Some people at my local makerspace decided to build some of these "conestoga huts" to aid local homeless, which is basically a tiny house<p><a href="https://www.communitysupportedshelters.org/conestoga-huts" rel="nofollow">https://www.communitysupportedshelters.org/conestoga-huts</a><p>as a shelter I would much prefer it over being homeless I guess, but there were issues<p>- Being made primarily out of wood it was cheap and easy to build, but it was HEAVY. I guess this is a good thing once its placed somewhere but it took 6 men to get it onto a trailer and because everyone is a volunteer its not easy finding a time when that many people can show up just to move a house (the building was the fun part)<p>- Where to put it? The city was more annoyed by our efforts (the actual organizers really since I just put in labor) than grateful because they started showing the houses off to people and saying "just as soon as the city tells us where to put it youll get a house"<p>- security on these was decent, I found out that primarily people wanted security from other homeless rather than even shelter<p>- without power or plumbing its not clear to me how actually livable these things would be. Although it had 2 windows it was extremely dark inside<p>Overall I think these types of houses are not solving the root issues - if the city decided to do it and found the land, it would be way better to just tack-weld some metal boxes together and weigh it down with concrete blocks. Then it takes specialists to build though and that sucks the spirit out of volunteers who want to spend a Sunday physically building something, not throw in $200 for a contractor to build 50 of them, even though that would obviously be of more help
Serious question, is there any nuanced difference between "homeless" and "unhoused", or is it just a rebranding attempt (like spastic, then handicapped, then disabled, then differently abled, etc).<p>I suppose in certain circles "homeless" leads to connotations of drug use, dirtyness and crazyness, where as "unhoused" (to me at least) conjures and image of a regular person in a temporary situation.
Obviously, for the three individual people who live in these, this is great.<p>But surely a single, government-run homeless shelter is far more cost-effective than building a bunch of individual tiny mobile homes? Plus it allows centralized access to services (medical, social, etc.), since the long-term goal is to get them into a job (if possible) and their own place.<p>It's hard for me to see how tiny mobile homes are helping in the long-term.
American style tent cities or Brazillian style shanty towns are not the solution.<p>In my country there's a problem with providing shelters- you don't want to attract every Eastern European crackhead. On the other hand people have died and that's a bit embarrassing as well.<p>The solution was those crazy Christians from the Salvation army. They don't ask for ID and they are a private initiative which allows for full plausible deniability from the government.
Boothbay VETS in Maine has been making not-quite-as-small towable shelters for homeless veterans in Maine since 2019. <a href="https://boothbay-vets.com/in-the-press/" rel="nofollow">https://boothbay-vets.com/in-the-press/</a>
Yes, it's better than freezing to death but Finland and Denmark demonstrate that there exists a much better and humane way to deal with the problem <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland</a>
Non that much related, but inspired by: in the past southern States was the richest also thanks to the climate, and places where circadian delta was little was the most preferred. Than when heating became more automated (meaning you do not have to manually chop wood/dig for coal for most of the year) northern countries get richer, since there was still no A/C. I think we start to reverse again where some sufficiently mild climate zones, where p.v. is meaningful and with BIG circadian delta, to not need cooling in summer nights, will be again the richest a small step at a time as fossils get phased out.<p>At our current technological progress we still need nature to produce food and climate have an immense impact, so well... Try to really think about the not-so-near future, where in most northern/southern areas even if the climate will be less cold heating will be simply too expensive for most.<p>Introduce in the mix issues with melting permafrost and Canadian geological peculiarities... Canada seems to be probably a work zone for poor more than a wealthy country...
A different org that is building small intermediate shelters that I think is cool is Pallet: <a href="https://palletshelter.com/" rel="nofollow">https://palletshelter.com/</a><p>I'm not affiliated with them, I just think it's a good idea and they are making some real traction.
I don't see how this "unhoused" term is an effective euphemism relative to "homeless".<p>"un-" is not any softer than "-less". For instance, it's not any better to be called "ungrateful" than "thankless".<p>The "home" to "house" change also shows no detectable movement along the euphemistic gradient.<p>This is just a bunch of woke people deciding to use a different word which has about the same sugar content, purely so that they could then feel superior to those who are not yet using the new word.
I love the idea of small homes for everyone, and I'd want to help with similar projects in my areas. This is inspiring.<p>Separately, I absolutely love the "lite" aspect of this news web page. Clean, simple, quick, with an easy button to load an image? Yes, please! More of this!
Wow, the formatting of this CBC article is great. It looks like this is their 'low-bandwidth' site.<p>I wish all my news was presented like this.