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I've spent some time living in a third-world country and one of the things I've observed is that even the poorest people are still living in some sort of struct

I've spent some time living in a third-world country and one of the things I've observed is that even the poorest people are still living in some sort of structure that is capable of providing a limited amount of protection from the elements, a small bit of privacy, and a place to come back to at night. Even in villages, these small homes have electricity and satellite TV. They're often built with low cost materials like bricks and tin roofs, but they allow people who can't afford a brick-and-mortor home the opportunity to have some stability in life. I'm a big fan of safety regulations for construction but after time living abroad, I'm beginning to see a case for loosening some construction rules to make true low-cost housing available to more people. I don't intend to say bricks and tin, nor so dense it becomes a large fire risk, but some simple allowances that would let people build theirselves a small place to call home without city regulators barring it. Perhaps this could help with the increasing amount of health issues occurring like typhus.

sambull 8y ago
We can't because we put them there for this reason. Zoning regulations affecting occupation like needing to be connected to water, sewage and sometimes electrical grid instantly prevent most of this. We could give people land and a shelter; but they wouldn't be able to occupy them, and we are UNWILLING to change this.
jdavis703 8y ago
I’m not sure we even need to lower construction rules. It might be enough to just build dorm-room style (i.e. SROs) for affordable housing. The problem is people don’t want this kind of housing going in near them. If you thought opposition to “luxury condos” was bad, wait until you see the opposition to homeless shelters in SF.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  That’s lowering the standard of housing. Many of the fancy 4 story buildings in NYC housed like 10-20x more people in those kind of accommodations. Opening that door will recreate the situations that led people who could to flee the city again.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
DoreenMichele 8y ago
It likely can't. Structures of the sort you are describing only work decently in small villages where people all know each other, etc. They tend to not work in more developed areas with a higher population density and different social fabric. If you are interested in addressing the housing aspect of this in the US, look into "Missing Middle Housing" and ways to promote more of it in your community. These are more affordable forms of housing that were common at one time in the US that have been largely zoned out of existence while we promote ever larger single-family detached homes and suburban sprawl. That's the crux of the issue in the US. It doesn't have to be that way.
- freddie_mercury 8y ago
  > Structures of the sort you are describing only work decently in small villages where people all know each other This hasn't been my experience at all. I live in a developing country. I've also spent significant amount of time in two cities: one with a population of 13 million and one with a population over 1 million. In both cases, there is lots and lots of housing just like the OP describes. It works fine in a big city. It doesn't require a village. There's an old lady who lives down the street. Her "house" is about 1 meter by 3 meters and is two levels. She sleeps upstairs and cooks downstairs.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I seriously doubt that. I would bet that you tend to see a lot more theft and other crime committed against people who have flimsy, unsecured shelter in more dense populations. In developing countries where people routinely still use a field to relieve their bowels and bladder in spite of the fact that you have city-style density levels, women get routinely raped and murdered while trying to pee or poop. This is such a widespread and common phenomenon that if you search on the term "rape, murder and lack of a toilet" you will find no shortage of articles on the subject. So I seriously doubt it works just fine. It probably doesn't work just fine.
    - jacobolus 8y ago
      Shanty towns slowly developing into established neighborhoods with permanent houses is the normal way cities have been built throughout history, and still dominates throughout the developing world. A significant proportion of all people alive today live in shanty towns. Of course urban shanty towns can be dangerous and have plenty of problems. So do rural villages.
logfromblammo 8y ago
Interlocking dry-stack (mortarless) compressed-earth blocks are actually very earthquake resistant as one-story buildings. Dry-stack bricks and corrugated weathering-steel roofs wouldn't be all that bad, even in well-developed economies. And the bricks would be reusable when the original structure is no longer needed. Restack the brick house onto pallets and wrap in plastic film; no bulldozer necessary. The alternating-cesspit outhouse is also an acceptable cheap sanitation solution. You don't really need to have the same high construction standards for rural poor counties as for rich urban counties. You're just preventing the former from using intermediate bootstrap technologies to reach a higher living standard.
noneeeed 8y ago
In a lot of these sorts of situations land ownership is a bit different. In the UK (and I assume in the US) there just isn't anywhere you could construct something like that without being moved on. Here in the UK, the major issue for home building seems to be less around the physical construction of houses (there are lots of low cost ways we can and do build), it's securing land to actually build on and that you can get planning permission for.
bluGill 8y ago
How much of that is because the inhabitants don't own the land their house is on? Each situation is different so I can't comment on what you saw, but in many cases the people don't own the land their house is on, thus they build cheap because when the police they can pack everything up and leave quickly are so are out almost nothing.
jtolmar 8y ago
There are six times more empty homes in the US than there are homeless people. This is not a supply problem, it's a distribution problem.
- slavik81 8y ago
  I briefly lived next to a 'housing-first' building, and it became very clear why there was a 24/7 staff. At least once I week I encountered someone who needed to be helped home because they were disabled, lost, drunk or some combination thereof. The staff basically filled in for the social support network that the residents didn't have. Residents may have been able to mostly get by on their own, but when they needed help, they really needed help. Living alone did not seem like a realistic option for the people I encountered. Reading through my comment and the thread context again, it's hard to come to a single conclusion. It's complicated. There's many different situations that ultimately end up as homelessness, and the different situations require different interventions to fix.
lisper 8y ago
> these small homes have electricity and satellite TV. Not all of them. In many parts of Africa, electricity is still a luxury, as is having a supply of clean water nearby. What African villagers have that American urban homeless people do not is access to open land where they can dig a latrine.
- kylehotchkiss 8y ago
  I saw the small homes with satellites in a Nepali village in the hills. It was very confusing at first to see people enjoying Indian TV shows in their homes (described above) and playing on their smartphones. I think they had a village latrine though.
rjf72 8y ago
Socioeconomic stuff in the developing world is something I think we can learn a lot from, but also has to be taken in context. There's one factor in particular that's just so different. In the US crime is extremely strongly connected to low income. Alongside the crime also comes drug abuse and other related issues. In many developing nations this is not such an issue. Building regulations and 'NIMBY' in general are often, at least in part, proxies for this issue. It's not until you've lived in the developing world and seeing 6 figure condos next to rundown shanties that you start to see how things differ. At first it's a depressing sight, but then you eventually come to realize that it's a million times better than the self economic segregation that we resort to in the US as we try to collectively escape crime. In the developing world when you speak of a 'nice' area you are often talking overtly and only about the positives of an area, as opposed to any 'non-negative.' In the US when you speak of a 'nice' area there's an often undertone of 'Can I walk around in this area at 10pm without having to worry about falling victim to randomly targeted violent crime?' In my opinion this is the true fundamental root of so many of our social and socioeconomic issues. If it could somehow be solved everything else would begin to fall in place with the slightest of effort.

sambull 8y ago

We can't because we put them there for this reason. Zoning regulations affecting occupation like needing to be connected to water, sewage and sometimes electrical grid instantly prevent most of this. We could give people land and a shelter; but they wouldn't be able to occupy them, and we are UNWILLING to change this.

jdavis703 8y ago

I’m not sure we even need to lower construction rules. It might be enough to just build dorm-room style (i.e. SROs) for affordable housing. The problem is people don’t want this kind of housing going in near them. If you thought opposition to “luxury condos” was bad, wait until you see the opposition to homeless shelters in SF.

Spooky23 8y ago
That’s lowering the standard of housing. Many of the fancy 4 story buildings in NYC housed like 10-20x more people in those kind of accommodations. Opening that door will recreate the situations that led people who could to flee the city again.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

DoreenMichele 8y ago

It likely can't. Structures of the sort you are describing only work decently in small villages where people all know each other, etc. They tend to not work in more developed areas with a higher population density and different social fabric. If you are interested in addressing the housing aspect of this in the US, look into "Missing Middle Housing" and ways to promote more of it in your community. These are more affordable forms of housing that were common at one time in the US that have been largely zoned out of existence while we promote ever larger single-family detached homes and suburban sprawl. That's the crux of the issue in the US. It doesn't have to be that way.

freddie_mercury 8y ago
> Structures of the sort you are describing only work decently in small villages where people all know each other This hasn't been my experience at all. I live in a developing country. I've also spent significant amount of time in two cities: one with a population of 13 million and one with a population over 1 million. In both cases, there is lots and lots of housing just like the OP describes. It works fine in a big city. It doesn't require a village. There's an old lady who lives down the street. Her "house" is about 1 meter by 3 meters and is two levels. She sleeps upstairs and cooks downstairs.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I seriously doubt that. I would bet that you tend to see a lot more theft and other crime committed against people who have flimsy, unsecured shelter in more dense populations. In developing countries where people routinely still use a field to relieve their bowels and bladder in spite of the fact that you have city-style density levels, women get routinely raped and murdered while trying to pee or poop. This is such a widespread and common phenomenon that if you search on the term "rape, murder and lack of a toilet" you will find no shortage of articles on the subject. So I seriously doubt it works just fine. It probably doesn't work just fine.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    Shanty towns slowly developing into established neighborhoods with permanent houses is the normal way cities have been built throughout history, and still dominates throughout the developing world. A significant proportion of all people alive today live in shanty towns. Of course urban shanty towns can be dangerous and have plenty of problems. So do rural villages.

logfromblammo 8y ago

Interlocking dry-stack (mortarless) compressed-earth blocks are actually very earthquake resistant as one-story buildings. Dry-stack bricks and corrugated weathering-steel roofs wouldn't be all that bad, even in well-developed economies. And the bricks would be reusable when the original structure is no longer needed. Restack the brick house onto pallets and wrap in plastic film; no bulldozer necessary. The alternating-cesspit outhouse is also an acceptable cheap sanitation solution. You don't really need to have the same high construction standards for rural poor counties as for rich urban counties. You're just preventing the former from using intermediate bootstrap technologies to reach a higher living standard.

noneeeed 8y ago

In a lot of these sorts of situations land ownership is a bit different. In the UK (and I assume in the US) there just isn't anywhere you could construct something like that without being moved on. Here in the UK, the major issue for home building seems to be less around the physical construction of houses (there are lots of low cost ways we can and do build), it's securing land to actually build on and that you can get planning permission for.

bluGill 8y ago

How much of that is because the inhabitants don't own the land their house is on? Each situation is different so I can't comment on what you saw, but in many cases the people don't own the land their house is on, thus they build cheap because when the police they can pack everything up and leave quickly are so are out almost nothing.

jtolmar 8y ago

There are six times more empty homes in the US than there are homeless people. This is not a supply problem, it's a distribution problem.

slavik81 8y ago
I briefly lived next to a 'housing-first' building, and it became very clear why there was a 24/7 staff. At least once I week I encountered someone who needed to be helped home because they were disabled, lost, drunk or some combination thereof. The staff basically filled in for the social support network that the residents didn't have. Residents may have been able to mostly get by on their own, but when they needed help, they really needed help. Living alone did not seem like a realistic option for the people I encountered. Reading through my comment and the thread context again, it's hard to come to a single conclusion. It's complicated. There's many different situations that ultimately end up as homelessness, and the different situations require different interventions to fix.

lisper 8y ago

> these small homes have electricity and satellite TV. Not all of them. In many parts of Africa, electricity is still a luxury, as is having a supply of clean water nearby. What African villagers have that American urban homeless people do not is access to open land where they can dig a latrine.

kylehotchkiss 8y ago
I saw the small homes with satellites in a Nepali village in the hills. It was very confusing at first to see people enjoying Indian TV shows in their homes (described above) and playing on their smartphones. I think they had a village latrine though.

rjf72 8y ago

Socioeconomic stuff in the developing world is something I think we can learn a lot from, but also has to be taken in context. There's one factor in particular that's just so different. In the US crime is extremely strongly connected to low income. Alongside the crime also comes drug abuse and other related issues. In many developing nations this is not such an issue. Building regulations and 'NIMBY' in general are often, at least in part, proxies for this issue. It's not until you've lived in the developing world and seeing 6 figure condos next to rundown shanties that you start to see how things differ. At first it's a depressing sight, but then you eventually come to realize that it's a million times better than the self economic segregation that we resort to in the US as we try to collectively escape crime. In the developing world when you speak of a 'nice' area you are often talking overtly and only about the positives of an area, as opposed to any 'non-negative.' In the US when you speak of a 'nice' area there's an often undertone of 'Can I walk around in this area at 10pm without having to worry about falling victim to randomly targeted violent crime?' In my opinion this is the true fundamental root of so many of our social and socioeconomic issues. If it could somehow be solved everything else would begin to fall in place with the slightest of effort.