Are there better, more efficient ways to accomplish this? Yes. Am I glad they at least did something though? Also yes.
Americans will build literal shoeboxes instead of 1 apartment building
is it just me or anyone else thinking that row houses would have been way more efficent than these? giving everyone living there more than 1 room
Depends. Given this happened in North America there might very well be existing production lines for these tiny houses, and construction laws are also way simpler to fulfill with those basically anywhere (e.g. in Germany you’d just have had to make the whole place a camping site). They all look pretty standardized, including those solar panels.
Although I’d agree that a properly build big building would probably last longer. Not too sure about that though, I’m just happy to hear there are still people with money actually taking care of those who’re at rock bottom.
I think this is the correct answer, outside of large cities it is not legal to build apartments or row houses in many places in the States. It would probably be significantly easier to skirt the zoning laws to buy a plot of land and put 100 tiny houses on it, than to attempt to get some sort exception granted to the zoning in order to build an apartment or row house.
not legal
I don’t know this, but I am willing to bet it’s not legal because of the segregation era suburban dystopia laws.
Might be, but those look cute as well to be honest.
This is my most common fantasy if I somehow came into a billion dollars.
It’s a fantasy, but I would create an apartment complex with mixed 1 2 and 3 bedrooms and set the rent below market value and then find a lawyer to draw up a legal document to turn it into a co-op so that after enough people moved in I could turn control over to them.
If I were a multibillionaire I would do this again and again until non market housing was normal In my city, and anyone wanting to build housing has to compete with a bunch of non market housing.
You might be interested in the story of Tengelo Park.
Harris Rosen went from a childhood in a rough New York City neighborhood to becoming a millionaire whose company owns seven hotels in Orlando, but his self-made success is not his proudest achievement.
Twenty years ago, the Orlando, Fla. neighborhood of Tangelo Park was a crime-infested place where people were afraid to walk down the street. The graduation rate at the local high school was 25 percent. Having amassed a fortune from his success in the hotel business, Rosen decided Tangelo Park needed some hospitality of its own.
“Hospitality really is appreciating a fellow human being,” Rosen told Gabe Gutierrez in a segment that aired on TODAY Wednesday. “I came to the realization that I really had to now say, ‘Thank you.’’’
Rosen, 73, began his philanthropic efforts by paying for day care for parents in Tangelo Park, a community of about 3,000 people. When those children reached high school, he created a scholarship program in which he offered to pay free tuition to Florida state colleges for any students in the neighborhood.
In the two decades since starting the programs, Rosen has donated nearly $10 million, and the results have been remarkable. The high school graduation rate is now nearly 100 percent, and some property values have quadrupled. The crime rate has been cut in half, according to a study by the University of Central Florida.
“We’ve given them hope,’’ Rosen said. “We’ve given these kids hope, and given the families hope. And hope is an amazing thing.”
Who would have thought that the way to reduce crime was to reduce people’s need to commit crimes by giving them homes and a future.
Bruce Wayne but sane
10M over 20 years to help a community of 3000 or $166 per person per year. USA is planning to increase the military budget by 150B this year or over $400 per US citIzen…
Yeah I was shocked by the math on that one too. It is ridiculously cheap to lower crime and poverty, while increasing graduation rates and college enrollment. It’s almost like keeping people poor and stupid and criminal is intentional.
Yo
Idea
What if ALL the houses we build are for reducing homelessness?
At least think about it
So this guy shouldn’t be news, this should be the standard, it’s scary that the one good guy with enough money to do something like this is the exception and not the norm.
We all evolved to live in tribes; we have to work together as people.
The problem is that we allow individuals to amass so much wealth, it inevitably leads to the rest of us being at their mercy like that. If we’re lucky, they’ll be sorta benevolent, like this person. Would be much easier if we took out the randomness and just had the funds to do necessary stuff like this collectively.
That’s why we elected people to help the community with our collected funds. To help govern the distribution of the community effort. Well, that was the idea.
Just want to remind everyone that we don’t have a housing shortage, we have a cost of living crisis. Everyone deserves a place to live and we have plenty. The will is the only thing. Fight YIMBY traitors. We can do it!
Yimby traitors?
What’s wrong with yimbys?
They won’t solve the underlying problem. Sure, that requires wealth redistribution, but where is the downside?
“YIMBY traitor” – isn’t that just a NIMBY?
Two things can be wrong. We can (and should) dispose of landlords and build more housing.
Someone took 99 families off the streets? Wow fuck that asshole, how dare she have enough money to do that. How dare she not give up her home and make it 100 families off the streets, not good enough!
-Half this website, angry 99 families now have a place to live who didn’t before this event
She?
Bold of you to assume their gender identity!
(I need glasses)
The anger isn’t (necessarily) for the rich person who housed people. It’s for the system who left people homeless in the first place, the system that will put those people back on the streets if they don’t pay rent/property taxes/whatever other fee people have to pay to exist, the system where the solution is literally just “have rich people pay their share and almost everything will be fixed” but for some reason the people in charge can’t (or don’t want to) figure that out.
You conflating anger with the system with anger for people getting houses is disingenuous.
He denied their choice to live like they wanted and God intended! What an asshole. Who is he to decide for them?
Millionaire? Nice. Billionaires should follow suit, but 1000x
(With ~800 billionaires in the US, that’s 79,200,000 homes)
Except it would be unethical for a billionaire to throw that much power around. They should relinquish the value back to the communities from where they took it.
That’s my takeaway. The positive effect of the charity of this mere millionaire really does a great job showing just how fucking evil billionaires are. So much potential for positive change in the world siphoned into yachts and propaganda
How many homes do we actually need?
Funny story, we actually have enough housing for everyone. It just isn’t always where people want to live, and corporate landlords would rather leave a space vacant to drive up rents than make all of their inventory available, so there is a shit ton of residential (and commercial) property that is basically abandoned.
Some estimates say there are as many as 12 vacant homes per homeless person
this countryin the United States.
Edit: millionaire in OP is from Canada
Last estimates I saw before the pandemic had the rate above 30:1. I haven’t looked since then, but I’m certain it’s only gotten worse.
What we need is tax on vacant property. Make it a ladder system so its worse based on number of vacant units and value.
And eliminate corporate ownership of residential property. Tax the shit out of anyone owning more than three residences, and bring property values back down to earth. Bail out homeowners who owe mortgages for more than the value of the properties, and let the market self-correct.
I’d go so far as to attack the idea of a corporation. Letting a business own property or act as a liability shield for human choices is clearly bad for society.
It goes both ways though. I have a corporation for my contracting business to shield possible frivolous lawsuits from unscrupulous people. I do my best to screen clients and not work for wackos, but that’s not necessarily enough to protect myself and family.
Same. Different entities for different concerns keeps each siloed WRT finance and liability. But that should have no bearing on what I believe is true.
TLDR: Thomas Jefferson asked us to “crush” them. Better late than never.
Corporate entities in the USA are out of control and absolutely must be reigned in at every level of government. Their overreach is not a new problem. Thomas Jefferson said it had already begun in a letter from 1816:
I hope we shall take warning from the example [of the lawless English aristocracy] and crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations (emphasis mine) which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country.
Spoiler, we didn’t. We just let them bribe legislators to change the laws so they no longer even had to defy them. And of course a few of the largest corporations recently purchased the republic outright for a relatively paltry sum, as if it were a startup acquisition.
It’s obvious to anyone who owns corporations that they make nearly everything easier. So much about the economy and government has been hugely optimized for them, while the real flesh-and-blood citizenry experience greater friction year over year.
Edit: TLDR because no one reads walls of text
There’s also the fact that many of those houses have sat vacant and have been left to rot for many years, meaning that plenty of them need to be demolished and rebuilt before they can be lived in. Small towns have been dying for decades as suburban sprawl consumes ever-increasing amounts of land and bleeds our cities dry of tax revenue, forcing them to continue making more suburbs to pay off the previous ones.
The official homeless number for 2024 in the US was 771,480. That’s probably just reported and not actual.
Analysts think we’re about 4.5 million homes short of what we would need to a well-functioning housing market. I’m not sure exactly how they’re defining that.
I would assume that figure takes into account not just how many homeless there are, but renters and home prices vs wages as well. There isn’t a single county in the US where a worker with the average annual wage can afford to buy a house at the average price range in that area, for example.
I see no reason to believe that letting this guy make unilateral decisions is somehow better than taxing him appropriately and using the revenue to build public housing.
Did anyone say that it was better this way? He could just go buy another yatch instead.
Dont let perfection be the enemy of better
millionares($) wouldn’t be able to afford multiple yachts, or even so large of a yacht. billionares, those who offshoring wealth makes sense for, are the problem.
not the docter nor lawyer, but the whale.
millionares pay about 48%-49%, at least where im from.
This statement might be true, but we’re not taxing him. Should he just donate his money to the government?
I don’t even think you can do that.
Absolutely. We don’t need kings making decisions like this. The downside is the difficulty in forcing government and the anti-help-anyone segment of our society to spend such taxation correctly to actually help people.
anti-help-anyone segment of our society
This is the biggest problem (IMHO) to getting government to assist anyone that is not already rich. The rich get help - i.e. which gets a special tax break:
- Walmart opening a new store (and driving all the little people out of business)?
- The little business owner who hires 2-5 employees?
The haves scream they are being “robbed” if you suggest taking any of “their tax dollars” to help the have-nots. It’s not “their tax dollars”, it’s “our tax dollars”.
I’m also angry he did a good thing despite the government’s abject failure to tax the rich.
If every billionaire did this and ended homelessness perhaps they would have a point about their wealth hoarding. I won’t be holding my breath for this to happen though. Tax the rich!
Sure there are lots of failures to the way we govern ourselves. This shouldn’t be a need. The reality is that it is a need and that person did what he could. Have you?
I see one: he actually did something instead of a council that blows all of the money on meetings
What makes you think Trump’s administration will make better use of that money?
Especially because his unilateral decision is optional. Someone got lucky with his choice vs someone was guaranteed an outcome.
Corruption could make that money go to some people’s 3rd, 4rd or their relatives houses UNFORTUNATELY . The question here is: what about those who pay a rent???
Corruption already makes most millionaires’ and billionaires’ money go to that anyway. At least if it’s taxed some of it will actually go to toward necessary housing, maybe even frequently enough that it’s not newsworthy when it does, the way it is now.
I did not understand what you said, sorry
You’re worried that if we collect money from the wealthy through taxation, it might not be used to reduce homelessness. However, if we don’t tax the wealthy, they’ll spend the money on their own goals, which definitely won’t be to reduce homelessness. While you’re right that taxes are largely wasted, they do still fund important things such as fire departments, medical research, and yes, government housing. It’s true that we need to implement better tax management systems, but we also need a wealth tax.
I never said we don’t need a taxation system, I’m just reporting what’s happening almost everywhere.
Alternatively a possibility is to give the public sector to woman, they should be a little bit more immune to corruption (I might be wrong though).
So we’re so scared of corruption that (checks notes) we stop even trying for fairness and instead just let rich fucks make all the decisions and hope for the best?
It’s clear that a lot of people switched to that way of thinking, thanks to those corrupted people.
That’s what current voting results say all around
This is obviously way better, come on. Why involve middle men in something like this? Add more layers and it becomes less efficient. Less of the money goes to helping people and it gets spread around to different agencies, or even worse goes to government contractors who can charge ridiculous rates because they know someone and didn’t have to compete for the contract. I worked at a place once where we got a couple hundred thousand dollars for a useless study because if the money didn’t get used it would make their budget smaller for next year. That kind of thing happens all the time.
Fight against homelessness shall not be charity driven.
Yes but this is still a good idea in the meantime
How good it is depends on the details, of course.
I have nothing against “home first” strategy, however when some random millionaire decide without impact study or methodology how to fix the problem it might look like home shelters outside of zones where homeless get their social, work or food access, without lights, water or any usefull public infrastructure.
That’s a good point. Homeless encampments will be within range of all the services they need. No guarantee these houses are anywhere near those services.
But like someone else said, it all depends on the details.
Really what this is showing me is that the public coffers don’t have nearly enough money in this region if some random is out here addressing critical infrastructure problems.
Nice!
Now, it would be good not to rely on good will of some individuals and actually enforce this for all the rich.
But still mad respect for the man.
Good for him, but this is pretty much an Orphan-Crushing Machine moment.
Haha uhhh gawd.
First time reading this?
And why were they homeless?
Why were they homeless???
