I really do want to put some positive framing on tiny houses in general because they are, utilized properly, a wonderful idea that can save lives.
The problem isn’t the idea of a tiny house. The idea is that a tiny house should be anything but temporary emergency shelter. I’d have loved to see a few thousand tiny houses in New Orleans after Katrina. They’d be a great solution for migrant-border crises such as the one at the southern US border, or currently blowing up at the Poland-Belorus border. Refugees, the displaced, situations when you need dignified shelter on the ground for a lot of people fast, and many of them may be transient, and many of the shelters may be used by many people, and so forth.
That is a wonderful use of the tiny house concept and I don’t wish to discourage research and development in that area in the least.
It’s just not a serious or effective solution to homelessness.
We have the homes, and the only reason we’re keeping them away from those who need them is someone wants to make a buck.
It is my carefully considered, and hopefully now well-defended, opinion that this is just not the way to run a decent society, and in spite of the earnest good will and compassionate intent of so many of those working on them, applying the technology of tiny houses to the problem of homelessness only serves in every way to perpetuate and reinforce the social structures that create it in the first place.
It may well be that this approach can be useful in parts of the world where there aren’t enough homes to go around, but that just isn’t the case here. We have 15 million real people homes where we can put people who don’t have them if we want to, we just have to want to.
We don’t want to.
Maybe we should work as hard on changing that as we are on building tiny house Hoovervilles.
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First of all it is not just to satisfy “fascists” to be compensated when one’s property bought with private money is confiscated by the government- it is right and fair and the very least that should be done, you know unless you are communist scum. There, we got the mutual name calling out of the way. Now 2 inconvenient truths for you – First what makes you think the government (under either/any D or R administration) will take the unused inventory from big bad corporate unused housing inventory? They will take it away from middle class landlords, for whom this is a business and livelihood. This same segment of landlords is still hurting from the Covid era that prevented them from evicting tenants who did not pay rent (and was taken advantage terribly by the way). But let the unit stay unoccupied “too long” and let the government take it, uh NO. You trust a government that taxes the hell out of the middle class but has loopholes for elites and corporations? This would be the same. The 2nd inconvenient truth is whether it be streets, tents, tiny homes, or nice enough pretty confiscated houses- it won’t solve the underlying issue of homelessness- which is not actually homelessness at all – but the underlying issues of addiction and mental illness. Put these addicts and untreated mentally ill into neighborhoods and drugs, crime, and death follow. Middle class folk don’t want that either – shocker I know, insert more name calling here I suppose. How about we get honest about that though – the WHY are people homeless—and stop the hyperbole of which type of socialist housing can solve this problem.