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Toronto man creates tiny mobile homes to help unhoused people escape the cold
- tmsh 2y agohttps://www.gofundme.com/f/tiny-tiny-homes-affordable-housing-solutions https://www.gofundme.com/f/tiny-tiny-homes-affordable-housin...
- kaycebasques 2y agoThe cbc.ca article says that each home costs $10K but the GoFundMe page says this: > Each unit costs around $5000 (not including sweat equity) to build, and I will ensure that every penny is spent wisely to create a safe and comfortable home for those who need it the most. So it sounds like the cost of materials has increased or Donais puts aside $5K of funds for every house built for his own living costs. Or maybe after starting the project and getting the larger construction space they can now accurately estimate the overall cost at $10K.
- th0ma5 2y agoMaybe your comment was meant to highlight costs and logistics or maybe it was meant to simultaneously undermine their project and projects like them, who can say? Do you think you'll be contributing or do you think there's fraud and you will dig into it? Hard to say you could have either motive, most any comment online could have either a good or nefarious motive. Maybe you're just wondering aloud or maybe you have an agenda.
- tomComb 2y agoPeople asking tough questions and being careful consumers are exactly what most good charities and other initiatives need. So, I think comments like yours are the ones undermining those good initiatives, which have a hard time being heard in a sea of scams.
- th0ma5 2y agoAccusing organizations of fraud without evidence isn't great.
- kaycebasques 2y agoI don't know why people are assuming malice in my comments. It's great work and I'm just curious about the cost breakdown. I also figured that other HN visitors would have similar questions and I could save them a few minutes of digging around. And yes, I did just donate.
- riiii 2y agoMaterials have gone up. But there are other costs involved than just raw materials. Transport, bought expert services (electrician, etc), tool wear, ... He also has to live and cover unexpected costs.
- kaycebasques 2y ago> Materials have gone up. The GoFundMe campaign was created on June 30th, 2024. Has Canada (or the world) had a big bout of inflation in the last 6 months? (Serious question, I'm not up-to-date with global macroeconomics.)
- stackghost 2y agoCanadian here. The retail price of a 2x4 has fluctuated wildly over the last 18-24 months, mostly disconnected from inflation and due more to global supply chain issues. At one point my local hardware store in a medium sized city was selling a single 8-foot spruce 2x4 for upwards of $14, when pre-COVID it was probably closer to $4.
- kaycebasques 2y agoI remember when prices exploded during covid. Has that happened again in the last 6 months in Canada? Global prices look mostly flat over the last year. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU081 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU081
- stackghost 2y agoMaybe not in the last 6 months (haven't been to the hardware store recently) but the data in TFA could be from 2023, which would fit
- karaterobot 2y agoAnother possibility is simply that the CBC article is incorrect. Or, more generously, that he told them a rough estimate of, e.g. "about $5-$10k" and they went with the higher number.
- cf100clunk 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42540975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42540975
- bad_haircut72 2y agoSome people at my local makerspace decided to build some of these "conestoga huts" to aid local homeless, which is basically a tiny house https://www.communitysupportedshelters.org/conestoga-huts https://www.communitysupportedshelters.org/conestoga-huts as a shelter I would much prefer it over being homeless I guess, but there were issues - Being made primarily out of wood it was cheap and easy to build, but it was HEAVY. I guess this is a good thing once its placed somewhere but it took 6 men to get it onto a trailer and because everyone is a volunteer its not easy finding a time when that many people can show up just to move a house (the building was the fun part) - Where to put it? The city was more annoyed by our efforts (the actual organizers really since I just put in labor) than grateful because they started showing the houses off to people and saying "just as soon as the city tells us where to put it youll get a house" - security on these was decent, I found out that primarily people wanted security from other homeless rather than even shelter - without power or plumbing its not clear to me how actually livable these things would be. Although it had 2 windows it was extremely dark inside Overall I think these types of houses are not solving the root issues - if the city decided to do it and found the land, it would be way better to just tack-weld some metal boxes together and weigh it down with concrete blocks. Then it takes specialists to build though and that sucks the spirit out of volunteers who want to spend a Sunday physically building something, not throw in $200 for a contractor to build 50 of them, even though that would obviously be of more help
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ibejoeb 2y agoIt is certainly not solving the problem. It is probably perpetuating it. Without the other complementary life-critical facilities, nothing changes. These are useful for solving one particular facet: people die from exposure in Toronto. If this did anything to address the actual problem, then there would be no homelessness problem in LA. Quite a few cities have actually solved this problem. They provide housing and all of the additional services, like hygiene facilities, food, and security. Granted, they only solve it for certain cohorts, but it demonstrates that it is rather trivially solvable. That's going to lead to hot political quarreling, so it's a good place to stop. There is no chance that these can provide the full spectrum of services required for a person to thrive. We absolutely can't handle the upkeep on 100,000 one-person boxes. We need to make the shelters better. Many are terrible, but there are better ones, and a lot of that comes down to who is working there. Everyone who is able should make time to volunteer, even just a few shifts, to see what it is and how it can be improved. (It's also a good way to meet people in your city.)
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago[flagged]
- marxisttemp 2y ago[flagged]
- atlintots 2y agoWith the state of the housing market, no one bothers investing in anything else -- it's just not "worth it" when housing is already such a good investment. Not to mention the issue of monopolies.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoThis. People sit on houses like lecherous dragons instead of funding risky startups which can take over the world. There are no stars in Canada. Growing the pie is frowned upon. That "mediocrity" thinking falls all the way down to the local governance level and housing.
- llamaimperative 2y agoAh yes, if only Canada had a lion (?) to reduce capital gains tax (?) you’d get more startups (?) which would then magically solve the problem of homeless people being cold in winter. Or you could, you know, look at perverse housing policy across more or less the entire developed world.
- smnrchrds 2y agoI don't know how your comment is related to the article under discussion. If innovation could solve homelessness, San Francisco wouldn't have had the crisis it currently does. I don't know how changing Toronto to be more like SF in terms of tech companies is supposed to solve homelessness. At best, these are orthogonal issues.
- gruez 2y ago>If innovation could solve homelessness, San Francisco wouldn't have had the crisis it currently does. You can't innovate when zoning regulations and building codes prevent you from doing so.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoBoothbay VETS in Maine has been making not-quite-as-small towable shelters for homeless veterans in Maine since 2019. https://boothbay-vets.com/in-the-press/ https://boothbay-vets.com/in-the-press/
- renewiltord 2y ago[flagged]
- bthallplz 2y ago/s ???
- 101008 2y agoThis is the view of someone who never had to spend a night in the street, in the cold, that never suffered something like this. Yeah, in a perfect world any of this would be needed. But I can assure you that any homeless person would be more than happy to have this instead of spending another night outside. This comment is completely out of touch.
- renewiltord 2y agoYeah, this is exploitation of people because they have no other option. You should care enough for people to make things good for them. If you can’t do it right, don’t do it. This tech bro mentality of move fast and break things doesn’t work with people’s lives. Read a humanities book once in a while instead of being obsessed with technology.
- 101008 2y ago> You should care enough for people to make things good for them. If you can’t do it right, don’t do it. This tech bro mentality of move fast and break things doesn’t work with people’s lives. Yeah, it would be much betterto spend years finding the "right solution" while some people die out there. /s
- renewiltord 2y agoIdeally, yes. We should not do anything to anyone anywhere until we can exhaustively determine what the consequences are. Remember Chesterton's fence and never forget that regulations are written in blood.
- 2y ago
- _9za9 2y agoFor $250 one could build themselves a mobile nanoshelter of my design. Build instructions found at nanoshelters.com
- kimjune01 2y agoYou might also be interested in designs by Paul Elkins. I like his use of coroplast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPWpjnmL3B0&t=213s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPWpjnmL3B0&t=213s
- euniceee3 2y agoWhile his work is inspirational it is really not moving the needle on solving this problem. He is a tinkerer, wish he would put his idea's into motion to produce his designs like the dude making the wheelchairs in Utah.
- robertlagrant 2y agoIs there anything stopping anyone from doing that with his designs?
- lurn_mor 2y agoCoroplast deteriorates quickly in UV light (like the sun). In 2-3 years, those pristine white panels will crumble under your fingertips. I just scrapped some coroplast windows that faced the sun after only 3 years.
- exe34 2y agodid your sketchup account get pushed out of free tier because of the traffic or something? it won't load up on chrome on android or Linux. any chance you would be able to include a downloadable file in some common format please?
- _9za9 2y agoInteresting that the embed doesn't load but the URL in the embed does: https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/embed/5b91607c-93df-4e7c-92b4-bd435f3ce626?token=51_6Xj4IXSs=&binaryName=s21 https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/embed/5b91607c-93df-4e7c-92...
- tomComb 2y agoWow, the formatting of this CBC article is great. It looks like this is their 'low-bandwidth' site. I wish all my news was presented like this.
- soulofmischief 2y agoIt's a great format, only stained by the mention of advertiser tracking cookies at the very bottom.
- tomcam 2y agoBut you can opt out completely, so I’m fine with it
- cf100clunk 2y agoThe given link goes to CBC Lite version as opposed to their regular site at www.cbc.ca/news
- ChrisArchitect 2y agohttps://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-tiny-mobile-homes-1.7419805 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-tiny-mobile-h...
- dan353hehe 2y agoWhole heartedly agree. At first I was confused by there being no images/media, but then I was delighted that got to choose which ones to load. No auto playing videos, or obstructive ads.
- tomcam 2y agoI would actually pay for such news sites.
- __turbobrew__ 2y agoCBC is “free” in that anyone can access it and it is funded by Canadian taxes.
- JasserInicide 2y agounhoused Can we stop with the language propaganda bullshit? They're homeless. We've used the term for decades
- deadbabe 2y agoTechnically I’d say it’s more accurate to call some of these homeless as non-functional drug addicts.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoUsually, mentally ill folks (which can include drug addicts). I've known plenty of "fully functional" drug addicts that make life much harder for everyone, than some schizoaffective dude on the sidewalk. Before the 1980s, when they started shutting down the "warehouse" mental institutions, homelessness was a far less pervasive issue.
- sergiotapia 2y agowe're leaving this doublethink wordplay back in 2024 where it belongs.
- archagon 2y agoNah.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wizzwizz4 2y agoThe words "house" and "home" mean different things. "Houseless" is more correct than "homeless" – except that not all housing is houses, so you'd have to make it "housingless", and "unhoused" is far less clumsy. (I don't think this is one worth fighting: if you feel strongly about neologisms, best to pick your battles.)
- tomcam 2y ago
- euniceee3 2y agoLooks too nice for a stealth shelter. Make it look like a dumpster and nobody will be complaining.
- johnklos 2y agoI love the idea of small homes for everyone, and I'd want to help with similar projects in my areas. This is inspiring. Separately, I absolutely love the "lite" aspect of this news web page. Clean, simple, quick, with an easy button to load an image? Yes, please! More of this!
- osigurdson 2y agoA house, that conforms to e-bike regulations? Photo please.
- fldskfjdslkfj 2y agoZoning laws and housing regulations need to be abolished across the border.
- kkfx 2y agoNon that much related, but inspired by: in the past southern States was the richest also thanks to the climate, and places where circadian delta was little was the most preferred. Than when heating became more automated (meaning you do not have to manually chop wood/dig for coal for most of the year) northern countries get richer, since there was still no A/C. I think we start to reverse again where some sufficiently mild climate zones, where p.v. is meaningful and with BIG circadian delta, to not need cooling in summer nights, will be again the richest a small step at a time as fossils get phased out. At our current technological progress we still need nature to produce food and climate have an immense impact, so well... Try to really think about the not-so-near future, where in most northern/southern areas even if the climate will be less cold heating will be simply too expensive for most. Introduce in the mix issues with melting permafrost and Canadian geological peculiarities... Canada seems to be probably a work zone for poor more than a wealthy country...
- HPsquared 2y agoHuman factors are the most important thing these days to wealth, not geography.
- kkfx 2y agoEnergy is needed to be wealthy, and a country with too limited energy production can't be rich except small fiscal paradises...
- hollerith 2y agoJapan has basically no internal energy production. Ditto Switzerland, Sweden and Finland I think. (Being reliant on energy imports definitely makes it harder for these countries to guarantee their national security in time of war, tho.) Also the Southern US states were never richer than the North.
- Neonlicht 2y agoAmerican style tent cities or Brazillian style shanty towns are not the solution. In my country there's a problem with providing shelters- you don't want to attract every Eastern European crackhead. On the other hand people have died and that's a bit embarrassing as well. The solution was those crazy Christians from the Salvation army. They don't ask for ID and they are a private initiative which allows for full plausible deniability from the government.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoHow did that solve the crackhead problem?
- phoronixrly 2y agoThey housed them no questions asked. That is how you solve the problem.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoThen the story doesn't make sense. The argument was that if the city tried to do that, then people would come from all around and make the problem worse.
- strken 2y agoPossibly by adding a strict set of rules like https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/wmicentral.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/b/3b/b3b12313-15ef-517b-bd3f-31a402761011/5dcd8e6889edb.pdf.pdf https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/wmicentral.com/... that require you to apply for 7 jobs a day and submit to mandatory daily room searches for porn, drugs, and alcohol. Perhaps these might be too onerous for the government to introduce.
- MattGaiser 2y agoHow did the Salvation Army solve the problem?
- 2y ago
- rmbyrro 2y agothis [load image] button is so respectful and considerate, such a pleasant surprise to find on a random website in 2024's internet
- araes 2y agoThat was my immediate response. Best web design in a long time. Instant bookmark (technically, WP landing homepage links) This and https://neuters.de/ https://neuters.de/ (Reuters Plaintext) are the best developments of the last half a decade in WWW news.
- dredmorbius 2y agoA chief difference is that the CBC's lite page is the work of the CBC, whereas Neuters, as with Nitter (its inspiration), Invididious and Piped (both YouTube front-ends), Teddit (Reddit), Bibliogram (defunct) and Proxigram (Instagram), and more[1], are alternative front-ends to services. -------------------------------- Notes: 1. Libredirect has a collection of such alternatives, for YouTube Music, Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, IMDb, Bilibili, Pixiv, Fandom, Imgur, Pinterest, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Tekstowo, Genius, Medium, Quora, GitHub, GitLab, Stack Overflow, Reuters, Snopes, iFunny, Tenor, KnowYourMeme, Urban Dictionary, Goodreads, Wolfram Alpha, Instructables, Wikipedia, Wayback Machine, Search, Translate, Google Maps, Meet, Send Files, Paste Text, and Ultimate Guitar. See: <https://libredirect.github.io/ https://libredirect.github.io/> Several of these are inspired: Snopes -> Suds, iFunny -> UNfunny, Tenor -> Soprnao, Urban Dictionary -> Rural Dictionary.
- dredmorbius 2y agoI'm realising that this is CBC's "lite" website, similar to those of CNN (<https://lite.cnn.com https://lite.cnn.com>) and NPR (<https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/>). Mind that these aren't perfect (I've been working on an improved, "sanified", CNN extractor, as described here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535359>), but are a breath of fresh air compared with bloated sites, and almost always work well with terminal-mode browsers (w3m, lynx, elinks2, etc.) CBC have release notes for this site (launched in 2021), here: <https://medium.com/cbc-digital-labs/cbc-lite-release-notes-cbc-ca-lite-a562a5529738 https://medium.com/cbc-digital-labs/cbc-lite-release-notes-c...>
- averageRoyalty 2y agoSerious question, is there any nuanced difference between "homeless" and "unhoused", or is it just a rebranding attempt (like spastic, then handicapped, then disabled, then differently abled, etc). I suppose in certain circles "homeless" leads to connotations of drug use, dirtyness and crazyness, where as "unhoused" (to me at least) conjures and image of a regular person in a temporary situation.
- buckle8017 2y agoIt's purely a re-brand, the re-branders say that the "unhoused" have homes they're just not houses. It's stupid.
- pkkkzip 2y agoif you look at the NGO that receive government grants they have been doing quite a bit of renovation. Simply changing their brand from "homeless industrial complex" to "unhoused industrial complex" they can bank on slow bureaucracy and continue to pay themselves tech salary to perpetuate the exact same situation that ultimately provides no uplift. There's a correlation between "sanctuary ciies" and NGOs that ultimately hire based on political ideology rather than pragmatic policies. If you do not remove the drugs from the equation the overall situation will not improve. There's a big contrast between homeless population in Japan vs West Coast America and the obvious reason is access to drugs.
- buckle8017 2y agoSF should just buy some large area of land 2 hours away from the city and offer anybody downtown openly doing drugs free drugs if they leave.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y agoWe have an immense amount of free space in CA, it's just nowhere people find desirable, or nowhere the local community would appreciate you parking the temporarily dysfunctional members of society. You could build a fantastic homeless campus in Lancaster CA, there's abundant space, real estate is about as cheap as it gets, you have access to an airport, LA is not too far, it's already practically Meth Mecca. There's fundamentally no reason for cramming 10k people in some of the most unaffordable NIMBY real estate land of one of the most expensive CoL countries in the world. Even if these folks were able to overcome years of raging addiction, what will they do in SF? Learn machine learning? Become a wealth manager? A teacher? A cop? How are they going to make enough to live in the city when even most regular middle class professions can barely make it there?
- sixdimensional 2y agoA different org that is building small intermediate shelters that I think is cool is Pallet: https://palletshelter.com/ https://palletshelter.com/ I'm not affiliated with them, I just think it's a good idea and they are making some real traction.
- crazygringo 2y agoObviously, for the three individual people who live in these, this is great. But surely a single, government-run homeless shelter is far more cost-effective than building a bunch of individual tiny mobile homes? Plus it allows centralized access to services (medical, social, etc.), since the long-term goal is to get them into a job (if possible) and their own place. It's hard for me to see how tiny mobile homes are helping in the long-term.
- weitendorf 2y agoIMO these are more comparable to transitional housing or maybe even a lower quality version of section 8 than to a shelter. If you compare the costs of these to something like an SRO or cheap hotel (common transitional housing in SF) I'm betting these come out ahead. The going rate for SROs here, which I'm assuming isn't far off from any major city in a developed country, comes out to just about $10k/year, and it probably costs cities far more to put homeless people in cheap hotels. Of course, these tiny homes don't just cost $10k upfront because you have to put them somewhere, but as long as they last at least 1-2 years they seem just as cost effective as SROs. Also, homeless shelters are only cost effective for people who put up with them. A lot of homeless people would rather sleep in a tent or a car than a shelter and I honestly can't blame them, I'd probably do the same. Since shelters are less preferable to literally living outside to so many people (even in the absence of drug addiction) they are IMO not cost effective at actually addressing homelessness.
- qingcharles 2y agoHaving been homeless, the reason you see people sleeping rough and not in shelters is out of choice. Firstly, there are lots of restrictions for entering shelters (many won't allow you to stay without ID), and then there are enormous amounts of rules for staying there which makes it akin to prison for the residents (most of whom are fresh out of the joint). The other issue is that if you are recovering from an addiction, then shelters are awful. Literally every person there is trying to sell you some kind of substance, and when they're not doing that they are trying to figure out some other form of crime that you can help them with to get money for their addictions. Homeless people just often want to be left to their own devices, so I can see these tiny homes helping there.
- farceSpherule 2y agoPeople are homeless, not “unhoused” which is not even a word.
- E-Reverance 2y agoI wonder if something like Origami can help scale production and if a crease-able but insulating material even exists
- kazinator 2y agoI don't see how this "unhoused" term is an effective euphemism relative to "homeless". "un-" is not any softer than "-less". For instance, it's not any better to be called "ungrateful" than "thankless". The "home" to "house" change also shows no detectable movement along the euphemistic gradient. This is just a bunch of woke people deciding to use a different word which has about the same sugar content, purely so that they could then feel superior to those who are not yet using the new word.
- bffvhjnh 2y agoWhat’s not to like? The person gets to pat themselves on the back for “raising awareness” or “supporting the cause/people” while accomplishing nothing of value. It’s win win!
- genman 2y agoYes, it's better than freezing to death but Finland and Denmark demonstrate that there exists a much better and humane way to deal with the problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland
- wetpaws 2y ago[dead]