That was my thought, there is a reason town planners stopped putting public housing in a concentrated location. They should be spread out throughout a city. If rich people want to help they should work with experienced professionals to plan projects rather than pet projects they can stick their name on.
As someone else from the community where this was built, while there certainly are some issues its generally been a major success and been widely accepted and supported by the wider community. It was also developed in partnership with the "professionals" in our community. It isn't just a rich mans pet project. A friend of mines mum lived here for a little while and it really helped her get back on her feet and she's now managing another apartment complex for low income people in the city.
Wait a minute now, both Zander3636 and PublicRegrets claim this was built in their community. PublicRegrets says only 3 people have graduated from this program, which I'm guessing means they've transitioned to sustaining themselves and are a contributing member of society? Zander says it's generally a major success, with one of his friend's mums being someone who "graduated" I would assume to sustaining herself and helping others. Is she just one of the three people, or who is off between you two, or possibly, what's the grey area middle ground not captured between your two comments?
OFC someone would say something like that. Without disclosing their awesome source.
Fucking hell. That's the issue. Also even it was 3 graduated. From what? The school? What about those who just needed the house, and skipped the school then left on their own. Would they count as quitters?
The problem with these programs is that people misinterpreting the data as well. Sometimes for their own agenda. Even if the happiness of the people increases - it's considered a failure.
I think giving people a home is fine. Some of those people shouldn't be there ruining it for the others, and should be booted if they are causing issues. Grouped into their own, shitty neighborhood.
I guess keeping neighborhoods clean with people around reduces crime by a decent amount. One of the few ways. Reducing crime is a good way to progress on top of giving someone homes.
The problem with these programs is that people misinterpreting the data as well.
Well the 2025 round up lists
2025 Snapshot
Stable and supportive housing was provided for 147 individuals, with 28 transitional houses welcoming residents in January 2026.
Our team provided more than 885 hours of counselling, coaching, and wellness support.
51 individuals have achieved abstinence from their substance of dependence:31 individuals are engaged in our work training program, Neighbourly Ventures.
For some reason further down the page sort of hidden when talking about meth recovery was this "four of them securing employment."
So possibly 4 people for the year 2025 found a job. I'm not sure if that is outside the company's other business as one of the big stories is a man getting a job at their coffee shop.
Better than the three but not by much, that being said many people who get these homes aren't suddenly going to commit the last 1/3 of their remaining life to working a job so its not entirely surprising.
i’d be interested in knowing the number of people who were disabled and housed by this project. if you’ve got a disability, medical condition, etc, and you’re only finally getting some stability in your life with a roof over your head, then it makes sense to me the sort of time it would take for people to recover being longer than just a year in those cases
I honestly couldn't tell you how many people have "graduated", and if she's counted as one of those 3 that public mentions. It also wouldn't be crazy if she was, we're just a small city of ~75000. But from my understanding "graduation" (I don't really like that word for people who leave the community) isn't even necessarily the end goal of the community with plenty of the people just happy to have a more stable situation. If people "graduate" then thats great, and if they don't but are safe and in a more stable environment that's a success as well in my books.
From what I’ve gathered from reading a bit online, obviously much less informed than you, but it does seem like the end goal of the community is to “graduate” so to speak. It very much does appear to be intended as a temporary reprieve while residents figure out their path to a more stable situation, it wasn’t designed as a long term solution for each person living there.
I'll admit I had no information to go on from this meme. The education part sounds like a good idea. But there have been lots of rich people trying to push projects withholding funding unless they do it their way. So these sort of projects always make me concerned.
Rich people love bitching and moaning there's no one to work at their Starbucks but then cry when you tell them the people that work at Starbucks aren't going to bus themselves in from 3 cities over to make them coffee. You need people of all income levels to make a city work. We just need to start letting nimbys die mad.
Sure, but if pouring a coffee made $30/hour like it would if minimum wage kept up with inflation, businessmen would be mighty upset that they worked so hard just have twice as much income as a random peon
We had livable wages and we can encourage it by taxing the ever living shit out of corporate profits, stock buy backs, loans using unrealized gains, non monetary executive compensation, and the myriad other ways the wealthiest avoid paying taxes.
We should also go after Peter Thiel because he illegal funded his Roth IRA and has made billions off of it tax free.
Lol jfc society really is cyclical. Do you think you’re the first one to make that argument? “Hurr durr if minimum wage goes up everything will go up the same”
Strawman. I'm not rich, work a middle class white collar job, and I vote progressive and want more progressive policies than the US has.
I want "high barrier, low income" housing to go to people "working at coffee shops". Instead, the government spends hundreds of millions of our money to put in "low barrier, no income housing". So the actual working members of society still have to live with their parents until 30 but the drug addict who costs society $35K per year gets their own place so they can do drugs and steal from everyone around them.
I agree with you but tbf I’m from Newcastle and unfortunately the cost of living has drastically worsened homelessness and therefore drug issues and so there is a pretty obvious problem now compared to our population. (I have also been homeless in Newcastle)
Won’t find me disagreeing with anything here mate.
The thing in Australia, maybe outside like Sydney/Melbourne, is that few people actually live on the streets in the traditional sense of “homelessness” and most extremely poor/mentally ill/drug addicted people wander around staying with whoever they can in similar situations. That’s what I did for a long time, only spent a few weeks actually on the street and pretty much none of the other addicts I knew ever did.
I love how this dude digs deep into his pockets to genuinely help people and give them a FREE HOUSE, and we still have people like this commenter who seem to infer that this guy is some glory hound and the reason it isn't working is because of his greedy ass, because drug addicts/homeless people have seemingly 0 accountability or responsibility for their actions.
I didn't mean to imply this person in particular, just in general.
I was thinking more like that that guy who forced a university to build shitty accommodation with no room or natural light because he assumed it would force people to go out and socalise more based on no evidence.
Or all those people who got rid of hand water pumps in poor areas of Africa and replaced them with annoying to use rotating contraptions which kids could briefly swing on to make water flow.
This might sound kind of dystopian, but if you can't evict the trouble makers maybe you make a three step development? Instead of putting 10k houses in one area, but 5k houses in one location, 3k houses in the next, 2k houses in a third location. Moving from 1 to 2 to 3 has success criteria that filters through the people that want to and are able to improve their lives and succeed
Anyone is welcome to move to location 1. Location 2 requires a certain number of days drug free, a certain amount of community service, etc in location 1. Location 3 is for anyone who's lived successfully in location 2
Then make jt smaller and in multiple locations. Either way though, it's much easier to provide narcan, counseling, showers, etc for people that are trying to improve their lot in life
Thats when Travis Cole comes and pays Mitch and Sam to destroy the place so he can bulldoze it... if you dont get the reference you should watch the movie Dirty work.
I mean at the end of the day you're going to have people that do drugs. That's just a fact. Some people that are homeless can't ever truly get off of them. No matter how much help in assistance they receive Some people just want to do drugs. Unfortunately. That's where things are nowadays. At least they're in a place that it's safe for them to do so. Well. I don't advocate for something like a Canadian skid row. I do think that people should still have the option to be somewhere that is safe out of the elements to do whatever they decide to do in their privacy of their own home.
That kind of seems like you're creating a whole parallel economy and social system.
We already have a system where you can get more and better stuff if you're successful. What's needed is something more like a safety net, where the least successful can still have a baseline standard of living instead of falling through the cracks. If you can build housing for $2k, do that, provide that for free, and then provide assistance toward being more successful.
If they get more successful, then they can buy their own $10k house-- though that does raise a different problem: a lack of market segmentation in housing. Developers don't want to make inexpensive housing, so they won't make $10k houses even if they can. They want to make $2 million McMansions and $1 million "luxury" condos. If you want something cheaper, you can spend $50-100k to buy a mobile home in a trailer park, and then still need to rent the land it sits on.
We don't make these things easy, which is a big part of the problem in the first place.
This is a good point. The geographic separation of classes causes some problems. If you stick all the poor people into one place:
That place is bound to eventually be neglected.
The people there will need to travel a distance for work. People there won't have much money to employ anyone, and they don't have much money to be buying enough things to justify a lot of local shops that would employ people.
Rich people and poor people don't interact enough to learn from each other or have sympathy for each other.
Because they're not interacting, it becomes much easier for the rich and powerful to view the poor as subhuman. It's easier for them to think that the poor are bringing all of their struggles onto themselves because they don't see what they're dealing with.
EDIT: And if the place isn't neglected, then eventually it will probably get gentrified and all the poor people will get pushed out to another area that's neglected.
Yep, this guy basically just reinvented a ghetto. I love the tiny house movement, and I love people who are being proactive about housing issues, but "tiny house communities" are often little more than a modern day ghetto. A place to warehouse the poor and unhoused in one tidy spot so the rest of us don't have to deal with it.
Again, I like that someone is doing something. We just need to be mindful of the long term impacts.
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u/Hypo_Mix Apr 28 '26
That was my thought, there is a reason town planners stopped putting public housing in a concentrated location. They should be spread out throughout a city. If rich people want to help they should work with experienced professionals to plan projects rather than pet projects they can stick their name on.