This is my most common fantasy if I somehow came into a billion dollars.
It’s a fantasy, but I would create an apartment complex with mixed 1 2 and 3 bedrooms and set the rent below market value and then find a lawyer to draw up a legal document to turn it into a co-op so that after enough people moved in I could turn control over to them.
If I were a multibillionaire I would do this again and again until non market housing was normal In my city, and anyone wanting to build housing has to compete with a bunch of non market housing.
Are there better, more efficient ways to accomplish this? Yes. Am I glad they at least did something though? Also yes.
Americans will build literal shoeboxes instead of 1 apartment building
When dealing with homeless and mentally ill this setup of isolation from other units is better. Dealing with unsanitary living, smells, fires, sounds, are all are easier to mitigate in this setup. Also America is not hurting for wide open spaces to build this type of thing.
I dunno, wouldn’t it be cheaper to make and wouldn’t be easier to look after as well? (Having all the plumbing, heating, wiring, AC in one place)
Independent homes require a lot of work and maintenance, compared to shared Apartment buildings.
Sanitary wise, I could see it being a problem in both the cases. It really depends on the people.
Besides, just because you have land doesn’t mean you should use it. Trust me, living in a place where there’s virtual no trees to look at, I’d prefer to just live in a shared Apartment and enjoy the view (that’s going by the picture and if there’s one).
Americans are too scared of apartment buildings because it reminds them of the projects, imo. That apartments are a poor person thing.
There are cities where they have tried like in old hotels or old apartments that got refurbished. Usually just ends up in a broke down roach infested place. There are videos on YouTube. I went down a rabbit hole on YouTube about this very thing recently lol
Nor is Canada, where this is.
is it just me or anyone else thinking that row houses would have been way more efficent than these? giving everyone living there more than 1 room
Depends. Given this happened in North America there might very well be existing production lines for these tiny houses, and construction laws are also way simpler to fulfill with those basically anywhere (e.g. in Germany you’d just have had to make the whole place a camping site). They all look pretty standardized, including those solar panels.
Although I’d agree that a properly build big building would probably last longer. Not too sure about that though, I’m just happy to hear there are still people with money actually taking care of those who’re at rock bottom.
I think this is the correct answer, outside of large cities it is not legal to build apartments or row houses in many places in the States. It would probably be significantly easier to skirt the zoning laws to buy a plot of land and put 100 tiny houses on it, than to attempt to get some sort exception granted to the zoning in order to build an apartment or row house.
They are also a lot more expensive. The most expensive with these houses he built is probably the ground, but he might’ve gotten it for free from the town.
Might be, but those look cute as well to be honest.
Millionaire? Nice. Billionaires should follow suit, but 1000x
(With ~800 billionaires in the US, that’s 79,200,000 homes)
Except it would be unethical for a billionaire to throw that much power around. They should relinquish the value back to the communities from where they took it.
They didn’t become billionaires by being charitable.
Quite the contrary. You CAN’T accumulate that much money except by exploiting others, creating issues like homelessness.
That’s my takeaway. The positive effect of the charity of this mere millionaire really does a great job showing just how fucking evil billionaires are. So much potential for positive change in the world siphoned into yachts and propaganda
How many homes do we actually need?
Analysts think we’re about 4.5 million homes short of what we would need to a well-functioning housing market. I’m not sure exactly how they’re defining that.
I would assume that figure takes into account not just how many homeless there are, but renters and home prices vs wages as well. There isn’t a single county in the US where a worker with the average annual wage can afford to buy a house at the average price range in that area, for example.
Drive through a small town, and all of your questions will be answered.
This is not a housing problem, it’s not a mental health problem, it’s a fucking unadulterated greed problem.
Please arm yourselves. The opposition will.
Funny story, we actually have enough housing for everyone. It just isn’t always where people want to live, and corporate landlords would rather leave a space vacant to drive up rents than make all of their inventory available, so there is a shit ton of residential (and commercial) property that is basically abandoned.
What we need is tax on vacant property. Make it a ladder system so its worse based on number of vacant units and value.
And eliminate corporate ownership of residential property. Tax the shit out of anyone owning more than three residences, and bring property values back down to earth. Bail out homeowners who owe mortgages for more than the value of the properties, and let the market self-correct.
I’d go so far as to attack the idea of a corporation. Letting a business own property or act as a liability shield for human choices is clearly bad for society.
It goes both ways though. I have a corporation for my contracting business to shield possible frivolous lawsuits from unscrupulous people. I do my best to screen clients and not work for wackos, but that’s not necessarily enough to protect myself and family.
Same. Different entities for different concerns keeps each siloed WRT finance and liability. But that should have no bearing on what I believe is true.
TLDR: Thomas Jefferson asked us to “crush” them. Better late than never.
Corporate entities in the USA are out of control and absolutely must be reigned in at every level of government. Their overreach is not a new problem. Thomas Jefferson said it had already begun in a letter from 1816:
I hope we shall take warning from the example [of the lawless English aristocracy] and crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations (emphasis mine) which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country.
Spoiler, we didn’t. We just let them bribe legislators to change the laws so they no longer even had to defy them. And of course a few of the largest corporations recently purchased the republic outright for a relatively paltry sum, as if it were a startup acquisition.
It’s obvious to anyone who owns corporations that they make nearly everything easier. So much about the economy and government has been hugely optimized for them, while the real flesh-and-blood citizenry experience greater friction year over year.
Edit: TLDR because no one reads walls of text
There’s also the fact that many of those houses have sat vacant and have been left to rot for many years, meaning that plenty of them need to be demolished and rebuilt before they can be lived in. Small towns have been dying for decades as suburban sprawl consumes ever-increasing amounts of land and bleeds our cities dry of tax revenue, forcing them to continue making more suburbs to pay off the previous ones.
Some estimates say there are as many as 12 vacant homes per homeless person this country.
Last estimates I saw before the pandemic had the rate above 30:1. I haven’t looked since then, but I’m certain it’s only gotten worse.
Yeah, we were gonna do that anyway. After covid, I lost faith in humanities ability to be decent.
The official homeless number for 2024 in the US was 771,480. That’s probably just reported and not actual.
I’ve heard elsewhere that we already have enough vacant homes being reverse squatted by property management companies to house every homeless person.
Vacant homes in general, yes. Similar numbers of people have second homes for vacations as are homeless in the US. There are also quite a few abandoned homes in dying rural communities with no jobs.
Property management companies are managing rentals, not squatting. Some investors hold properties empty, but they aren’t in large enough numbers to be THE problem.
is this a joke? any of those buildings are smaller then the cars they have!
I’m sorry, are the free houses you built for the homeless much larger than that?
They’re homeless, not mansionless. A large number of tiny houses is absolutely a fantastic way to help.
Exactly, one of the major hurdles of being unhoused is not having a house. You have to have an address to begin the process of getting assistance in most places.
Look up articles about ADUs (accessory dwelling units). This is a legitimate housing category based on the tiny house fad
Considering everything some of them own can fit in a shopping cart, they are mansions.
They look like toilets with a cute small porch
And why were they homeless?
Why were they homeless???
99 is not nearly enough but it’s a start at least
Not nearly enough? How many homeless people were in this guy’s town?!
i mean depends how big the town is
99 would take in every homeless person in a wide berth around here. WIDE. And I’m next door to the second poorest county in Florida.
one thing most people don’t realize is: most homeless people don’t look homeless… they actually go out of their way to not look that way.
the people that look homeless to you are just the most extremely disabled homeless…
I would say that this particular millionaire did his part to help out. If every millionaire/billionaire spend the same percentage of their wealth on similar projects we would be in pretty good shape as far as homelessness goes.
Source? Did it actually work? Very cool if so.
Here’s one article about it.
https://macleans.ca/society/tiny-homes-fredericton/
I don’t remember where I saw this the first time, but it did mention that this had become a thing in a few American cities too (this story was from Fredericton, Canada)
If you give a homeless person a home, then by definition, they are no longer homeless.
On a less pedantic note, yes, it should. Some countries (like mine) provide a secure place to live as step one, when helping the homeless. Having somewhere safe to sleep, keep your property, etc. makes all the other steps involved in solving your problems much easier, leading to a better success rate in getting people back on their feet.
Further it enables them to apply for all manners of documents as they have an address to their name. Try getting any sort of document from a bank or governmental branch without an address. Trying to get a passport without address? Nope. No address no ID, no Bank account and mostly no employment anywhere without either of the two.
This is what I found: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/12-neighbours-founder-transitional-housing-1.7510785
But basically, this is something that works in Finland well enough https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/look-finlands-housing-first-initiative
My city does something like this as part of our homeless program and we’re at “net-zero” homeless. It doesn’t work on it’s own, but the tiny homes give people a stable place to keep their stuff safe and the elements off their bodies, it gives them an address they can use for things like mail and applications, and it gives social workers a place to find them reliably. It’s the start of a long process to help them back to their feet.
Being on the streets is also incredibly dangerous. Putting drug users around other drug users as well doesn’t keep them off drugs.
I used to live in a town that did something very similar to this. It sorta worked but mostly did not. But as another commenter pointed out you need more than just homes. Obviously they help a ton but a lot of people need more help than just a roof over their head. Financially, medically, mentally, employment… It’s a bigger, more complicated problem.
But it goes without saying that this is a step in the right direction and absolutely better than collectively shrugging our shoulders and walking away.
Housing is the basis for addressing most of those other issues.
I’m chill with rich people as long as some of their money goes to helping people
Do they pay him rent now?
Someone took 99 families off the streets? Wow fuck that asshole, how dare she have enough money to do that. How dare she not give up her home and make it 100 families off the streets, not good enough!
-Half this website, angry 99 families now have a place to live who didn’t before this event
He denied their choice to live like they wanted and God intended! What an asshole. Who is he to decide for them?
This website is full of envy is the simple answer. Hate for people who have more, tons of entitlement and the “I totally wouldn’t want to be a billionaire!” bullcrap flying around.
the bullshit is that the system left 99 people without homes in the first place
She?
Bold of you to assume their gender identity!
(I need glasses)
The anger isn’t (necessarily) for the rich person who housed people. It’s for the system who left people homeless in the first place, the system that will put those people back on the streets if they don’t pay rent/property taxes/whatever other fee people have to pay to exist, the system where the solution is literally just “have rich people pay their share and almost everything will be fixed” but for some reason the people in charge can’t (or don’t want to) figure that out.
You conflating anger with the system with anger for people getting houses is disingenuous.
Where are they built in relation to necessary services, and what other services are available?
Is there on site support for drugs and mental health issues?
Is anybody’s stuff going to be safe there? Or are they dumped out of sight and mind?
You have to ‘invest’ in preventing the causes of homelessness in the first place, which has proved impossible under capitalism. I doubt corrupt dictatorships of the proletariat such as the Soviet Union did any better.
Yo
Idea
What if ALL the houses we build are for reducing homelessness?
At least think about it
