[EarthAmbassador]

600,000 homeless times $10,000 per tiny home, clustered where social services are made available, voila, the problem is solved for $6 billion, which is nothing, excluding the cost of those social services.

The issue is really there is a lack of genuine desire to solve the problem because the cruelty and baked-in lies within American self-reliance philosophy put such a solution outside the Overton window of what is possible.

Instead of a one-time investment, we dump more than $6 billion into the problem but never solve it.

[JohnMakin]

Throwing money and houses at the problem has failed many, many times before. “just put a bunch of houses where social services are” is profoundly unrealistic. are there any areas that aren’t already developed heavily that would even qualify? social services are already criminally underfunded.

Even if you could do this for your extremely underestimated price tag, getting the “chronically” homeless (the people on the street we typically imagine as the homeless) to maintain a property without being a nuisance to neighbors and actually use the social services would require an entirely new social service of its own, with legions case workers being assigned to people, etc.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t build more cheap housing near social services, but I think statements like this profoundly underestimate and trivialize a problem that goes very deep - namely, the complete lack of societal safety nets and access to quality healthcare, all of which is exacerbated by a lack of housing.

[lupusreal]

You make it sound so simple, but the devil is in the details. You've not even gone into the high level details, let alone the low level details. Each level adds more complexity and more cost.

At the highest level, obviously the problem can't be solved with a one time purchase of 600k homes. The homes will be worn out and require replacing, some of them very rapidly, and their number will need to grow with time as new people requiring homes come to the city or drop out of regular housing. How many more homes do you need to build each year after the initial batch?

Furthermore, this number of homes has an infrastructure cost which isn't captured in your 10k figure. How much does it cost to hook each one into the grid, water and sewage? Without these they will be spoiled immediately.

And what of the land cost? Tiny homes aren't usually high rises, so you'll be creating tiny home suburban sprawl. Where do you put it? It should be close to city services, otherwise you might as well make it a camp in the wilderness. But it would be an inefficient use of space close to the city where land is generally valuable, and the cost of the land needs to be factored into it.

Furthermore you need to consider the impact to property values this housing project will have. Reduced property values means reduced revenue, from property taxes, from the city. This should be included in the cost of the project when proposing it.