Are there better, more efficient ways to accomplish this? Yes. Am I glad they at least did something though? Also yes.
Americans will build literal shoeboxes instead of 1 apartment building
When dealing with homeless and mentally ill this setup of isolation from other units is better. Dealing with unsanitary living, smells, fires, sounds, are all are easier to mitigate in this setup. Also America is not hurting for wide open spaces to build this type of thing.
Nor is Canada, where this is.
You might be interested in the story of Tengelo Park.
Harris Rosen went from a childhood in a rough New York City neighborhood to becoming a millionaire whose company owns seven hotels in Orlando, but his self-made success is not his proudest achievement.
Twenty years ago, the Orlando, Fla. neighborhood of Tangelo Park was a crime-infested place where people were afraid to walk down the street. The graduation rate at the local high school was 25 percent. Having amassed a fortune from his success in the hotel business, Rosen decided Tangelo Park needed some hospitality of its own.
“Hospitality really is appreciating a fellow human being,” Rosen told Gabe Gutierrez in a segment that aired on TODAY Wednesday. “I came to the realization that I really had to now say, ‘Thank you.’’’
Rosen, 73, began his philanthropic efforts by paying for day care for parents in Tangelo Park, a community of about 3,000 people. When those children reached high school, he created a scholarship program in which he offered to pay free tuition to Florida state colleges for any students in the neighborhood.
In the two decades since starting the programs, Rosen has donated nearly $10 million, and the results have been remarkable. The high school graduation rate is now nearly 100 percent, and some property values have quadrupled. The crime rate has been cut in half, according to a study by the University of Central Florida.
"We've given them hope,’’ Rosen said. “We've given these kids hope, and given the families hope. And hope is an amazing thing."
10M over 20 years to help a community of 3000 or $166 per person per year. USA is planning to increase the military budget by 150B this year or over $400 per US citIzen...
Yeah I was shocked by the math on that one too. It is ridiculously cheap to lower crime and poverty, while increasing graduation rates and college enrollment. It's almost like keeping people poor and stupid and criminal is intentional.
You're saying that as if investment into military was unnecessary these days
It is if you don't use it when you're part of a contract that got broken from another Partie of the contract.
Alternatively you could eliminate oil company tax breaks and direct subsidies and that alone would fund it.
Who would have thought that the way to reduce crime was to reduce people's need to commit crimes by giving them homes and a future.
Bruce Wayne but sane
is it just me or anyone else thinking that row houses would have been way more efficent than these? giving everyone living there more than 1 room
Depends. Given this happened in North America there might very well be existing production lines for these tiny houses, and construction laws are also way simpler to fulfill with those basically anywhere (e.g. in Germany you'd just have had to make the whole place a camping site). They all look pretty standardized, including those solar panels.
Although I'd agree that a properly build big building would probably last longer. Not too sure about that though, I'm just happy to hear there are still people with money actually taking care of those who're at rock bottom.
I think this is the correct answer, outside of large cities it is not legal to build apartments or row houses in many places in the States. It would probably be significantly easier to skirt the zoning laws to buy a plot of land and put 100 tiny houses on it, than to attempt to get some sort exception granted to the zoning in order to build an apartment or row house.
They are also a lot more expensive. The most expensive with these houses he built is probably the ground, but he might've gotten it for free from the town.
Might be, but those look cute as well to be honest.
So this guy shouldn't be news, this should be the standard, it's scary that the one good guy with enough money to do something like this is the exception and not the norm.
We all evolved to live in tribes; we have to work together as people.
That's why we elected people to help the community with our collected funds. To help govern the distribution of the community effort. Well, that was the idea.
The problem is that we allow individuals to amass so much wealth, it inevitably leads to the rest of us being at their mercy like that. If we're lucky, they'll be sorta benevolent, like this person. Would be much easier if we took out the randomness and just had the funds to do necessary stuff like this collectively.
Yo
Idea
What if ALL the houses we build are for reducing homelessness?
At least think about it
Just want to remind everyone that we don’t have a housing shortage, we have a cost of living crisis. Everyone deserves a place to live and we have plenty. The will is the only thing. Fight YIMBY traitors. We can do it!
"YIMBY traitor" -- isn't that just a NIMBY?
Two things can be wrong. We can (and should) dispose of landlords and build more housing.
Not sure what you're talking about, but here in the UK we need over 4m houses to be built to house the current population. That's quite a lot for a country of 68m.
Millionaire? Nice. Billionaires should follow suit, but 1000x
(With ~800 billionaires in the US, that's 79,200,000 homes)
That's my takeaway. The positive effect of the charity of this mere millionaire really does a great job showing just how fucking evil billionaires are. So much potential for positive change in the world siphoned into yachts and propaganda
Except it would be unethical for a billionaire to throw that much power around. They should relinquish the value back to the communities from where they took it.
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 country~~ in the United States.
Edit: millionaire in OP is from Canada
There's a lot of negativity from armchair experts in this thread but this seems like a genuine case of somebody putting a lot of thought and a lot of effort into actually helping the homeless. It's not just dropping a bunch of tiny houses and saying "job done".
It's deadass exhausting seeing people whinge whenever anything that improves the world happens. Always enough time for criticism, never enough to do something anywhere near as positive IRL.
It's hard not to be jaded. I bounce between both sides constantly.
Either way, this guy did an incredible thing.
This is my most common fantasy if I somehow came into a billion dollars.
It's a fantasy, but I would create an apartment complex with mixed 1 2 and 3 bedrooms and set the rent below market value and then find a lawyer to draw up a legal document to turn it into a co-op so that after enough people moved in I could turn control over to them.
If I were a multibillionaire I would do this again and again until non market housing was normal In my city, and anyone wanting to build housing has to compete with a bunch of non market housing.
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
Fight against homelessness shall not be charity driven.
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