An abandoned office park in Sacramento will be the site of the first group of 1,200 tiny homes to be built in four cities to address California’s homelessness crisis, the governor’s office announced Wednesday after being criticized for the project experiencing multiple delays.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is under pressure to make good on his promise to show he’s tackling the issue. In March, the Democratic governor announced a plan to gift several California cities hundreds of tiny homes by the fall to create space to help clear homeless encampments that have sprung up across the state’s major cities. The $30 million project would create homes, some as small as 120 square feet (11 square meters), that can be assembled in 90 minutes and cost a fraction of what it takes to build permanent housing.
More than 171,000 homeless people live in California, making up about 30% of the nation’s homeless population. The state has spent roughly $30 billion in the last few years to help them, with mixed results.
Why tiny homes and not high density housing?
Seems pointlessly inefficient.
The tiny homes can be put up and taken down quicker from the sounds of the article. Takes the better part of a year to build an apartment building, they can put each of these up in 90 minutes supposedly. Does make me worried for structural integrity but it’s not like California gets severe weather so should be fine.
Modern Hoovervilles. There is nothing new under the sun, etc. etc. But yes, this is the point, scale up housing quick, get homeless people housed now and try and get them stabilized and back into society.
Yea the hope is providing them any stability will help them back on their feet and on the path to living independently again
I don’t think it was an engineering consideration, I suspect it was the only thing they could get past the NIMBYs
Maybe easier to rent for pest control? That would be my most practical guess. Also subject to different building codes normally and faster to build than high rise apts.
Plus modularity. If something goes wrong in an apartment building, the units tend to have a shared fate. With tiny houses, if something goes wrong, replace the tiny house and it’s unlikely other units are affected collaterally.
I would say mobility is the main positive. We have endless parking lots everywhere, so these can be moved as needed for different populations. That and NIMBYS complaining.
Mobility can be useful, but once it’s up, the odds of needing to move it are generally going to be low. But it definitely can help a lot in certain circumstances.
I can just see them “solving” the homeless problem by waiting until they fall asleep in the tiny home and then towing it away.
High density housing specifically dedicated to housing homeless people also seems like a really bad idea.
We have many, many decades of experience of segregating socially disadvantaged people into high density “projects,” and it never led to any desirable results.
Much better to set aside a certain quota of new high density housing for socially disadvantaged people, one apartment at a time, and give people the opportunity to integrate with a community without the stigma of giving them an address in the undesirable stigmatized “projects.”
$30,000,000 / 1,200 homes = $25,000 per home.
That seems cheap, and tiny homes will probably still have the density to support mass transit.
I don’t have a horse in this race except to imagine being in the situation myself, but why should only people with lots of money be allowed to own their own walls and small piece of land?
Tiny homes = concentration camp
Versus them being homeless and sleeping in broken down RVs, cars, or tents? Ideally this is a stabilization step so people can move up and out.
aka decentralized camps.
Just don’t allow fences around the things.
Please, I’m begging you: just fix the damn zoning already!
(That goes for California and everywhere else in North America.)
in tons of instances theres simply lacking the infrastructure like electricity water and sewer and traffic etc to handle such densities in a reasonable timeframe, nor the labor or materials or finances to bring them up. i’d love to see a long term plan along with a short term stopgap like this.
It’s called “impact fees.” The developers pay for the infrastructure costs to support the development.
They make too much money from zoning.
I don’t think it’s that; development with dense zoning can be just as profitable, if not more so.
If anything, the corrupt business interests behind this would’ve been mostly General Motors and Standard Oil back in the day. Nowadays, I think it’s genuinely sustained mostly by good ol’ fashioned grassroots racism, classism, and NIMBYism.
Depends on who wants what land or who owns what land. If you think local politicians aren’t up the asses of your local elite, I’d say you’re being way too kind.
Perhaps I misled by using the word “grassroots.” The local elite are the NIMBYs. Their selfish interests as homeowners collectively greatly outweigh the business interests of the tiny minority of them who are property developers.
In other words, consider the archetypal mansion neighborhood way too close to the city center (for example: Tuxedo Park in Atlanta), whose single-family, large lot zoning physically displaces tens of thousands of people who could have been living there if development were allowed to meet demand. Even if the filthy-rich developers living there wanted to buy out their neighbors and profit fabulously from meeting that demand – and they don’t, because they themselves live there – they can’t because their neighbors are doctors and lawyers and CEOs and celebrities who are just as rich and powerful as they are and would never stand for it.
That’s fair. I’m in a small/mid sized city that’s still expanding into the neighboring towns so the impact is really bad at times.
How exactly does this work? Not trolling I’ve just never heard this particular accusation before
It depends on each region but in the case of Cali prop 13 (someone correct me) keeps a certain type of zoning locked in preventing new developments. It’s awful.
I thought tiny homes were a good idea until I lived in a couple of them.
This is a CA project that is wasting money when they could better control rent and ditch air bnb (or make them bend and go back to the niche market).
This is a stupid idea for a lot of reasons but the most prevalent is that nobody upkeeps their homes properly, do you think they’ll upkeep these?
The housing crisis is more in depth than “we just need housing” its a systemic problem that keeps getting sidelined.
Young people STILL can’t afford homes. WHY?
This isn’t to stabilize things. This is just more bullshit directed by assholes with ZERO IDEAS who are also DEAF.
I thought tiny homes were a good idea until I lived in a couple of them.
It seems that “tiny home” has a fluid definition. I’ve seen it used for 120 sq ft homes all the way up to just under 1000 sq ft. The latter measure of just under 650 to 1000 sq ft is close to the size of the hundreds of thousands of starter homes that returning soldiers from WWII that represented the largest boom in private home ownership in US history:
When developers are usually only building giant single family home outside of the reach of those new to home ownership, the return to these smaller starter homes sounds like a really REALLY good idea! Prior to this there has been almost no homes for sale for someone that is otherwise happy in the space of a one or two bedroom apartment. It meant essentially renting forever in many places in the USA.
There’s a development of tiny homes going up in San Antonio TX that I’ve been watching that looks really promising.
350-650 sq ft with starting prices at $140k. That’s affordable for many people that have been priced out of those WWII age homes of similar sizes that are going for $250k-$400k today.
As you’ve actually lived in a tiny home, I’m interested in your opinion about how these won’t work. How big was your tiny home? What makes it unworkable?
Any time I see pictures of narrow SFHs placed so close to each other I have to ask, why they fuck can’t we just build row homes in this country? They save energy, space, and create much more living area in the same lot size. Properly designed row homes don’t even have issues with noise because they’re built with firewalls that are basically the same as outdoor walls between the homes.
I think for the same reason that people usually prefer single family homes (aka "detached) to shared wall condos. Very little of what you neighbor does will affect you in a single family home. Shared walls means neighbors household neglect (like a roof) can make you have problems. A neighbor that does nothing to keep their home pest free means you’re sharing walls (and roaches/mice) with your neighbor and very little you can do about the underlying problem.
Separated walls means your neighbor’s problems don’t become your problems.
Tiny homes are just a shitty bandaid to keep the current garbage flowing. Tax speculators and grow the middle class and people won’t need tiny homes.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — An abandoned office park in Sacramento will be the site of the first group of 1,200 tiny homes to be built in four cities to address California’s homelessness crisis, the governor’s office announced Wednesday after being criticized for the project experiencing multiple delays.
But seven months after the announcement, those homes haven’t been built, and the state has yet to award any contracts for builders, the Sacramento Bee reported.
Newsom’s administration said the state is “moving with unprecedented rate” on the project and will finalize the contracts this month, with plans to break ground at the Sacramento location before the end of the year.
Officials also pointed to a new law signed by Newsom in July to streamline construction of tiny homes.
“When it comes to projects like this, it’s just not overnight,” Hafsa Kaka, a senior advisor to Newsom, said at a news conference Wednesday.
San Jose this month has secured a 7.2-acre lot owned by the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority for its 200 homes.
The original article contains 448 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
