Ask HN: Tiny Home for $5k USD?
Does anyone want to work with me and engineer or market a $5,000 tiny home — the blueprints will be open source, but also manufacture at scale if there is demand. This home would have a solar roof, small battery, water tank, will arrive in a IKEA-like box worldwide. It should allow a 6.5 ft person sleep comfortably and should be movable with a forklift. Think a next generation home for the homeless. Should withstand regular weather for 20 years. DM me. I could invest some $50k to start this venture if we can form a team. Email me at somid3@gmail.com or text me +1 323-240-1241
71 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadI make about $1mil a year and I can’t believe I haven’t done this sooner.
Part of this is probably due to the fact that I pay 48% of everything I earn in taxes and I am totally fine with it!
1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-officials-w...
The highest federal income tax backet is at 37%. the highest california state income tax bracket is 12.7%. San francisco residents pay a .38 payroll tax.
This is going to get you pretty darn close to 50% effective tax rate right there but we haven't even started to look at property taxes or sales taxes. So yeah, there are definitely people paying 50% taxes in SF.
Honestly surprised to see this misapprehension of progressive income tax on HN
Thats why even though those numbers add up to 50%, i specifically said that will only get you close to 50% effective. Also the more you make, the more percentage wise will be paid at the highest marginal rate meaning some people will pay close to their highest marginal rate effectively.
Thats why the whole second point was there about other taxes. Those numbers dont have to add up to 50 for there to be people paying that rate
So yeah, no misunderstanding here. Im well aware of how marginal tax rates work.
But the figures you quoted are the marginal rates, and at the federal level that top bracket kicks in at over 500k
in the limit of very high income, your effective rate will start to approach the top marginal rate. But the idea of 500k being the negligible portion of one’s gross income is just so far out of my experience, it’s hard to see why that’s the default assumption.
how many people is that even realistic for? I thought past a certain point peoples total comp started to be more things like equity
Edit: I think I see what you meant by “i specifically said that will only get you close to 50% effective”, initially I just added the marginal rate for federal and CA and thought that’s what you meant by “close to 50%”
I still don’t really know where you’re coming from though — say you’re single and your income is 1 M$, and you don’t do anything aside from standard deduction to reduce, that’s like 46% effective (I forgot payroll taxes before). Is 40k property tax realistic in SF? I genuinely don’t know
There is no comparison.
My grandmother was homeless until a social worker found her on the streets and got her an apartment (in D.C.). The logistics are actually quite simple.
$5K houses aren't the main solution. We need inexpensive medium to high density apartments.
I will admit in the Bay area, adding a $5K house to every SFH lot might help a bit. In reality it would be $5K house + at least the same in permitting.
[0] https://marketurbanism.com/2019/03/19/why-is-japanese-zoning... [1] https://www.econlib.org/the-case-for-boarding-houses/
I have a plan to buy land, on that land we add like 5 to 10 glamping spots, one of which is a yurt for us to live in temporarily.
we Airbnb the spots... to pay for building supplies and other things... maybe earn some income too...
we create a big building that is a warehouse basically for common goods that households really don't need to own .. like tools, cleaning supplies, recreational vehicles, etc... the rec vehicles we can also rent to Airbnb's... the idea is every house needs tons of extra space to duplicate things like drills and saws... when you might use those things once a month or year or decade....
if you could just walk down the street and check out some tool... like a library... then maybe we have 3 drills per ten families or whatever we deem necessary to ensure needs are met...
the warehouse could have a commercial kitchen too for community meals etc or people could reserve it for special occasions...
we then could build cheap housing using containers (easier but a little more costly), or earth bags (very difficult work but affordable... also takes longer) then maybe we charge like 200 per month rent per family member, and if we could duplicate this we could create a share system so people could stay at the Zion Utah one when traveling for free, or Disney land... etc...
there might be an opportunity there to also help intentional communities set up glamping camps that maybe keep 50 percent vacancies so it's like a free travel network or plan for residents to travel cheaper so everyone can afford to have more and better experiences via vacations instead of focusing on things and owning more crap we don't need....
We could easily build enough units to house homeless but they won’t meet our zoning and permitting process.
City’s like San Francisco don’t actually want to solve the problem. Instead they just want to profit off of it.
The issue is government, not available funds or land.
Where I am right now, it's illegal to sleep in a car for instance. And similarly, a lot of alternative housing solutions are highly burocratized, require lots of permits etc. Almost like politicians are protecting their real estate investments.
In any case, homelessness at a society level is a political problem.
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OTOH, since I was planning on building a wood cabin for myself at some point, I do wonder what solution you had in mind for the toilets/sewage.
And shipping rough sleepers to parts of the country with low housing costs doesn’t seem politically popular.
Furthermore, what happens when they get there? Low housing costs are a symptom of little to no economic opportunities, so you’re essentially just warehousing them like parts on a shelf.
What do you do with the inconvenient people, the mentally ill and those who cannot easily participate in society? Yeah, you’ve shipped them somewhere where they’re not in your way, but will you also provide for treatment or just wait and hope they solve the problem by dying or getting killed?
People are not things, despite what economists may say. You can’t just ship them around and utter thoughts and prayers at them. I guess you could but you’d be joining a select group of history’s biggest assholes.
Even buying a lot in a residential area with a condemned building would require you to jump through so many hoops that would make it near impossible to build for anything below 7 figures…
If they want to break the law with their $5k tiny home on wheels, then so be it until the laws open space for them. The state should provide property tax breaks for people who allow temporary homes.
I mean it should be clear that the laws regarding land ownership are serving owners at the expense of everyone else and not in a particularly efficient way.
In socialism everyone scrambles to get up early and be lucky enough to find what they need at the grocery store, in capitalism people are born early and scramble to get hold of land because it doesn't go "bad" unlike most physical goods including capital itself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/rnmtpn/arnold_...
There's some good details there about people already doing this kind of good work.
Perhaps you could talk to some rough sleepers an get their opinion - and if they agree with you, as an MVP you could give them such a home, and see if it keeps them off the streets?
1. Can you make a travel trailer that can’t be towed, with higher quality, for $5000?
2. Can a travel trailer solve rough sleeping?
On my opinion, the second question has much more uncertainty than the first one.
2. Yep, absolutely.
She posts as DoreenMichele in HackerNews.
being impacted by earth is a natural insulator... and it faces south...
I'd love to do something like this... team up buy land then place yurts and things while we build earth bag or container homes... maybe we use some of the land for Airbnb rentals to pay for supplies for the rest of what we want to do ....
ideally next to Zion national park in kanab.... could easily make 150 per night for our glamping spots...
Also, gasses like xenon are heavier than air. Do you know how they handled ventilation?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0oFJ2jbkDI
A hexayurt is good enough most of the time and costs very little, but apparently no one can afford enough politicians to be permitted to help
Get cities to rezone their public parks that have existing bathrooms and 90% of the problem will solved. Let’s start with Dolores Park to see how serious the HN crowd is. Start a Change.org petition for that and I’ll be first to sign.
https://www.pinterest.com/wamalinf/vintage-teardrop-trailers...
So far I have:
- Some regions in Sweden
- Some areas in Portugal
- Possibly Romania
- It used to be common in Poland, but possibly illegal today.
Wonder if anyone here had also been researching this kind of thing.
Your can build for about AUD 1650 per sqm (USD 1.20 per sqft) but that does not include power or water.
It is land that is the problem not buildings.