it enables them to apply for all manners of documents as they have an address to their name. Try getting any sort of document from a bank or governmental branch without an address. Trying to get a passport without address? Nope. No address no ID, no Bank account and mostly no employment anywhere without either of the two.
My city does something like this as part of our homeless program and we’re at “net-zero” homeless. It doesn’t work on it’s own, but the tiny homes give people a stable place to keep their stuff safe and the elements off their bodies, it gives them an address they can use for things like mail and applications, and it gives social workers a place to find them reliably. It’s the start of a long process to help them back to their feet.
Being on the streets is also incredibly dangerous. Putting drug users around other drug users as well doesn’t keep them off drugs.
Here’s one article about it.
https://macleans.ca/society/tiny-homes-fredericton/
I don’t remember where I saw this the first time, but it did mention that this had become a thing in a few American cities too (this story was from Fredericton, Canada)
This is what I found: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/12-neighbours-founder-transitional-housing-1.7510785
But basically, this is something that works in Finland well enough https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/look-finlands-housing-first-initiative
