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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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urbanism
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I actually think there's something here for homelessness prevention. Like, take that company that is doing legal tent encampments and make them do tinyhouse style apartments with the bare minimum of space, offered for free to anyone that needs it. Would need an exception for current housing laws but like it's better than under a bridge.
What's the bare minimum for a human to have all the necessities? 100sqft? The minimum in NYC now is 150sqft and those people are paying through the nose for it.
You need to dream bigger than giving people 6m² in a cramped appartment with shared bathrooms and kitchens. Absolute
shit. You could just make more appartments and be less evil.
I can't make more apartments, I don't have the money to build them or the political votes to fund them. If you do, go live your values. I'm trying to deal with the political realities, and 100sqft of optional free housing that does get built is better than the nothing that is currently being built.
We can do both, if your idea can get the funding. If it can't, all the more reason we need a compromise solution to help the people who are hurting right now.
You're real proud of your goal "let's meet the absolute bare minimum requirement for human habitability" aren't you
and its not even that. a bare minimum would mean you get a restroom (small shower + toilet + sink and mirror) and a small stove + fridge imo. soviet union built small things like that to solve immediate demand after ww2 where they had a ton of homeless people due to bombings.
You're real proud of...letting people be unhoused.
If you build something someone can live in, and let them decide whether or not they want to live in it optionally, the people who take advantage of it will be the ones who will be helped by it. I'm not saying anything other than that.
I'm not proud of letting people be unhoused at all. I'm a firm believer in and supporter of housing first models. There are empty full sized apartments and homes all over the world. Put people in them. It's literally that easy. There's no need to hand wring about anything else. There's no need to build insufficient temporary shelter. Put. People. In. Homes.
There are ~27 empty homes for every homeless person in America. We could end homelessness tomorrow without the need for nightmare "technically habitable" tiny homes.
That stay is highly misleading for this purpose because it doesn't mean 27 homes are empty that a person could move into. It includes vacation homes that are not habitable in the season they are not being used, and apartments that are empty in the one month between when someone moved out and someone else moves in. You couldn't actually house someone there. And a lot of second homes even if they are insulated and habitable year round are in the middle of nowhere.
But that said, I never said we couldn't do that too, if you can get the votes to pass your thing then sure let's do both.
There's a good faith discussion to be had on locations of empty homes and how the problem isn't supply but distribution, but it's clear that you aren't really interested in any of that because of how you ended the comment:
I mean, right before this you spent a paragraph calling vacation homes inhabitable, but sure whatever. And, the cherry on top:
It reveals so much about your thought process that your imagination ends at what policies can "get the votes." If you're justifying potential government activity within the bounds of what the current system allows to pass then anything beyond tax cuts for the rich and increased military spending is straight up off the table. You can smugly pretend that you're being reasonable and pragmatic but ultimately anything that changes the status quo will be violently opposed by people in power - so why not advocate for the most humane and society-improving solution?
Some vacation homes are not habitable year-round, I'm not like making that up. There are cabins on Minnesota lakes without insulation, you want to bus people from the streets of LA there and call it the cure for homelessness? It's so good that it is impossible that we could improve the idea by doing both and giving people more options?
My imagination doesn't end on what gets the votes, it's that there are people who need help right now, so I think we should work with the system we have now to do SOMETHING. It doesn't preclude still doing your thing when possible. Waiting for the revolution is the same as doing nothing to the people who need help right now. You can smugly pretend that anything less than your one idea is inhumane so we shouldn't do anything to help anyone, but why not advocate for any solution that can help people?
No I don't, and it's wild because I double checked what I wrote and I absolutely did not say that. If you really need it spelled out, the homeless people in LA would just be handed the keys for the empty houses and apartments inside of LA that outnumber them (and - gasp - some of those are even non-cabin vacation homes, trust me those actually exist).
This is really getting away from you. My "thing" or "one idea" (lol) is to actually end homelessness by giving homes to people that don't have them - it's actually a really simple idea that can be implemented immediately since we already have more than enough housing for everyone. I am not "pretending like anything less than that is inhumane," I'm directly saying that stacking people into the smallest possible living spaces is inhumane; I definitely wouldn't want to live in 100sqft with shared plumbing, and you wouldn't either.
You're all over this thread talking about "doing both", but no one's biting because your idea is bad - it's more complicated and expensive to build a bunch of pods or tents or tiny homes or whatever than it is to just hand the keys of already constructed empty places over to people who need shelter. And further, your idea does nothing to change the societal relationship towards housing, which means the conditions that create homelessness are reinforced - there's a reason why every city that deploys some unorthodox housing arrangement still fucking has homeless people!
Why not do both? Why not advocate for "any solution"? Why not "do SOMETHING"? Because a solution already exists that is easy, effective, and well within the existing powers and legal framework of the current state.
Absolutely do not do this. Makeshift "tiny houses" inside apartment buildings is a massive personal safety and fire hazard.
Is this what you want?
yeah lets not bring back victorian 5 families one hovel living conditions. Especially not during an active plague
They are a fire hazard if they are done in an unregulated fashion, we can build them to code and that would prevent people from doing it in secret and causing fire hazards.
This is like saying you can't have legal abortion because people will die of the complications from coat hangers. Actually, the legality is the thing that stops that.
Or just expropriate the empty houses that already exist and give them to the homeless.
There are literally houses already, that people built, with the construction of them has been paid many times over, and the people that built them are all probably dead already. Nobody else needs money from them, they exist, put the people inside them.
Or we could do both.
it's better (or warmer at least) than under a bridge but worse than anything anyone deserves. then of course once there's "sufficient" housing, vagrancy laws will be enforced much more strictly, forcing people into these tenements where they have no power and are under constant scrutiny (presumably like current low-income housing but more so), and then whoops, we just built more prisons.
like it should be emphasized that your idea is just an intensification of our current non-solution to homelessness, whereby companies are given government subsidies to meet the barest minimum standard of housing and then treat their tenants like shit under the guise of "public safety," and then anyone who can't even afford that is unpersoned into a cell maintained by the state directly.
"Whoops we built more prisons" except specifically the type of prisons with 2-3x the space that are entirely voluntary to enter and leave. The 'not being allowed to leave part is a big part of why people don't like being in prison.