I assume a group within the city unilaterally decided to confiscate and destroy the tiny houses. They seem to think that if you make being homeless more uncomfortable, then the homeless people will just eventually give up "slacking" and go and get a job and rent an apartment.
When the people who raze homeless camp sites or "tent cities" do it, they usually say that for their safety and public health reasons, they have to destroy everything.
With that usual behavior, I wouldn't be surprised if a random employee saw the sheds with the solar panels and said "It'll be a shame to let that go to waste" and took them off before the sheds were supposed to be destroyed.
I hope the guy running this project finds a good place to keep the tiny houses in the future. I'm disappointed in LA for passing the laws to try to prevent homeless people from having semi-permanent structures rather than tents.
What I don't understand is how it's legal to park a trailer on a street, but not a shed on a trailer frame.
"Group", nothing. That's SOP for cities. And they don't care about anyone getting a job, they just want homeless people to disappear, whether that's to leave, to be less visible, or to die.
We don't just let people put up houses on random pieces of land they don't own and live there.
I don't see anything remotely surprising or controversial about the basic concept, though clearly it seems more productive to channel the energy of this project into something workable rather than dismantle it.
>We don't just let people put up houses on random pieces of land they don't own and live there.
The current lack of any serious action or even any real interest in solving the now generation old homeless problem makes shanty towns eventually inevitable. I know it will be embarrassing to have them scattered outside the richest cities in the country but for some unfathomable reason that is the economic path we chose.
I suggest Mt San Bruno will make a fine favela for what is already the world's richest 3rd world city in all but name.
The city shouldn't do things that the people who live in it disprove of. If you can find me a majority of local people who agree with this then I'll buy this answer. This is a bit different then most other situations though. This is genuinely effective activism that will improve the quality of some people's lives. I don't see what's wrong with this especially if no one is harmed and no one's private property rights have been encroched. From what I understand this was done on public property that was "unattended" until the law was changed to exclude this practice.
From this statement:
Since the city changed its [unattended property] ordinance, barring me from putting them on public land, I can only go with private land
I also see no valid reason to allow the government to damage property that is confiscated without paying them back. That's insane in it's own right.
The city treated them as abandoned personal property (as opposed to abandoned real property), probably because they could move it.
The people behind these homes then made it politically costly for the city to keep doing it, so they returned it.
I suspect they could sue the city for the solar kits and win, but then you are tying up more resources that could be used to help people.
That said, I'm skeptical on how this will work, in large part because of the heat here - LA saw over 100F today. These could get as hot as a parked car and cook the occupants. (Hoping I'm wrong, but friends "tough shed" sure got scorching in SFV.)
My guess is it is due to permitting. Is most of California, you can put up a building smaller than 150 SF without permits assuming no plumbing or electrical.
My guess is that they were trying to find something illegal in the solar electronics, i.e. Something not up to building code. If the house is that simple, that's the place to look.
Either they found something and removed them or they didn't and were too lazy to put them back. I guess since they removed all 3 instead of just 1 of 3, you charitably interpret it as the former.
This is epically awesome. Enough solar to charge a cell phone and provide some light at night, a door you can lock to prevent being hassled, a composting toilet to keep the area clean and a place to sleep. I can totally see this working for a lot of people.
As always, the problem is getting permission to build on that land, then permission to build a tiny house, and finally permission to live there.
I don't know about Santa Clara county, but in most places you can't build without a Building Permit, and you can't live there without a Certificate of Occupancy.
So the main problem is not building a cheap house, it is getting land to live on. In this context the tiny house movement solves nothing.
I love the idea of Tiny Houses, but to me they are tackling the wrong problem. And I worry about people who build a tiny house in good faith, then find they can't legally live in it.
There is also the problem that - even when you give the homeless a home - they will not always take good care of it
Take for example the bulgarian attempts to give houses to their homeless ethnic groups. Search for the documentary "hotel paradise bulgaria" on youtube or other video sites.
I know nothing about "Hotel Paradise" other than the movie still showing a highrise apartment building in squalid condition. But I do know that the American experience says such things are not as simple as saying "give the homeless a home - they will not always take good care of it". The usual example is Chicago's Cabrini–Green. http://whitecenternow.com/2008/11/28/greenbridge-the-failure... gives a summary of one description of the failure. I'll pull out two quotes:
> "Sprawling high-rise projects housing exclusively poor families with many children amounted to a tragic, terrible mistake."
> "... it was one thing to build apartment towers for the upper-middle-class, as Mies did, and quite another to adopt them as solutions for housing the poor. The well-off have doormen, janitors, repairmen, and baby-sitters; the poor have none of these things. Without restricted access, the lobbies and corridors were vandalized; without proper maintenance, elevators broke down, staircases became garbage dumps, roofs leaked, and broken windows remained unreplaced; without baby-sitters, single mothers were stranded in their apartments, and children roamed unsupervised sixteen floors below."
> The rapid decline of industry and general flight from the city – Chicago lost a million residents between 1970 and 1990 – led to widespread abandonment throughout the city, but particularly in its poorer quarters. The blocks immediately surrounding housing projects like Cabrini-Green went vacant as residents and businesses left. City government, reacting to political and fiscal pressures, cut services to many housing projects. Train stations serving projects were shuttered, police patrols ceased, and schools were written off. The CHA effectively stopped maintaining units: lawns were paved to reduce maintenance costs, light bulbs blinked off, vacant units were left unlocked, water and fire damage went unrepaired. Deferred maintenance rendered thousands of units uninhabitable. The result was a near total isolation of the housing projects from the life of the city. The lawlessness of the projects in many ways was a logical outcome of their isolation from legal forms of social organization.
The type of housing and the large social situation therefore also play a role, making it hard to single out the residents as the primary reason for a housing failure.
The tiny homes project is a different organizational scheme than a highrise.
Also, is it really fair to say that gypsies are homeless? As a nomadic/itinerant culture, I thought the gypsies placed little value in a fixed place to live. We don't tend to call full-time RV'ers, or global/digital nomads homeless, even though they have no fixed residence. While the people we're talking about in L.A. want a fixed place to call home.
This is key. I've been researching solutions to homelessness and part of that has involved looking at attempted solutions. In the 60's and 70's the idea that you could just "build them homes and that would fix it" failed pretty miserably for all of the reasons you describe and more, which was that "home" was only one part of the problem.
One of the things my research has turned up is that you have to build a community rather than simply shelter. The keys being governance and an economy. As there are a number of goods and services these communities need, I am looking at how a project could empower residents of the community to provide those goods and services. As examples, providing basic groceries or child care in a way that it can be both staffed locally and delivered locally. Also the local delivery of mental health, general health, and addiction management services.
Basic shelter though is key and it has to be low enough cost/maintenance that you manage it through the inevitable destructive people. The tiny houses in the article had the simplicity that you could pull out a damaged unit, salvage what you could from it (solar panels for example) and then replace it with a new unit relatively cost effectively. Not so with a multi-story apartment building.
Who fixes them when things break. Who organises plumbers, electricians and pays for them?
What happens when someone leaves or falls off the wagon.
Can you be sued if a lock breaks and someone is hurt.
You risk creating a slum if they are all together, which will not be liked by NIMBY. Spread them out it's hard to manage and is there spare public land spread out?
Who keeps the water supply up and empties the toilets.
Great idea, but it's not that simple, I do hope it continues and it kinks can be worked out.
Giant apartment complex for the poor also is an excellent idea. Easy to manage. Facilities to help them all in the one place. Cookie cutter fixes for plumbing and electricity keep cost down. Schools near by designed to help them.......
true, but integration is hard, very hard. in fact, most of the time it's a failed cause, visible all over the europe, france being one of the worse cases
Item on the left is old growth, and is a century or more old.
New growth is 'cheaper' but quality has gone way down.
You also want to avoid buying any wood that could have come from South of the Equator, it'd be like handling conflict diamonds.
Happily since a Tiny House requires 5x-10x less material than the average house, you get to pick and choose and the premiums are manageable.
Another challenge is that many useful things in a house off-gas dangerous chemicals like formaldehyde. Woods natural and artificial, insulation, paints, plastics, chaulk, they all give off gas for years. It is widely acknowledged in the building industry that this is so, builders do warn their clients of this, but home buyers optimize for sq ft (making the use of superior materials much less likely) + time to move in. Now that regular houses are using passive house principals for air tightness this is going to be a big problem for health.
Because a Tiny House is small, this is an even bigger problem. So you need to do your research on VOCs with respect to woods like MDF, insulation foam or chaulking. If you ventilate correctly or have a HRV and you wait for a month of venting before moving in, that would be an intelligent thing to do. Chances are that you'll live longer by at least a month!
I am trying something very unusual with respect to the roof that no Tiny Houser has done before, which is to use a metal mansard roof.
They look elegant in metal if done correctly. My TH is following a Georgian design so it suits the time period. Also mansards were invented to avoid taxes so it is also about heritage and continuing tradition. Gambrel would also work since I'm going > 10ft wide, that is plan B.
Am having difficulty finding good information on this subject but at least I have the Prince of Wales as my spirit animal:
"You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe," Charles told the Corporation of London Planning and Communication Committee's annual dinner at Mansion House. "When it knocked down our buildings, it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble."
This is the basic problem with being reactionary, everybody cool is totally dead and then the living are like 'why don't you build a flat roof brah, everybody's doing it'.
Do you mean modular Tiny Houses where two or more Tiny Houses are attached together?
Not yet, but I have been intrigued by the thought lately. That is because it may very well be cheaper to acquire two trailers instead of one long trailer, which would mean less of a weight restriction and much easier Tiny House moving management.
I think you could have a clever design where you used vaccum insulated panels and some kind of seal at an intersection, I'm certain this has been solved by engineers before. We have to remember NASA was building Tiny Houses in orbit long before this became a terrestrial trend. I'm already using a material invented by them called aerogel (thin strips!) to thermally isolate the studs to prevent thermal bridging, it'll cost me just 1300 to raise the R (insulation) value by a min of 10% - 20%.
So this is a major bottleneck for Tiny Housers. It is easier in the countryside than in the cities. Understand that this is a quasi-legal kind of project. The local government usually does not care but they are obligated to act if somebody complains about your Tiny House.
This means if somebody says scram, you got to move.
So you need your Tiny House to look nice because it is not just decor, presentability matters a lot practically. Some places in the USA are making Tiny Houses legal but it is early stages yet. If you need to move around frequently (more than twice per year) then you shouldn't build too big (> 30 ft length).
I intend to buy land in the countryside. On it I shall prepare a concrete pad, use 4 to 6 jack screws to hold up the trailer bed (which is also on blocks) and then use 15 - 20 scissor jacks to stabilize so it is rock solid. Then I shall skirt the bottom gap with stone such that it appears not to be on a trailer at all. Here is an example of that practice:
Some rent land in the countryside. This is usually cheap, not more than few hundred bucks a year.
In the cities some stay on 'friendly lots'.
It is probably better to talk to Tiny Housers in your specific region or city, because the regulations and circumstances are all in flux, so local knowledge is key.
> how much does it cost approximately.
This is very variable.
You can build a respectable basic Tiny House for 5k. This will probably be around 15 ft in length. People choose smaller trailers if they move often. The lower the price, the higher the risk any 'short-cuts' you take turn into 'long-cuts'.
Then you have high end Tiny Houses that cost 50-70k. This is what I'm doing, my project is probably one of the most complex because this is not intended to be a temporary shelter and it has features you'd have to be a millionaire to afford in a average sized dwelling e.g. superinsulation, exotic roofing.
Utility bills in a Tiny House tend to be $10-$50 per month if you're connected to utilities.
If you are cash poor you can investigate the option of buying second hand materials and tools. You can basically build a Tiny House for $0.00 if you really needed to, but there is a catch. It will cost you time and effort to curate the correct supplies. Still, for some people this is the right option to get decent affordable housing. I advise you not to buy used framing materials such as studs, sheathing or strapping.
If you are time poor, then pay an expert to build it custom made to your needs. This will roughly double the price of the Tiny House. Good labour costs real money.
If you are a middle of the road situation I suggest you check out Dan Louche's Tiny Houses, he is a computer programmer who does really well crafted builds.
You can see these tiny houses in SOMA in SF, too - on division st or 7th st. I've seen them replace tents and I admire whoever is providing them / helping the homeless put these together.
I know a social worker that worked with the homeless. She told me that many have just given up. No matter how hard you try they will not change their ways. And they rather be on the street than be bunched up in places where they get a bed to sleep. These places have too many rules and they are dangerous places.
Given that our current fixes are not working. Building a home for them is a great way to go. But putting the homes randomly through the city is a problem. They should be built in a complex like system. Where people can have their own space and be close to services they might need and hopefully get rehabilitated.
This is the place where innovation needs to be applied. We don't need another chat app or Facebook. There is no app for this. No matter how you look at it it's a hard problem to fix but it would be nice to put a dent on it.
Here's a place to start, how do we make it easier to build new affordable/tiny homes in large cities like LA and San Fran.? For that matter just getting the permits. Adding supply would bring down prices and help with the problem.
If this is targeting homeless, would it not be cheaper to start building them a little outside LA and San Francisco where the land is much cheaper and the permitting is looser?
In Aus we have a few shelter programs including Backpack Beds and Sleep Bus, but these Tiny Houses are next level. A lot to consider with ownership, registration, land, environment, permits, safety, insurance etc. Maybe between the government, charities and good samaritans, perhaps efforts combined could be better geared towards larger and more sustainable community housing projects. A good story though and hopefully the kind hearts and generous spirits continue.
> Since when has creating slums become a thing to laud? How does it get covered in such shining terms?
42 dispersed shelters constitute as slum now? Ok, I'll bite. It becomes a thing to laud when it's an improvement to the current status. Being sheltered in a slum is better than not being sheltered at all. Unless you believe homeless people shouldn't be seen or accommodated.
Temporary emergency accommodation and mobile shower buses are helpful, but as often gets repeated, "homelessness is more than houselessness" - for the longer term homeless population, there's often deep drug, alcohol and mental health issues acting as barriers against re-integration into society.
50 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 60.7 ms ] threadhttp://www.tinyhousedesign.com/a-real-bike-trailer-house/
You can make one for about 200 bucks or less.
Thanks :)
This makes no sense to me.
When the people who raze homeless camp sites or "tent cities" do it, they usually say that for their safety and public health reasons, they have to destroy everything.
With that usual behavior, I wouldn't be surprised if a random employee saw the sheds with the solar panels and said "It'll be a shame to let that go to waste" and took them off before the sheds were supposed to be destroyed.
I hope the guy running this project finds a good place to keep the tiny houses in the future. I'm disappointed in LA for passing the laws to try to prevent homeless people from having semi-permanent structures rather than tents.
What I don't understand is how it's legal to park a trailer on a street, but not a shed on a trailer frame.
I don't see anything remotely surprising or controversial about the basic concept, though clearly it seems more productive to channel the energy of this project into something workable rather than dismantle it.
The current lack of any serious action or even any real interest in solving the now generation old homeless problem makes shanty towns eventually inevitable. I know it will be embarrassing to have them scattered outside the richest cities in the country but for some unfathomable reason that is the economic path we chose.
I suggest Mt San Bruno will make a fine favela for what is already the world's richest 3rd world city in all but name.
From this statement:
I also see no valid reason to allow the government to damage property that is confiscated without paying them back. That's insane in it's own right.The article implies you could? Some sort of loophole they had to close down?
The people behind these homes then made it politically costly for the city to keep doing it, so they returned it.
I suspect they could sue the city for the solar kits and win, but then you are tying up more resources that could be used to help people.
That said, I'm skeptical on how this will work, in large part because of the heat here - LA saw over 100F today. These could get as hot as a parked car and cook the occupants. (Hoping I'm wrong, but friends "tough shed" sure got scorching in SFV.)
Either they found something and removed them or they didn't and were too lazy to put them back. I guess since they removed all 3 instead of just 1 of 3, you charitably interpret it as the former.
I am surprised this isn't more common. There is a lot of unincorporated land in Santa Clara county (https://www.sccgov.org/sites/sccphd/en-us/Partners/Data/Page...) that might support this sort of housing.
As always, the problem is getting permission to build on that land, then permission to build a tiny house, and finally permission to live there.
I don't know about Santa Clara county, but in most places you can't build without a Building Permit, and you can't live there without a Certificate of Occupancy.
So the main problem is not building a cheap house, it is getting land to live on. In this context the tiny house movement solves nothing.
I love the idea of Tiny Houses, but to me they are tackling the wrong problem. And I worry about people who build a tiny house in good faith, then find they can't legally live in it.
Take for example the bulgarian attempts to give houses to their homeless ethnic groups. Search for the documentary "hotel paradise bulgaria" on youtube or other video sites.
https://vimeo.com/13906172
It is remarkable how hard it is to provide something as basic as shelter.
> "Sprawling high-rise projects housing exclusively poor families with many children amounted to a tragic, terrible mistake."
> "... it was one thing to build apartment towers for the upper-middle-class, as Mies did, and quite another to adopt them as solutions for housing the poor. The well-off have doormen, janitors, repairmen, and baby-sitters; the poor have none of these things. Without restricted access, the lobbies and corridors were vandalized; without proper maintenance, elevators broke down, staircases became garbage dumps, roofs leaked, and broken windows remained unreplaced; without baby-sitters, single mothers were stranded in their apartments, and children roamed unsupervised sixteen floors below."
Now quoting from https://westnorth.com/2003/01/02/short-history-of-cabrini-gr...
> The rapid decline of industry and general flight from the city – Chicago lost a million residents between 1970 and 1990 – led to widespread abandonment throughout the city, but particularly in its poorer quarters. The blocks immediately surrounding housing projects like Cabrini-Green went vacant as residents and businesses left. City government, reacting to political and fiscal pressures, cut services to many housing projects. Train stations serving projects were shuttered, police patrols ceased, and schools were written off. The CHA effectively stopped maintaining units: lawns were paved to reduce maintenance costs, light bulbs blinked off, vacant units were left unlocked, water and fire damage went unrepaired. Deferred maintenance rendered thousands of units uninhabitable. The result was a near total isolation of the housing projects from the life of the city. The lawlessness of the projects in many ways was a logical outcome of their isolation from legal forms of social organization.
The type of housing and the large social situation therefore also play a role, making it hard to single out the residents as the primary reason for a housing failure.
The tiny homes project is a different organizational scheme than a highrise.
Also, is it really fair to say that gypsies are homeless? As a nomadic/itinerant culture, I thought the gypsies placed little value in a fixed place to live. We don't tend to call full-time RV'ers, or global/digital nomads homeless, even though they have no fixed residence. While the people we're talking about in L.A. want a fixed place to call home.
One of the things my research has turned up is that you have to build a community rather than simply shelter. The keys being governance and an economy. As there are a number of goods and services these communities need, I am looking at how a project could empower residents of the community to provide those goods and services. As examples, providing basic groceries or child care in a way that it can be both staffed locally and delivered locally. Also the local delivery of mental health, general health, and addiction management services.
Basic shelter though is key and it has to be low enough cost/maintenance that you manage it through the inevitable destructive people. The tiny houses in the article had the simplicity that you could pull out a damaged unit, salvage what you could from it (solar panels for example) and then replace it with a new unit relatively cost effectively. Not so with a multi-story apartment building.
I think it's not that simple.
Who fixes them when things break. Who organises plumbers, electricians and pays for them?
What happens when someone leaves or falls off the wagon.
Can you be sued if a lock breaks and someone is hurt.
You risk creating a slum if they are all together, which will not be liked by NIMBY. Spread them out it's hard to manage and is there spare public land spread out?
Who keeps the water supply up and empties the toilets.
Great idea, but it's not that simple, I do hope it continues and it kinks can be worked out.
Giant apartment complex for the poor also is an excellent idea. Easy to manage. Facilities to help them all in the one place. Cookie cutter fixes for plumbing and electricity keep cost down. Schools near by designed to help them.......
In America they're known as projects and in France banlieus. And they don't really solve any problems.
Building a society that values integrating folks of all backgrounds (and practices it) would fix the root or the problem.
http://www.seattleschild.com/Sawhorse-Revolution-teaches-Sea...
Take a look.
http://thecraftsmanblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/old-g...
Item on the left is old growth, and is a century or more old.
New growth is 'cheaper' but quality has gone way down.
You also want to avoid buying any wood that could have come from South of the Equator, it'd be like handling conflict diamonds.
Happily since a Tiny House requires 5x-10x less material than the average house, you get to pick and choose and the premiums are manageable.
Another challenge is that many useful things in a house off-gas dangerous chemicals like formaldehyde. Woods natural and artificial, insulation, paints, plastics, chaulk, they all give off gas for years. It is widely acknowledged in the building industry that this is so, builders do warn their clients of this, but home buyers optimize for sq ft (making the use of superior materials much less likely) + time to move in. Now that regular houses are using passive house principals for air tightness this is going to be a big problem for health.
Because a Tiny House is small, this is an even bigger problem. So you need to do your research on VOCs with respect to woods like MDF, insulation foam or chaulking. If you ventilate correctly or have a HRV and you wait for a month of venting before moving in, that would be an intelligent thing to do. Chances are that you'll live longer by at least a month!
I am trying something very unusual with respect to the roof that no Tiny Houser has done before, which is to use a metal mansard roof.
They look elegant in metal if done correctly. My TH is following a Georgian design so it suits the time period. Also mansards were invented to avoid taxes so it is also about heritage and continuing tradition. Gambrel would also work since I'm going > 10ft wide, that is plan B.
Am having difficulty finding good information on this subject but at least I have the Prince of Wales as my spirit animal:
"You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe," Charles told the Corporation of London Planning and Communication Committee's annual dinner at Mansion House. "When it knocked down our buildings, it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble."
This is the basic problem with being reactionary, everybody cool is totally dead and then the living are like 'why don't you build a flat roof brah, everybody's doing it'.
Never!
Not yet, but I have been intrigued by the thought lately. That is because it may very well be cheaper to acquire two trailers instead of one long trailer, which would mean less of a weight restriction and much easier Tiny House moving management.
I think you could have a clever design where you used vaccum insulated panels and some kind of seal at an intersection, I'm certain this has been solved by engineers before. We have to remember NASA was building Tiny Houses in orbit long before this became a terrestrial trend. I'm already using a material invented by them called aerogel (thin strips!) to thermally isolate the studs to prevent thermal bridging, it'll cost me just 1300 to raise the R (insulation) value by a min of 10% - 20%.
So this is a major bottleneck for Tiny Housers. It is easier in the countryside than in the cities. Understand that this is a quasi-legal kind of project. The local government usually does not care but they are obligated to act if somebody complains about your Tiny House.
This means if somebody says scram, you got to move.
So you need your Tiny House to look nice because it is not just decor, presentability matters a lot practically. Some places in the USA are making Tiny Houses legal but it is early stages yet. If you need to move around frequently (more than twice per year) then you shouldn't build too big (> 30 ft length).
I intend to buy land in the countryside. On it I shall prepare a concrete pad, use 4 to 6 jack screws to hold up the trailer bed (which is also on blocks) and then use 15 - 20 scissor jacks to stabilize so it is rock solid. Then I shall skirt the bottom gap with stone such that it appears not to be on a trailer at all. Here is an example of that practice:
https://i.reddituploads.com/303b76eaa06e495f8381f2bca3cf48f2...
https://i.reddituploads.com/ff4dee466ad34517bf0c1149ac3ba934...
Other people choose the following options.
Some rent land in the countryside. This is usually cheap, not more than few hundred bucks a year.
In the cities some stay on 'friendly lots'.
It is probably better to talk to Tiny Housers in your specific region or city, because the regulations and circumstances are all in flux, so local knowledge is key.
> how much does it cost approximately.
This is very variable.
You can build a respectable basic Tiny House for 5k. This will probably be around 15 ft in length. People choose smaller trailers if they move often. The lower the price, the higher the risk any 'short-cuts' you take turn into 'long-cuts'.
Then you have high end Tiny Houses that cost 50-70k. This is what I'm doing, my project is probably one of the most complex because this is not intended to be a temporary shelter and it has features you'd have to be a millionaire to afford in a average sized dwelling e.g. superinsulation, exotic roofing.
Utility bills in a Tiny House tend to be $10-$50 per month if you're connected to utilities.
If you are cash poor you can investigate the option of buying second hand materials and tools. You can basically build a Tiny House for $0.00 if you really needed to, but there is a catch. It will cost you time and effort to curate the correct supplies. Still, for some people this is the right option to get decent affordable housing. I advise you not to buy used framing materials such as studs, sheathing or strapping.
If you are time poor, then pay an expert to build it custom made to your needs. This will roughly double the price of the Tiny House. Good labour costs real money.
If you are a middle of the road situation I suggest you check out Dan Louche's Tiny Houses, he is a computer programmer who does really well crafted builds.
https://www.tinyhomebuilders.com/tiny-houses/tiny-living
If you can't afford his prices, build his design yourself, you can do it for about 16k-20k.
Given that our current fixes are not working. Building a home for them is a great way to go. But putting the homes randomly through the city is a problem. They should be built in a complex like system. Where people can have their own space and be close to services they might need and hopefully get rehabilitated.
This is the place where innovation needs to be applied. We don't need another chat app or Facebook. There is no app for this. No matter how you look at it it's a hard problem to fix but it would be nice to put a dent on it.
Here's a place to start, how do we make it easier to build new affordable/tiny homes in large cities like LA and San Fran.? For that matter just getting the permits. Adding supply would bring down prices and help with the problem.
Since when has creating slums become a thing to laud? How does it get covered in such shining terms?
42 dispersed shelters constitute as slum now? Ok, I'll bite. It becomes a thing to laud when it's an improvement to the current status. Being sheltered in a slum is better than not being sheltered at all. Unless you believe homeless people shouldn't be seen or accommodated.