Aside from building every person who needs one a home, how about just giving all of the vacant homes to the project? Give them the same deal as say Amazon or another company and defer property taxes for 20 or so years? And maybe the problem with housing projects is not having any job prospects and being very much over policed? Not to mention the outlook of upoer/middle class on people who need help on top of not having a place to live.
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Those last two items seem to be where most people run into problems. Zoning and regulations written for more traditional structures aren’t easy to overcome.
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most of the wasted space in the housing business is mandated on purpose in the form of setback requirements, height limits, etc., whereas making the interior living area itself smaller creates obvious problems for residents with mobility issues
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A manufactured home doesn’t need to cost more or be less interesting.
I would hazard the difference is a trailer-based tiny home invokes images of a house on wheels able to be towed behind a vehicle. Something that’s parked, perhaps has a temporary skirt around it, but is sitting on it’s own wheels.
While a manufactured home may be one or many pieces that’s shipped on a flat bed trailer/temporary wheels, moved onto a foundation with a crane when it arrives on site.
Having said that, I’ve seen Tiny Home shows where they build something on a foundation. A manufactured home once installed is generally more like a traditional home than a trailer or mobile home.
For a backyard in-law suite, I can see pro/cons of both. To me, they feel about the same while being used as the backyard in-law suite. It’s what happens afterwards? If the goal is temporary, few years then remove, the trailer based is going to be easier to remove. If the goal is to have a guest house on site forever, then the manufactured home is probably better.
A few years back, someone built a manufactured home near us. It was 7 trailer sized parts, 2 stories, plus an onsite traditional build garage. I think it was for a family plus in-law suite. Looked just like traditional houses in the neighborhood when it was done. Only difference, it went from foundation to complete house in a week. Since all the build time was offsite and we didn’t see that time.
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I think where these would really shine is for homes on hillsides. Our neighbors have wanted to put in a pool for decades, but the flat part of their yard is maybe 10 feet before transitioning into a ~70% grade (I’m eyeballing it looking out my window. Might be even worse).
When they get quotes, the amount of dirt that would need to be hauled in dwarfs the actual pool cost. Installing what would effectively be an above ground pool would avoid the majority of the earth moving. Forget the window (though it’s mighty cool) and just add a deck level with the pool on the downhill side, and you’ve got a nice little swimmin’ hole. Not cheap, but cheaper than alternatives.
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That’s a complicated topic all on its own that would probably derail this thread too far, but there are a whole lot of problems with housing projects. Racism in their implementations, policing, transportation and infrastructure inequalities, the list goes on and on. They’ve been studied for decades though, so hopefully the experts in this area have a better idea how to avoid the issues next time. Assuming a city comes along that is willing to write evidence-based policy, that is.
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Hipsters. The whole point is that this new category of “Tiny Home” didn’t need to exist. We have solutions to those niches that work better than these fancy wood cabins on wheels, it’s just that well-off white people don’t like them because they are associated with trailer parks and rednecks. So instead hipsters are going off and spending a lot of money to build fancy cabins on fancy land and feeling like they’re saving the world doing it.
Edited to add: I’m not saying you can’t build a fancy cabin any size you want on whatever land you have. Just don’t act like you’re saving the planet by doing it. Call it what it is- privilege.
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The key is not to build them on racism (segregated spaces) and to fund their maintenance and upkeep and not just expect rents to cover it.
The new strategy, though, is to tear down housing projects and offer vouchers and to offer tax incentives to build mixed-income apartment buildings. More often than not, the section 8 vouchers and mixed income buildings do not cover nearly as many people as the old projects did.
Cities need to have much stronger regulations on making sure housing is affordable for all their citizens, even in highly desirable neighborhoods that young professionals want to live in.
Also, I think you’re spot on about tiny houses not being a workable solution and requiring things like, owning land, which the working poor often do not have the ability to do. This is the case in the US, so I don’t know about the situation in other parts of the world…
Right and not everyone has the space and time to do all that. Much like owning land, having the time to do such things tends to be a privilege, at least in the way our current society is structured. If you are working 2 to 3 jobs to put food on the table, you probably have far less time to do things like customize your tiny house. Everyone should get that freedom, but far too many people don’t because they can’t afford to.
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Perhaps they would like to build it themselves. Perhaps they would like a feature that isn’t available. Perhaps they want to be a little bit like a hobbit surrounded by wood. It’s important to give people space to be themselves and explore and pursue weird ideas even if it’s not always the optimized solution. It’s not always them engaging in poverty tourism either, sometimes they are just struck by an idea.
While there are many serious issues related to housing going after people who are experimenting doesn’t seem like the way forward. There’s a public image of people who live in tiny houses and these images seem to be from online videos and glossy magazines that present a type of tiny home and owner. Like regular homes the average tiny home owner doesn’t get a video or spread about their life. They’re almost certainly a fairly regular person who wanted to try something different. It might not be perfect, but compared to the many other housing options a person can choose it’s at least a shuffle in the right direction.
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I would wager that I could build an interesting tiny home on a trailer for far less than the cost of an equivalent stylish manufactured home. Obviously it’s more labor, but I enjoy that kind of project. Not for everyone, I know.
But you keep talking about permanent structures that require a slab, and, more importantly, building permits, tax assessments, etc. You really seem to be bothered by the prospect of a home sitting on its own wheels, even if they’re hidden by a skirt, and that’s fine. But in the use case I was talking about if I were to build a permanent structure (assuming I could get city approval) then in a few short years the increase in my tax bill alone would exceed the construction cost of a trailer-based tiny home. There are pros and cons to each strategy, but depending on your tax rate / property assessment / building permit process / etc they aren’t remotely the same cost.
I just want to point out that you suggested that a better alternative to building a cheap, trailer-based structure as a guest house would be to build a concrete slab and purchase/install a permanent or at least semi-permanent manufactured home, which requires owning the land, getting building permits, and paying property taxes on it. Which is fine if you have those resources, but I really don’t think you should be criticizing others for their sense of “privilege” if they can’t go that way, or choose the cheaper alternative.
They aren’t all self-righteous smug hipsters you know.
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You probably can, but it’s not going to be the same. The restrictions imposed by being on a trailer, especially if you’re trying to be street legal for normal towing are going to impose restrictions. Your labor costs something, although since it’s time not cash that may be a good trade off. The factory has a bunch of economy of scale working for it too, for both tooling and materials. They’ll get a wide load permit for the delivery too. Like for like, the manufactured home could be cheaper initially.
My point was (less sure about the original poster) was that on a direct product quality and use comparison for the time it’s being used as a guest suite, the manufactured home is probably better. And, I mentioned that, depending on the plan for afterwards, those conditions may completely change the comparison.
On those notes, it’s possible the extra structure devalues the house, the taxes could go down. 
Even a trailer may need city approval when used as a living space for more than a few days. Zoning laws create all kinds of issues around just parking a trailer and using it as a living space.
Even with all that, if the guest suite has a limited use lifespan, I agree something on wheels may be much better in the long run.
Did you read her comment, because she was addressing the fact that the people who can take advantage of those are already privileged, so floating tiny houses as a solution to homelessness is myopic because it isn’t taking that privilege into account. One of the very first things that @VeronicaConnor noted was that the tiny house movement is privileged because others (the working poor) lack access to land and time.
I also don’t think she suggested that they were all “entitled hipsters”… I don’t think that’s a fair accusation to level at her, when she’s arguing in good faith here.
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Her comment was in direct reply to my comment asking the difference between two different types of trailer based homes for my specific use case as a guest house. Didn’t have anything to do with solutions for homelessness, or if it did, then it wasn’t relevant to the question she was replying to.
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I think of it as being for people who want to live in a trailer, but not a trailer park.
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I want to learn to consume less
but, you know, not in the presence of those people who were already consuming less
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I don’t know if this is the particular book you are talking about, but my reference to Hiro Protagonist is from Snow Crash, an awesome novel about a near-future dystopia causing a lot of folks to live in storage units.
That being said, it might be possible to do this in a less dystopian fashion, I dunno.
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Tiny homes and shipping container homes are on my hate list. I priced out a lot of options to try and get around the Seattle housing bubble. Turns out tiny homes are often ridiculously priced, and questionably built. Shipping container homes are just architect dreams and big budget builds.
It’s easier to buy a damn trailer or RV if you want small space living.
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so simple, the Los Angeles building department just has an 8 page checklist:
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But part of the reason that stuff like homes in shipping containers or tiny houses are being floated is to deal with our ongoing housing crisis in general, which includes homelessness. The general problem is access, not lack of options, I suspect she’s trying to get at.
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