What's not a solution is taking away their tiny houses just to distory it,
It’s not a solution to homelessness... it’s a solution for slums, which are big ticket problems for cities... again, countless deaths.
And not just in the slums themselves, which some people would count as an acceptable loss, because fire spreads, illness spreads like wildfire, groundwater is contaminated, If the tiny homes and the land they were on were all up to code? There wouldn’t be the legal ability to tear them down, any more than any other legally held & used property, nor likely any reason to. Including snobbery, or jealousy, which has more weight to it than a lot of things.
In point of fact, many cities are building these communities, and even spending a couple hundred thousand a year supplying water, power, sewer, & garbage to them.
https://charterforcompassion.org/pr...he-homeless-an-affordable-solution-catches-on
https://www.curbed.com/maps/tiny-houses-for-the-homeless-villages
Homelessness is a huge complex problem.
One of the things mentioned in the second article is that some cities are paying the utilities for these communities ... That’s a HUGE boon ...to the total of a couple hundred thousand a year. The water bills in my city are more than the rent in yours, our rent is about double, and our minimum wage a little more than half. Social services? Are TAPPED. Those relief agencies you mentioned? Here you have to already be homeless AND without assets (no car, no job, nothing you could reasonably be expect to sell (ie do you have furniture worth more than $20), etc.) to even get on the
waiting list for emergency assistance. Which can take a couple years. At which point you find out food stamps for 2 people are only $12 a month (WIC is decent, but that’s a federal program, not a local one). Because every last dollar is stretched to breaking, and the food program is broke. Meanwhile A lot of people are working a second, or third job
just to pay their utility bills. So the city goes and pays the water bill for one small slice of its poor? :O_o: Starts making people struggling with constant shut offs, or paying more than half their salary in taxes being asked to pay even more taxes, pretty pissed off. I don’t see this project lasting very long in my city.
You know what’s more cost effective than 50 tiny homes? 1 hotel. That’s another solution that many cities have been using for years. Double or triple the occupancy, less than half the ongoing cost & upkeep. Sometimes less than 1/10th or less than 1/100th depending on who’s operating it. We have the numbers very solid there, because they’ve been used for halfway homes for decades as they’re Uber cheap to operate.
So why don’t we have more hotels for the homeless? Most homeless people won’t live there, when our city has tried pilot systems. Why? Because the prison system has been operating the existing ones, and the standards they keep are too low for anyone not already institutionalized to accept. :bored:
It wouldn’t actually cost much more to increase the standard of living to a point someone wouldn’t rather live on the street than come inside out of the cold. Certainly a lot less than paying the water & power bill for a community a fraction of the size. But as soon as fresh paint starts going up? And stank stained infested carpet gets pulled out... all of a sudden it becomes a “viable” property, and the city sells it to developers. :banghead: Every. Single. Time. More than a dozen times in the past 10 years.
None of this does more than scratch the surface of the ongoing homeless problem.
Even solutions that sound simple? Aren’t.
A lot of it breaks down to being a capitalist society instead of a socialized one.
