Toronto man creates tiny mobile homes to help unhoused people escape the cold
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
https://www.communitysupportedshelters.org/conestoga-huts
as a shelter I would much prefer it over being homeless I guess, but there were issues
- Being made primarily out of wood it was cheap and easy to build, but it was HEAVY. I guess this is a good thing once its placed somewhere but it took 6 men to get it onto a trailer and because everyone is a volunteer its not easy finding a time when that many people can show up just to move a house (the building was the fun part)
- Where to put it? The city was more annoyed by our efforts (the actual organizers really since I just put in labor) than grateful because they started showing the houses off to people and saying "just as soon as the city tells us where to put it youll get a house"
- security on these was decent, I found out that primarily people wanted security from other homeless rather than even shelter
- without power or plumbing its not clear to me how actually livable these things would be. Although it had 2 windows it was extremely dark inside
Overall I think these types of houses are not solving the root issues - if the city decided to do it and found the land, it would be way better to just tack-weld some metal boxes together and weigh it down with concrete blocks. Then it takes specialists to build though and that sucks the spirit out of volunteers who want to spend a Sunday physically building something, not throw in $200 for a contractor to build 50 of them, even though that would obviously be of more help
These are useful for solving one particular facet: people die from exposure in Toronto. If this did anything to address the actual problem, then there would be no homelessness problem in LA.
Quite a few cities have actually solved this problem. They provide housing and all of the additional services, like hygiene facilities, food, and security. Granted, they only solve it for certain cohorts, but it demonstrates that it is rather trivially solvable. That's going to lead to hot political quarreling, so it's a good place to stop.
There is no chance that these can provide the full spectrum of services required for a person to thrive. We absolutely can't handle the upkeep on 100,000 one-person boxes. We need to make the shelters better. Many are terrible, but there are better ones, and a lot of that comes down to who is working there. Everyone who is able should make time to volunteer, even just a few shifts, to see what it is and how it can be improved. (It's also a good way to meet people in your city.)
> We can’t handle the upkeep
The main benefit of these is that they are effectively disposable, and they’re dispersed enough that you don’t have to deal with one person starting a flood or fire and wrecking a whole building.
If I were ever to become homeless I would much rather live in a tiny home than in a shelter, even if I had to go to a shelter or gym or something to take showers and interact with social workers. I feel like I’d never feel a sense of safety, privacy or autonomy in a shelter.
Most of those services are available AFAIK, there's charities in most major Canadian cities that provide those basics. Without them the homeless population would probably be triple what you can see, and from what I've heard the majority just need it short term to get back on their feet.
But they can only offer those to people without substance abuse problems (drugs and alcohol are banned in those shelters), and those are the folks you'll mostly see out and about. You'd need some sort of institution with far greater resources to handle those, like an asylum. North America just seems to have a sordid history with the like.
Does anywhere not have a sordid history with asylums? I'm genuinely asking as it seems like such facilities always devolve into pseudo-prison for the undesirable no matter what.
Is a terrible asylum better or worse than living on the streets?
Those cohorts being women and children.
You have a very good point that further supports are needed, however living in an urban area, I don't know if I can watch another 20 years waiting for the entire chain of everything to be setup before starting.
THese types of solutions from the private/volunteer sector do things that can't be unseen and often initiate conversations about what progress looks like.
The new types of shelter buildings with integrated services right in them, like other things are postive beacons.
If something cna improve the day to day, it's hard to say I'm against it when I'm sitting inside and someone who I might be saying it about isn't sitting inside.
> These are useful for solving one particular facet: people die from exposure in Toronto.
They are also useful because human beings need shelter, whether or not the exposure is life-threatening. They can't wait for your more ideal solutions.
> In a conventional homeless shelter there are more people around and staff, meaning you're at least not alone with an attacker.
I don't know if it really works out that way - plenty of homeless people say the shelters aren't safe - but regardless, it isn't working.
I'm not overly knowledgeable about the weather in Toronto, but heavy snow and heavy windows typically require things to be heavy so they don't get pushed by snow or wind. Maybe this is actually a feature of these type of huts.
Also, the huts in the article seem easier to move if what it states is accurate, that you can transport them in the bicycle lane legally and with bikes.
> without power or plumbing its not clear to me how actually livable these things would be.
What I've seen in my country (Spain) is that homeless tends to resolve to using tents, so if it's at least the same liveability but a little more protective against the elements, it sounds like an improvement.
The root issue of course isn't just that these people cannot find housing, but something about the reason why they aren't able to use the existing empty housing and how they became homeless in the first place. Be it because of costs, health, housing requirements or whatever.
$17-24k each per city/county documents: https://www.portland.gov/shelter-services/city-shelter-villa...
People try to tell me that it was a good deal because houses are over a million, but those include the land
This is one of the main reasons that many homeless people refuse shelter beds unless the weather makes it absolutely necessary. Phones and other important personal items get stolen constantly.
The hard problem is how do you house a lot of mentally unstable people who can often be a danger to themselves and others at the same density as the rest of the city and at an affordable cost.
I don’t think it’s generally possible because as soon as you hit any kind of density with these you get problems, but you need a minimum density to provide bathrooms showers and services. The best solution that I’ve seen is forcing builders to incorporate 1-2 subsidized units into every new building, as that distributes the problem around in a manageable way. Still that likely will not yield a quick solution and may never hit the required number of units.
It may be impractical I realize but since the trailer has to fit it anyway, perhaps not
The solution in the OP of building this as part of a dedicated tricycle is pretty damn slick. "Yes of course officer I am moving along, as fast as I can"
Perhaps the fact that you could build these theoretically faster than doing on a trailer makes it a moot point, then again if trailers are your bottleneck maybe it’s possible to schedule building around that to keep delivery smooth
Granted, there are homeless people who have a stable life but work a job that just doesn't pay enough to afford a home, or people who are between jobs and are temporarily homeless. But those people generally sleep in a car, cause few problems, are largely invisible, have most of their needs met in some way, and are generally not the people we are concerned about when talking about "the homeless".
The Homeless™ usually have more complex issues like untreated psychological issues, drug problems, etc. And while the previous group would rejoice about small cheap housing, it does little to solve the issues of The Homeless™.
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/datasets/affor...
I don't think anyone has a solution to the root issues. At this point, the fastest way to fix homelessness is to let the currently homeless people die out, while trying our best to prevent people from becoming homeless.
I suppose in certain circles "homeless" leads to connotations of drug use, dirtyness and crazyness, where as "unhoused" (to me at least) conjures and image of a regular person in a temporary situation.
It's stupid.
There's a correlation between "sanctuary ciies" and NGOs that ultimately hire based on political ideology rather than pragmatic policies.
If you do not remove the drugs from the equation the overall situation will not improve. There's a big contrast between homeless population in Japan vs West Coast America and the obvious reason is access to drugs.
There's fundamentally no reason for cramming 10k people in some of the most unaffordable NIMBY real estate land of one of the most expensive CoL countries in the world. Even if these folks were able to overcome years of raging addiction, what will they do in SF? Learn machine learning? Become a wealth manager? A teacher? A cop? How are they going to make enough to live in the city when even most regular middle class professions can barely make it there?
"They're unhoused. They have a home: Seattle is their home"
later excerpts
"...the word’s root emphasizes that the problem is a structural one linked to a lack of affordable housing, not a personal weakness."
"...those who have adopted it say it’s [...] to lessen stigma and to highlight that those lacking permanent roofs over their heads may still have communities or physical spaces they consider home."
"Unhoused" being those literally without any shelter. "Homeless" can refer to anyone without a fixed address, but say couchsurfing.
Most "homeless" don't actually sleep outside.
But surely a single, government-run homeless shelter is far more cost-effective than building a bunch of individual tiny mobile homes? Plus it allows centralized access to services (medical, social, etc.), since the long-term goal is to get them into a job (if possible) and their own place.
It's hard for me to see how tiny mobile homes are helping in the long-term.
Firstly, there are lots of restrictions for entering shelters (many won't allow you to stay without ID), and then there are enormous amounts of rules for staying there which makes it akin to prison for the residents (most of whom are fresh out of the joint). The other issue is that if you are recovering from an addiction, then shelters are awful. Literally every person there is trying to sell you some kind of substance, and when they're not doing that they are trying to figure out some other form of crime that you can help them with to get money for their addictions.
Homeless people just often want to be left to their own devices, so I can see these tiny homes helping there.
Also, homeless shelters are only cost effective for people who put up with them. A lot of homeless people would rather sleep in a tent or a car than a shelter and I honestly can't blame them, I'd probably do the same. Since shelters are less preferable to literally living outside to so many people (even in the absence of drug addiction) they are IMO not cost effective at actually addressing homelessness.
In my country there's a problem with providing shelters- you don't want to attract every Eastern European crackhead. On the other hand people have died and that's a bit embarrassing as well.
The solution was those crazy Christians from the Salvation army. They don't ask for ID and they are a private initiative which allows for full plausible deniability from the government.
Mind that these aren't perfect (I've been working on an improved, "sanified", CNN extractor, as described here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535359>), but are a breath of fresh air compared with bloated sites, and almost always work well with terminal-mode browsers (w3m, lynx, elinks2, etc.)
CBC have release notes for this site (launched in 2021), here:
<https://medium.com/cbc-digital-labs/cbc-lite-release-notes-c...>
This and https://neuters.de/ (Reuters Plaintext) are the best developments of the last half a decade in WWW news.
--------------------------------
Notes:
1. Libredirect has a collection of such alternatives, for YouTube Music, Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, IMDb, Bilibili, Pixiv, Fandom, Imgur, Pinterest, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Tekstowo, Genius, Medium, Quora, GitHub, GitLab, Stack Overflow, Reuters, Snopes, iFunny, Tenor, KnowYourMeme, Urban Dictionary, Goodreads, Wolfram Alpha, Instructables, Wikipedia, Wayback Machine, Search, Translate, Google Maps, Meet, Send Files, Paste Text, and Ultimate Guitar. See: <https://libredirect.github.io/>
Several of these are inspired: Snopes -> Suds, iFunny -> UNfunny, Tenor -> Soprnao, Urban Dictionary -> Rural Dictionary.
any chance you would be able to include a downloadable file in some common format please?
At our current technological progress we still need nature to produce food and climate have an immense impact, so well... Try to really think about the not-so-near future, where in most northern/southern areas even if the climate will be less cold heating will be simply too expensive for most.
Introduce in the mix issues with melting permafrost and Canadian geological peculiarities... Canada seems to be probably a work zone for poor more than a wealthy country...
(Being reliant on energy imports definitely makes it harder for these countries to guarantee their national security in time of war, tho.)
Also the Southern US states were never richer than the North.
I'm not affiliated with them, I just think it's a good idea and they are making some real traction.
"un-" is not any softer than "-less". For instance, it's not any better to be called "ungrateful" than "thankless".
The "home" to "house" change also shows no detectable movement along the euphemistic gradient.
This is just a bunch of woke people deciding to use a different word which has about the same sugar content, purely so that they could then feel superior to those who are not yet using the new word.
Separately, I absolutely love the "lite" aspect of this news web page. Clean, simple, quick, with an easy button to load an image? Yes, please! More of this!
Can we stop with the language propaganda bullshit? They're homeless. We've used the term for decades
Reminds me of the politically-correct nonsense in the 90s with *-challenged, like a short person is now vertically-challenged, a bald person is folliclly-challenged or adding *-technician to something like dish-cleansing-technician.
It does seem that vapid progressives love faux-academic jargon to get double plus good points.
These people are your neighbors, your neighborhood is home to them, they just don't have houses.
I think the best term that has the most impact is Sleeping Rough Outdoors. You read that and it does not matter what side you are one, you now how the person is living and it describes the plight that many homeless face when just needing to get some rest.
The concept you are describing is a "homebum" which describes a person who sticks to one area. This is different than a "hobo" who keeps moving and is not as much a nuisance of homeless. A "rubber tramp" is a homeless person who lives in a vehicle.
I think part of the linguistic shift is to imply social ownership. Unhoused describes both their state, but also a failure of someone who is responsible for housing them.
These distinctions are being made because
silver bullet policies are failing,
most laypersons equate homelessness with the visibly unhoused,
and the homeless population is much bigger than just the unhoused.
> The words "house" and "home" mean different things.
A house is a physical dwelling unit for humans to occupy. It's a building. A home often implies a place you reside, where you find safety and joy. The difference between these concepts gives rise to the common expression "make this house a home".
People can have homes, even without a house. For instance, a digital nomad might live in an RV or van. They would call it home, but not a house.
> "Houseless" is more correct than "homeless"
If we decouple the idea of a physical house from the idea of a home, then "homeless" people might actually have homes -- a spot they feel secure in, a place they return to.
So calling them homeless is incorrect. One can have a home but not have a house.
> except that not all housing is houses, so you'd have to make it "housingless",
Many things aren't "houses" per se, though they are housing. Apartments aren't houses, condos aren't houses, RVs aren't houses, etc. The umbrella term for house structures is "housing". These people lack housing of any type, not homes, so they could be called "housingless".
> and "unhoused" is far less clumsy.
This person would rather say "unhoused" vs "housingless", because they find it easier to say.
Hope that's clarifying. I'm not interested in discussing whether the terms are good or bad. You can disagree with their use and keep using "homeless" for all I care.
I just want you to understand the post being presented. Again, feel free to disagree, I just don't want you to feel like "I don't understand the reasoning".
I don't understand the logic at this point. The person living in an RV wouldn't be counted as homeless (RV is home) but should be counted as unhoused (RV isn't a house or any sort of fixed building)?
If someone has somewhere they have shelter and feel safe, that they return to, then great, they aren't homeless. Shouldn't we be worrying about the other people, who don't have homes?
Sadly, some people struggle with words having multiple meanings, sometimes dependent on context.
While others revel in willfully refusing to understand what's what. Because arguing about correct use of language (oh the irony) distracts from taking action. A technique popularized by the OSS's WWII era field manual of sabotage.
Second question, absolutely. I think we should be worrying about those people. (I personally think safe housing is a right, and something our government should provide, but now we're veering away from Tern's explaining terms to Tern's ideas on housing policy.)
You've twice now made some pretty bad faith assertions.
You're clearly missing something here. Nobody is using the term "homeless" to refer to people with a spot they feel secure in.
Before the 1980s, when they started shutting down the "warehouse" mental institutions, homelessness was a far less pervasive issue.
Interestingly, the word "vagabond" is getting a rebound as "homeless" has become really unpopular lately, and as of 2022, "vagabond" saw more usage than "unhoused", which one might not have guessed given the bellyaching over other people's language.
1. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=vagabond%2Chom...
Very few of the comments here are discussing the posted article, and it's downright shameful. Creating a reproducible substantive shelter on permanent wheels that can be moved by its resident themselves is novel, at least to me. Underhousedness (/whatever you want to call it) is not even a pet issue of mine. But I respect a good hack, and this is a great hack.
And in any case, this is just yelling into the void. Language usage will not change just because you want it to.
And who loathes the "unhoused"?
Elon Musk recently claimed that homelessness was a "lie" and that unhoused people were actually "violent drug zombies with dead eyes": https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
You don't have to dig very far to see the hate. At the root is a deep, inhumane entitlement to keep "undesirables" out of sight and mind, plus a conviction that anyone in that situation did something bad to deserve it.
I wish all my news was presented like this.
At first I was confused by there being no images/media, but then I was delighted that got to choose which ones to load.
No auto playing videos, or obstructive ads.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-tiny-mobile-h...
> Each unit costs around $5000 (not including sweat equity) to build, and I will ensure that every penny is spent wisely to create a safe and comfortable home for those who need it the most.
So it sounds like the cost of materials has increased or Donais puts aside $5K of funds for every house built for his own living costs. Or maybe after starting the project and getting the larger construction space they can now accurately estimate the overall cost at $10K.
He also has to live and cover unexpected costs.
The GoFundMe campaign was created on June 30th, 2024. Has Canada (or the world) had a big bout of inflation in the last 6 months? (Serious question, I'm not up-to-date with global macroeconomics.)
At one point my local hardware store in a medium sized city was selling a single 8-foot spruce 2x4 for upwards of $14, when pre-COVID it was probably closer to $4.
So, I think comments like yours are the ones undermining those good initiatives, which have a hard time being heard in a sea of scams.
I also figured that other HN visitors would have similar questions and I could save them a few minutes of digging around.
And yes, I did just donate.