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.
It seems that “tiny home” has a fluid definition. I’ve seen it used for 120 sq ft homes all the way up to just under 1000 sq ft. The latter measure of just under 650 to 1000 sq ft is close to the size of the hundreds of thousands of starter homes that returning soldiers from WWII that represented the largest boom in private home ownership in US history:
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When developers are usually only building giant single family home outside of the reach of those new to home ownership, the return to these smaller starter homes sounds like a really REALLY good idea! Prior to this there has been almost no homes for sale for someone that is otherwise happy in the space of a one or two bedroom apartment. It meant essentially renting forever in many places in the USA.
There’s a development of tiny homes going up in San Antonio TX that I’ve been watching that looks really promising.
350-650 sq ft with starting prices at $140k. That’s affordable for many people that have been priced out of those WWII age homes of similar sizes that are going for $250k-$400k today.
As you’ve actually lived in a tiny home, I’m interested in your opinion about how these won’t work. How big was your tiny home? What makes it unworkable?
Any time I see pictures of narrow SFHs placed so close to each other I have to ask, why they fuck can’t we just build row homes in this country? They save energy, space, and create much more living area in the same lot size. Properly designed row homes don’t even have issues with noise because they’re built with firewalls that are basically the same as outdoor walls between the homes.