Can Oregon's tiny houses be part of the solution to homelessness? | Hacker News Reader

Can Oregon's tiny houses be part of the solution to homelessness?

theguardian.com

38 pointstaivare49 comments

Probably not. Most homelessness is due to either mental illness and substance abuse or due to a shortage of affordable housing in places where jobs are available - typically dense cities where the only way to add housing within reasonable commute distance of the jobs is to build upwards, not building inexpensive 1-story buildings on vacant land.

Furthermore, both types of homeless tend to congregate in places where there's a density of social services available because they rely on those services for food, clothing, health care, or assistance seeking employment, in addition to shelter. Those areas tend not to be within walking distance (for the vast majority who also lack cars) of anywhere that has space to build dozens or hundreds of these tiny houses.

There are plenty of places in this country that have a ton of vacant housing stock, and even some of those have a homelessness problem (see also: Detroit). The problems underlying homelessness are far more complicated than the size of the houses we build.

Agreed that homelessness has complex underlying issues, but homelessness can ALSO be a temporary condition triggered by any number of problems (loss of a job, insurmountable debt, etc). The people are still technically "homeless" though rarely classified as such. Anything that provides more options for housing will help people who are homeless or on the verge of becoming homeless.

But moving them to the area 3 hours drive away from the city where there's actually space to build some of these things doesn't help them deal with joblessness (or needing a second job to pay down debt, when you lose 6 hours/day to your commute) since employment is generally easier to find in a city. In most of these cases, what's needed is not to expand low-density areas with marginally higher density, but to increase density in higher density areas so that housing there becomes affordable, or to offer temporary free/subsidized housing in those high-density areas until people are back on their feet.

Which is essentially the underlying plot of City of God. And which was based on a true story in the Brazilian favelas.

It's just hipster hubris. If someone suggested building apartment blocks with the same square footage as those twee little houses, they would be accused of trying to warehouse the homeless, but it's actually a much better idea.

Don't underestimate the power of green space. Having small homes in the middle of lawn, trees, and plants is much better than having small apartments in a dense apartment building.

There's still the problem of services / jobs, of course. But that's a bit separate.

What preserves greenspace more: 1000 people living in a tower block, or 1000 people, each with their own homes and lawns, sprawling across an entire suburban neighborhood?

Of course, it's not as simple as that. Greenspace is important, which is why cities have parks.

A lot of suburban neighborhoods are surprisingly not actually all that green: small yards, no trees (because they were all bulldozed and the residents, having exhausted themselves to buy the McMansion, can't really afford to re-do the landscaping from scratch), small backyards, houses crammed next to each other.

And don't forget the very large paved roads to accommodate lines of parked vehicles on the side of the road (because naturally once you have a garage you just hoard crap in it and then park your three cars on the street) and all the armored tank SUVs passing between them.

I recommend you check out City of God to see what happens when people are housed away from economic centers - a necessity for suburban lawns, trees and plants. Moreover, these things take time to care for, and money - something that is missing, or we wouldn't be having this conversation.

It's ridiculous to suggest that services/jobs don't hinge on high population densities and efficient use of space.

Warehousing people you don't want to deal with doesn't work either. See Cabrini Green, or other public housing disasters.

I'm pretty sure there is at least one stopping place between 35 residents (one of the 'villages' from the article' and the 16,000 of Cabrini-Green.

That wasn't my point. My point was that this was a worse idea than that.

Small houses can have fairly high populations density's. Let reserve 30'x30' plot per house.

A parking space is 9 foot wide and 18 feet long call it 10'x20'. So you can go 3 deep with hosses and give them 30'x30' plots + 10'x20' parking space each. That's 120' for 3 houses, 20' for parking spaces then 30' of road and then parking + 3 more houses on the other side = 6 houses per 30' of road. Per acre that's 6* 43560 / ((30 * 3 * 2 + 2 * 20 + 30) * 30) ~= 34 houses per acre and 640 * 34 ~= 22,000 houses per square mile.

For comparision DC has a total population density of 9,800 people per square mile.

PS: Granted that's exluding work, shopping etc, but only 10 cit's in the US beat 22,000 people per square mile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by...

And San Francisco has a population density of 17,867/sq mi. DC is a city with draconian height limits and a relentlessly suburban feel.

Sure, and San Franciso includes shops etc. So, there clearly not going to compete with 30 story apartment buildings. However, it's still fairly high population density so you can support things like good public transport links.

IMO low cost housing is about more than just poor people. Condos are expensive for young professionals, so a cheaper option with a reasonable commute could be very useful financially.

I would love to live in a tiny house village...but, the zoning laws in my home city (Austin) make it literally impossible.

It is also illegal to be homeless here, with fines for illegal camping costing several hundred dollars. It's sickening to see all the new construction, often with enthusiastic support of much of city council and the mayor, that is targeted at people who can afford $3000/month rents, when there are so many families being pushed out of their neighborhoods.

I've kind of idley been shopping for houses or land in New Orleans and its fascinating how tiny some of the old houses are. There was a time when it was not considered crazy or illegal to construct a two room, 250 square foot, house for one or two people to live in. It don't understand how we've gone so far in the McMansion direction. It's entirely possible to live happily in a tiny space (I did it for four years, living and traveling full-time in a motorhome).

I don't understand how we've gone so far in the McMansion direction.

"To achieve the American Dream, you must be asleep" said Lama Surya Das.

The mass population is in a trance, induced by constant, relentless marketing and monotony.

So the person who lives on a several acre lot with a 4000 sq ft house, running their own business is asleep and the person in a 600 sq ft loft crammed in a city block with thousands of others is wide awake?

The world sure is upside down.

As I see it, the size of the dwelling is irrelevant: plenty of americans with high salaries still manage to live paycheck-to-paycheck.

If somebody has a huge house, a high salary and 3 cars but spends all of their money every month, has no savings/emergency fund and aren't saving for retirement then they are anything but wide awake. Rather, they are sleepwalking through consumerism (just like most of their neighbors, friends and family).

Cars are a huge waste of money. But home ownership can be a incredible wealth building tool with tax benefits.

Most cities in Australia and New Zealand are like this, and I'd guess Canada and the U.S. as well. This is one-person one-vote "democracy" at work: the land-owners vote in the government that restricts supply via zoning laws, and boosts demand via immigration and international students. When even just a bare majority of people have jobs they hate and there's 95% bank loans available on houses and apartments, they'll gang up via the government on the renters and lower-waged to get those residential land prices going up. They want to sell their city houses and leave their jobs as soon as they can, and there's plenty of immigrants from Asia who'll happily rent and buy up with funds they earnt via questionable means in their home countries.

> there's plenty of immigrants from Asia who'll happily rent and buy up with funds they earnt via questionable means in their home countries

Way to go there - all immigrants are rich and earned their riches via questionable means!

This kind of "blame the immigrants" is spreading; a shame since I thought Australia was on top of that.

I blamed:

> This is one-person one-vote "democracy" at work: the land-owners vote in the government that restricts supply via zoning laws, and boosts demand via immigration and international students

as well as:

> 95% bank loans available on houses and apartments

and:

> a bare majority of people have jobs they hate and [...] leave their jobs as soon as they can

yet you read all that as "blame the immigrants who are all rich and earned their riches via questionable means"?

Australia has never been on top of its problems with immigration.

"It don't understand how we've gone so far in the McMansion direction."

My theory is two parts. In the old days, your kids could play outside and weren't expected to be in the house until dinner and then before bed. Now, your kids are probably in the house more, and let's face it, space creates harmony sometimes.

The second part is simply that people want to keep up with their peers and McMansions were sold "cheaply" enough for people to jump on. That big family home is still a measure of success.

I'm curious, what is a specific zoning ordinance which prohibits small houses? In my county, the building code does not mandate a minimum size, but many HOA covenants do. Or is it just the grouped houses that are outlawed, like minimum parcel size of 0.25 acre or something?

The IRC and IBC do specify minimum sizes, so if your county adopted either of those then there is a built in minimum.

> Every dwelling unit shall have at least one habitable room that shall have not less than 120 square feet (11 m2) of gross floor area. Other habitable rooms shall have a floor area of not less than 70 square feet (6.5 m2). Habitable rooms shall not be less than 7 feet (2134 mm) in any horizontal dimension.

The 2015 revision removes or modifies this.

Interesting, I did not know international building codes existed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Building_Code

It's not an internationally enforced document or anything, more of a "base code" that jurisdictions can choose to adopt (often with local modifications) to avoid writing their own from scratch.

Similar codes exist for electrical (NEC, which I guess is national because of voltage differences internationally?) and fire safety (IFC).

It is the multi-family rules that conflict with tiny villages in Austin, and many others. If you're seeking to build a multi-family "thing" on a plot of land, it has to be zoned for multi-family use, and the permitting process for that is much more complicated and subject to a lot more rules. So, yes, it is the parcel sizes and number of houses per parcel that triggers the problems.

You can put one tiny house on one regular plot of land in Austin, most likely, without too much trouble.

Density is the alleged goal for a lot of the rules that prevent tiny house communities from popping up. But, there's nothing stopping anyone from putting one huge house on a moderate sized lot anywhere in pretty much the whole city, including places that are extremely sought after. The moment you want to build housing for several families (or individuals) on one plot of land, that's when they insist it be condos or apartments with high density. There is no middle ground where people can have their own house and garden...either you're in a McMansion or you're in an apartment/condo.

There is recently an ordinance to allow a secondary housing unit on a lot, but the language of it makes it very clear there has to be a full-size house on the property and the secondary unit is to be a "granny flat" or garage apartment or similar. I don't know if this rule has passed yet, but it's been discussed quite a bit. I'm too busy lately to get involved in the minutiae of that, especially since it still doesn't actually fix the problem I have with the rules here. So, it may be that you could build a tiny house village of two tiny houses. Maybe you can get two lots side-by-side and build a four house village. Still extremely limiting, and doesn't help to resolve the sprawl problems that Austin has.

A friend who researched it found that building an "RV park" would be the only way to do it given current code and political climate...which has a limit on the number of permanent structures that can be on the grounds. So the tiny houses would have to be on wheels. And, homeowners associations and such will fight hard against permitting any new RV park or mobile home park, so the likelihood of any such thing happening near downtown approaches zero. Also, being an RV park makes it commercial construction, comparable to a hotel, rather than residential (though there are rules allowing permanent residency at RV parks with different taxation that doesn't include various "tourist taxes").

Frankly, a lot of this stuff comes down to wealthy people just not wanting poor people living anywhere near them.

If the people that can afford $3,000/month for rent don't have a place to spend it, they'll just bid up the price of the other housing. Nobody is going to build hovels out of the gate, affordable housing is luxury housing that was built 50 years ago.

> hovels

hovel: a small, poorly built and often dirty house

So, small houses must, by necessity be poorly built and often dirty?

I believe this is kinda where the problem lies in our culture. Only a large house can be nice, middle class, and a symbol of success in our culture.

Salt Lake City's approach seems to be going pretty well [1]. On another note, naming these places 'Dignity' and 'Opportunity' seems, at least to my ear, to sap the residents of both. Why not give them more innocuous names?

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/home-free

Sounds like something out of Anthem.

At points in my life my apartment has been pretty much a place to sleep for 8 hours, and little more. It was always maddening that the options were still expensive (even studios are cavernous when you're a 22 year old with almost no belongings, no car, and no family).

Here in Florida mobile home parks used to be common, to the point of being 50% of housing in some counties. My entire life they've been tearing them down, sometimes to build expensive stuff, whether residential or commercial, oftentimes because the community politicians want to eliminate any low-cost housing to upscale "their" community. Poor people aren't represented by the government at any level; the economic top third is precisely represented.

Are you sure the stupidity of flimsy housing in a hurricane hotspot wasn't a huge part of it? Shots of decimated trailer parks are usually the first things to hit the national news when a big hurricane hits you all.

That does get airplay but it's not accurate. Millions of people live in mobile homes, a few get damaged by storms, as do regular stick-built homes. Tornadoes trash a few every now and then. But none of that is why they're being cleaned out; it's arrogance. Pricing the poor out of housing altogether isn't improving their safety. Modern tie-down codes had already solved that problem years ago.

I think there will be a point where some people at an early stage of their life opt for a small mobile house.. that is actually a car, perhaps even self driving. If hourly jobs and limited urban real estate make home (e.g. land)-ownership an unrealistic expectation, why not live out of your car?

Would really turn the heads of people who expected their plot of land to be worth something because younger generations would aspire to it and have no other option.

To the argument that homelessness is because of mental illness / substance abuse. I think there's probably another (as yet unproven) side of this. And that is substance abuse / mental illness can and probably to a large extent is derived from the environment you're in. How many people would not fall into a funk if all they were ever worrying about were their bills, and never capable of making a dent in them. Let's face it. Some people get themselves into situations where they're never going to accumulate the skills necessary to make it out of borderline poverty. Most of the times it probably takes several generations to get into that situation. How many generations (in today's economic environment) could it possibly take to get out? It's sad to see that most of them feel such small amount of hope they put all their "money" on getting their kids to the NFL / NBA / etc. The system has failed them and it's not taking any steps to help them get out of those situations.

Didn't the previous occupants already solve this problem?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipi

For something more hardy, you could steal an idea from the central asian people and build yurts. They're more homely, portable, easier to construct, and surely cheaper.

http://www.rontravel.com/Web_Photos_Happy_Cannibal/X_Siberia...

Not really, half the problem is land. A portable structure that is illegal to set up is not really a solution. Where are you going to set up your tipi in Portland when doing so on public land is illegal[1]?

[1] http://www.portlandonline.com/auditor/index.cfm?a=15427&c=28...

> A top-of-the-line tiny house with RV-like conveniences can set you back $60,000 or more. The 30 dwellings at Opportunity Village, made of prefab donated materials, cost “around $3,300 a unit”. The savings come from the fact that they are basically detached bedrooms, with no utilities or running water.

Why do these things cost $3,300? They look like garbage and have no electric, plumbing, HVAC, etc. They also look like they are either on blocks or a large, shared, concrete slab, so you don't need to pour a slab for each one. You could put one of these things together with a few hundred dollars of material. These can't be much more than the shed kits at big box stores like Home Depot that run a couple hundred dollars.

Let's have a look:

  Cheapest Home Depot Shed[1]: $800 ($649 +$250 delivery)
  Windows[2]: $210 (3x$70)
  Wall Insulation (shed walls are ~10x10): $113.50 ($11.35 for a 40 ft^2 roll of minimum R13 batt)
  Ceiling Insulation (approximating @100ft^2)[3]: $118.28 (2x$59.14)
  Actual Door[4]: $99
  Drywall[5]: $84.80 (approx. 10 peices)

Total: $1524.58

Looks like you're correct, it could be cheaper. Wait a minute, we just have a pile of materials now. Let's put it together. Judging by [6], it's about $1500 of labor to hire a professional to build you a shed. Let's assume that you can negotiate installation of the insulation, drywall, and windows for free (it's for a good cause!). You are now at $3,024.58 final cost. Hmm.

[1] http://www.homedepot.com/p/Handy-Home-Products-Princeton-10-...

[2] http://www.homedepot.com/p/Handy-Home-Products-Princeton-10-...

[3] http://www.homedepot.com/p/Owens-Corning-R-38-Kraft-Faced-In...

[4] http://www.homedepot.com/p/Unbranded-Premium-6-Panel-Primed-...

[5] http://www.homedepot.com/p/SHEETROCK-UltraLight-1-2-in-x-4-f...

[6] http://www.diyornot.com/Project.aspx?ndx2=10&Rcd=332

This probably wouldn't do much to solve the homeless problem in NYC. In a neighborhood like the East Village or Williamsburg, I could see it being rented for $1,000/month.

I was hoping there would be some pictures of the interior.

When I hear homeless ... I always think of Carlin - they are not homeless, they are houseless. People need cheap affordable housing - that's it.

> People need cheap affordable housing

That's not going to get rid of homelessness. People with severe and enduring mental illness, or addiction, might need support to stay in their cheap affordable housing.

That ship sailed, badly. Democrats don't like mental institutions (evil, scary, and corrupt) and Republicans don't like in community projects (bringing the insane to our homes), so both solutions got trampled. To be fair, both sides have their points, but the problem is a spectrum. We really do need top flight institutions that are safe, healthy, clean, and well monitored. We also really need community outreach and assisted living. Our current policy of drugging people to the key of G is not really solving the problem (looking at you VA).

The only solution to homelessness is to abolish the class structure that is fundamental to capitalism. Our current model of private ownership has encouraged the ruling class to grab enormous amounts of land, because of it's speculative value on the realestate market. Look at a place like New York, homelessness has in recent years reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Still plenty of aparments are empty. Does this seem rational to anyone?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/nyregion/more-apartments-a...

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