An abandoned office park in Sacramento will be the site of the first group of 1,200 tiny homes to be built in four cities to address California’s homelessness crisis, the governor’s office announced Wednesday after being criticized for the project experiencing multiple delays.

Gov. Gavin Newsom is under pressure to make good on his promise to show he’s tackling the issue. In March, the Democratic governor announced a plan to gift several California cities hundreds of tiny homes by the fall to create space to help clear homeless encampments that have sprung up across the state’s major cities. The $30 million project would create homes, some as small as 120 square feet (11 square meters), that can be assembled in 90 minutes and cost a fraction of what it takes to build permanent housing.

More than 171,000 homeless people live in California, making up about 30% of the nation’s homeless population. The state has spent roughly $30 billion in the last few years to help them, with mixed results.

  • Arbiter@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Why tiny homes and not high density housing?

    Seems pointlessly inefficient.

    • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      The tiny homes can be put up and taken down quicker from the sounds of the article. Takes the better part of a year to build an apartment building, they can put each of these up in 90 minutes supposedly. Does make me worried for structural integrity but it’s not like California gets severe weather so should be fine.

      • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        Modern Hoovervilles. There is nothing new under the sun, etc. etc. But yes, this is the point, scale up housing quick, get homeless people housed now and try and get them stabilized and back into society.

        • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yea the hope is providing them any stability will help them back on their feet and on the path to living independently again

      • unceme@lemmy.one
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I don’t think it was an engineering consideration, I suspect it was the only thing they could get past the NIMBYs

    • tekktrix@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Maybe easier to rent for pest control? That would be my most practical guess. Also subject to different building codes normally and faster to build than high rise apts.

      • EvilBit@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Plus modularity. If something goes wrong in an apartment building, the units tend to have a shared fate. With tiny houses, if something goes wrong, replace the tiny house and it’s unlikely other units are affected collaterally.

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      $30,000,000 / 1,200 homes = $25,000 per home.

      That seems cheap, and tiny homes will probably still have the density to support mass transit.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — An abandoned office park in Sacramento will be the site of the first group of 1,200 tiny homes to be built in four cities to address California’s homelessness crisis, the governor’s office announced Wednesday after being criticized for the project experiencing multiple delays.

    But seven months after the announcement, those homes haven’t been built, and the state has yet to award any contracts for builders, the Sacramento Bee reported.

    Newsom’s administration said the state is “moving with unprecedented rate” on the project and will finalize the contracts this month, with plans to break ground at the Sacramento location before the end of the year.

    Officials also pointed to a new law signed by Newsom in July to streamline construction of tiny homes.

    “When it comes to projects like this, it’s just not overnight,” Hafsa Kaka, a senior advisor to Newsom, said at a news conference Wednesday.

    San Jose this month has secured a 7.2-acre lot owned by the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority for its 200 homes.


    The original article contains 448 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • Binthinkin@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I thought tiny homes were a good idea until I lived in a couple of them.

    This is a CA project that is wasting money when they could better control rent and ditch air bnb (or make them bend and go back to the niche market).

    This is a stupid idea for a lot of reasons but the most prevalent is that nobody upkeeps their homes properly, do you think they’ll upkeep these?

    The housing crisis is more in depth than “we just need housing” its a systemic problem that keeps getting sidelined.

    Young people STILL can’t afford homes. WHY?

    This isn’t to stabilize things. This is just more bullshit directed by assholes with ZERO IDEAS who are also DEAF.

    • Powerpoint@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Tiny homes are just a shitty bandaid to keep the current garbage flowing. Tax speculators and grow the middle class and people won’t need tiny homes.