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.
I can just see them “solving” the homeless problem by waiting until they fall asleep in the tiny home and then towing it away.
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.
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.