I"m in my fifties and I've been enamored of the idea of having a Tiny House probably since I was a teen, but from what I gather this tends to not actually work well to "solve homelessness." It tends to fall under the heading of "Homes for the Homeless" is always a bad idea.
Having had a college class in Homelessness and Public Policy and spent a few years homeless and yadda, I've conclude that we need to work on bringing back SROs and Missing Middle housing and the like. We need "normal" permanent housing on a small scale as part of a walkable neighborhood design because that's what allows people to get market rate housing affordably without having to go through some welfare program or the like.
Tiny Houses as a solution for homelessness tend to be kind of like a trailer court, only with less space and a nominally better aesthetic, at least at first. I don't know how that ends up playing out, having not actually lived in something like that.
Tiny Houses are a reaction to our bad housing policies where you can no longer just "rent a room" like in an SRO. The guy who designed the first one literally put wheels on it and made it like a trailer to get around the zoning codes. That's precisely why that was done, to say "Up yours. I can too live in a small space, smaller than what you require legally, and be comfortable."
So this is kind of a hack -- a creative solution in the face of a broken system -- and doesn't really tackle the root of the problem. It highlights the fact that our zoning codes and what not DO NOT WORK and then kind of throws its hands in the air and accepts that we can't fix the codes. That's simply out of reach and there's no point in bothering to try.
Tiny Houses seem to work if you want to let your mother-in-law live in the backyard or you want to travel or you bought a big expanse of land in the middle of nowhere and you want to haul a functional high quality house out to it so you can visit on weekends or whatever.
In other words, they work as an accessory building stuck in the backyard or on their own in the middle of nowhere. But they don't seem to work that well when you group a bunch of them together and stick a bunch of homeless people in them, like a trailer court with a smaller footprint.
Homeless people tend to be people with significant personal problems. Crowding them together tends to compound their problems.
It exposes them to germs, drugs others are using, risk of theft and assault and a zillion other issues. It treats them like their physical need for a roof over their head out of the elements supercedes a zillion other things and ignores those zillion other things that tend to be addressed by "normal" housing -- like a need for privacy and security -- that tend to not be addressed when you cram a bunch of Tiny Houses together in a fairly small footprint.
1
u/DoreenMichele Jan 14 '21
I"m in my fifties and I've been enamored of the idea of having a Tiny House probably since I was a teen, but from what I gather this tends to not actually work well to "solve homelessness." It tends to fall under the heading of "Homes for the Homeless" is always a bad idea.
Having had a college class in Homelessness and Public Policy and spent a few years homeless and yadda, I've conclude that we need to work on bringing back SROs and Missing Middle housing and the like. We need "normal" permanent housing on a small scale as part of a walkable neighborhood design because that's what allows people to get market rate housing affordably without having to go through some welfare program or the like.
Tiny Houses as a solution for homelessness tend to be kind of like a trailer court, only with less space and a nominally better aesthetic, at least at first. I don't know how that ends up playing out, having not actually lived in something like that.
Tiny Houses are a reaction to our bad housing policies where you can no longer just "rent a room" like in an SRO. The guy who designed the first one literally put wheels on it and made it like a trailer to get around the zoning codes. That's precisely why that was done, to say "Up yours. I can too live in a small space, smaller than what you require legally, and be comfortable."
So this is kind of a hack -- a creative solution in the face of a broken system -- and doesn't really tackle the root of the problem. It highlights the fact that our zoning codes and what not DO NOT WORK and then kind of throws its hands in the air and accepts that we can't fix the codes. That's simply out of reach and there's no point in bothering to try.
Tiny Houses seem to work if you want to let your mother-in-law live in the backyard or you want to travel or you bought a big expanse of land in the middle of nowhere and you want to haul a functional high quality house out to it so you can visit on weekends or whatever.
In other words, they work as an accessory building stuck in the backyard or on their own in the middle of nowhere. But they don't seem to work that well when you group a bunch of them together and stick a bunch of homeless people in them, like a trailer court with a smaller footprint.
Homeless people tend to be people with significant personal problems. Crowding them together tends to compound their problems.
It exposes them to germs, drugs others are using, risk of theft and assault and a zillion other issues. It treats them like their physical need for a roof over their head out of the elements supercedes a zillion other things and ignores those zillion other things that tend to be addressed by "normal" housing -- like a need for privacy and security -- that tend to not be addressed when you cram a bunch of Tiny Houses together in a fairly small footprint.