Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;re silly middle school solutions for a problem that was solved hundreds of years ago

I’ve volunteered to build a tiny home in Seattle and have seen this deployed in my neighborhood and a few other sites.<p>It is a feel good thing, but the reality is…<p>These are a fraction of what is actually needed. It is symbolic.<p>The residents are removed from mental health and other services and plopped into a suburban neighborhood without community or resources.<p>The host families are not trained social workers, but they are forced into a tenuous management role between the tiny homes project and the resident.<p>The one I helped build is no longer enrolled in the program, due to these and more failures of not having a long term sustainable system.

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&#x27;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 &quot;low income artists to be able to live here&quot; 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&#x27;t think outside the downtown box.

Homeless people often aren&#x27;t homeless because they lack homes. It&#x27;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.

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.<p>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.

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.

While I appreciate the sentiment, can America move on from these &quot;solutions&quot; for unhoused people? This is more like a 21st century garden hermit situation [1]. They don&#x27;t have plumbing or kitchens, they&#x27;re effectively Home Depo garden sheds. It&#x27;s vastly cheaper and more humane to prevent homelessness in the first place via rent control and allowing more housing to be built. It&#x27;s not flashy or sexy, but it&#x27;s actually a real solution.<p>I&#x27;m glad to live in a country where there&#x27;s very little homelessness, and if you&#x27;d hear about someone putting up garden sheds for people to live in, they would be laughed out of the town.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Garden_hermit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Garden_hermit</a>

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.<p>Pretty incredible to see what has come of faithfulness and persistence over 26 years.

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&#x27;s overall population. Wouldn&#x27;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.<p>Surely a large number of them are working low barrier to entry jobs that exist widely across the U.S.

As intended, I read the headline and the beginning of article picturing tiny houses.<p>Which sounds like treating the unhoused like I would want to be treated. Then:<p><i>most of its homes lack bathrooms and kitchens</i><p>And it all made sense, it’s a campground.<p>But written so I imagined tiny <i>houses.</i>

As intended, I read the headline and the beginning of article picturing tiny houses.<p>Which sounds like treating the unhoused like I would want to be treated. Then:<p><i>most of its homes lack bathrooms and kitchens</i><p>And then:<p><i>The tiny homes that make up two-thirds of the dwellings go for slightly lower rent but have no indoor plumbing.</i><p>And it all made sense, it’s a campground.<p><i>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.</i><p>A church campground.<p>TANSTAAFL.

&gt; most of its homes lack bathrooms and kitchens<p>That seems unacceptable to me, especially the bathrooms. How much does it cost to install plumbing (a genuine question)?<p>Do they have no refrigerator to store food or a way to warm it? It&#x27;s not a house, it&#x27;s a hard-sided tent.<p>&gt; Austin’s homelessness rate has been rapidly worsening<p>Reading the news, I would have thought that only happened in California.

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.

Most of the comments on this article, remind me of why they had to go outside of Austin to do this.

I am homeless and I am permanently disabled with bipolar disorder schizoaffective type.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

What&#x27;s wrong with building properly dense public housing?

If the rich have their way we’re all going to be living like this within a few decades. Probably even worse.

What&#x27;s wrong with trailer parks

Housing first does not work.

Ghettos.

Didn&#x27;t communist high rises kinda have this format. Or various Tokyo apartments?