After delays, California unveils first site of state tiny home project to relieve homelessness
After delays, California unveils first site of state tiny home project to relieve homelessness
Sacramento leaders and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration announced Wednesday the state will build the first group of 1,200 tiny homes at an abandoned office park.
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.
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.
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."
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?
$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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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