Ask HN: Tiny Home for $5k USD? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tiny Home for $5k USD?

44 pointssomid367 comments

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

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I honestly don't think that the "physical structure" or actual shelter is the main problem w.r.t. homelessness. The land itself is a lot more expensive. And the legal framework.

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.

This is the case in my country - any land within commuting distance of a middle class job that one can build a house on costs a fortune.

And shipping rough sleepers to parts of the country with low housing costs doesn’t seem politically popular.

If you start shipping them around, you’re dehumanizing them, treating them like objects instead of people with agency.

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.

That’s very much a UK problem, self build is pretty much non existent due to some of the worst zoning regulations imaginable.

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…

Then disrupt that. Those laws can be executed and people are on sidewalks in tents. That’s the problem that has to be solved.

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.

Well, let's say we do it, you're basically turning a single family home into a multifamily property with an ADU. How is that any different from say turning that single family home into a multi story multi family home?

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.

I’m fking tired of seeing human beings sleeping in tents on sidewalks. I don’t care what they did, what drugs they’ve used, who/what they are escaping, many of them are regular people who weee eaten and chewed up by the machine. We have to engineer a dignified a solution.

I make about $1mil a year and I can’t believe I haven’t done this sooner.

Just curious: have you donated to organizations that are solving the homelessness problem? Or do you think the work they are doing is not sufficient and this problem requires another approach.

They don’t think at scale, they are not engineers, they are flawed. I’ve donated over $200k in the past to no change in the overall system.

You can't engineer homelessness away.

to join the group email me at somid3@gmail.com or text me at +1 323-240-1241

I live in Austria and we do not have people living in tents on the sidewalk anywhere. (But we have some homeless people)

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!

This is a problem that will get worst in the coming decades.

to join the group email me at somid3@gmail.com or text me at +1 323-240-1241

In San Francisco some pay over 50% in taxes. It's not that the government doesn't have enough money. They have a spending problem and always find new ways to waste it on the homeless industrial complex with very little result. In fact they found a way to spend over $60,000 per tent[1]. Not per home, per tent!

1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-officials-w...

You don't pay more than 50% tax. No-one in SF does. THe article linked explains how it costs the gov so much to 'house'the homeless.

There are absolutely empirically people paying a 50% percent of their income in taxes in SF.

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.

Those are the marginal tax rates. You can’t just add the marginal rates and come up with your actual tax burden, at least in the US. (Can’t speak specifically to property tax in CA)

Honestly surprised to see this misapprehension of progressive income tax on HN

You seem to be the one not understanding here. I said effective which accounts for marginal rates.

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.

I will concede a misunderstanding perhaps of the income distribution in CA.

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

Sales tax at 8.5% is another big one.

Austria’s GDP is 429 billion dollars. Population 9 million. California GDP is 3.09 trillion dollars. Population 40 million.

There is no comparison.

California has 7ish times the GDP with less than 5 times the population, so it would superficially have less excuses for homelessness (to be fair, it has less control because the USA extracts more tax from and dictates more policy to California than the EU does to Austria, so arguably the blame belongs at least in part at the higher level.)

USA has 340 million people and borders between states are porous. Yes..it’s indeed arguable.

The EU has 450 million people and free movement, too.

Ok. Austria is better than California and EU is greater than USA. You win. Cheers.

This is not a simple problem. Language barrier alone will prevent people from going to Austria, never mind the weather.

The problem isn't taxation of income. The problem is the lack of taxation of land. The problems in San Francisco got worse precisely because they have property tax freezes. They should give owner occupied units a tax rebate instead of freezing taxes. Also, property taxes should be levied on the value of the land and not the building to reduce bureaucracy and indirect taxation of income.

We have solutions for this. It is called public housing.

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.

Permits are more like 20-40k in California. An ADU is roughly 150-200k after permits. That’s not including land cost.

Fight for mixed zoning[0] and to repeal laws against boarding houses[1]. Let people solve the problem, we're only in this mess because our hands are tied by regulations that favour certain interest groups.

[0] https://marketurbanism.com/2019/03/19/why-is-japanese-zoning... [1] https://www.econlib.org/the-case-for-boarding-houses/

want to team up?

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....

My shed cost me 3k in building supplies. It is 160sqr ft and has flooring…etc.

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.

Well then, have each $5k sponsored by a celebrity and give them to the homeless to set them up instead of living in tents

Already happening. https://www.instagram.com/p/CX2AXu-vzpN/?utm_medium=copy_lin...

Can you join the group email me at somid3@gmail.com or text me at +1 323-240-1241 — I’d love to learn how you built your shed

There’s already an industry making cost-optimised, factory-built tiny homes - you should look at the travel trailer/caravan industry.

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?

Travel trailers/caravans are overwhelmingly poorly made and they have many compromises made for the ability to constantly be moved/towed.

Well, there are two questions:

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.

1. Not sure. There are likely some cost savings if you don’t need road hardware and use temporary trailers or flatbeds to move them. You also wouldn’t need the water and waste tanks. Maybe some of that could go towards better insulation.

2. Yep, absolutely.

While a small mass produced teardrop trailer might be doable between $5-10k, it would effectively be a hard shell tent. Which is fine, but that’s the trivial part. The hard part is where to put them and who is going to provide the infrastructure for what is effectively a trailer park.

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...

A beat up commodity shipping container cost me $3,300. If you can deliver a functional home without taking a loss for $1,700 more, you're a genius and a wizard.

Did you get the container recently? The prices now are double that. At least for my area. I'm in the design phase for my personal "studio apartment"/ workshop container and keep an eye on tiny housing.

to join the group email me at somid3@gmail.com or text me at +1 323-240-1241

Those aren't insulated at all. You need to spend a bunch more getting that into shape to live in.

That's his point.

Shipping containers are not designed to be good homes, they are only designed to be easy to transport...

> Arnold Schwarzenegger donated $250,000 to build 25 tiny homes intended for homeless vets in West LA. The homes were turned over a few days before Christmas.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/rnmtpn/arnold_...

There's some good details there about people already doing this kind of good work.

Yes, and that was at $10k per home. It doesn’t need to be that expensive. And companies and celebrities would gladly sponsor this if there was a viable at scale solution

Key point here is that the VA donated the land. In the 20's in Germany, many homes were built on land donated by various churches. Churches, groups like the VA and others own a lot of land, if they can be convinced to help out it would make a big difference.

I lived in Miami in the late 1980s, and recall an article about an architectural student that demonstrated a low cost housing solution along similar lines. The local building codes were changed almost immediately to prevent any such units from being constructed (because “safety”).

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

At the risk of cling unwanted attention one someone: If she hasn’t done so, you may want to get in touch with Doreen Traylor (http://alexandralindelof.com/story-package/) for some perspective.

She posts as DoreenMichele in HackerNews.

I was researching suitable sites to legally build a tiny house in the EU, without a building permit.

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.

I've read of a couple that dug a huge hole with bulldozer.... then dropped 2 shipping containers and buried them back up... cost like 20k... mostly for the welding done to connect the containers, add rooms and windows...

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...

MIG welders are a few hundred to own and backhoe rentals are about the same to rent. Did they have to pay someone else to do the work?

Also, gasses like xenon are heavier than air. Do you know how they handled ventilation?

I think they had someone w/ some engineering skill do it, so it was structurally sound and all... I'm not sure if this is the exact same one I saw, but it's similar enough...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0oFJ2jbkDI

I am trying to build a "Sustainable" village with up to 200 houses. In Australia, rural land is about AUD 25K per ha (USD 4700 per acre). It some how you got permission to build on it the value increases to $100K per ha.

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.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/youexec_does-anyone-want-to-w...

If anyone wants to join the group email me at somid3@gmail.com or text me at +1 323-240-1241

Zoning is going to be your issue

Not if it’s mobile and homeless people can push it around like they do carts

Where are you based and what kind of help are you looking for?

I live in LA but I think a remote team can design, and a local team build. I can buy the parts

Why did this get flagged?

Is it 3-D printed?

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