Every time I see this kind of article, it kills me a bit inside. How badly we, as a society, have failed her; and hundreds of thousands or millions of other people.
I firmly believe that you should be able to make a choice to live in alternative housing. If you want to be fast and live nomadic, this is something that our society should support. If you want to live in a tiny house because you want to live in a tiny house, GREAT! If you want to live under a bridge because that is where the voices in your head are the most quiet… I mean, yes, but also we need better mental health care.
But what I firmly feel is really, really problematic is that people are being forced into non-code compliant, substandard housing by economic factors. We are quickly getting to a point where our less affluent are living in slums and substandard housing or are using alternate housing not because they want to but because they have a whole lot of options but safe, code-compliant, stable, standard housing isn’t one of them.
We are failing them. We are fucking this up royalty. And every time one of these article runs, it’s just normalizing our failures to the point where we begin to celebrate them.
I mean, go into private mode, and check out Youtube videos of minivan vanlife builds. You’ll start out with happy people doing it recreationally or by choice. Then you’ll get into homelesstube. The people who are doing minivanlife because they don’t have any other choices. The people who are doing TinyHomes because they can’t get an apartment. The people trying to put a nice face on tough economic decisions.
This is like the “feel good” stories about people coming together to help a GoFundMe for hospital expenses or people in the office pitching in their vacation days to help their colleague with cancer… it sounds really nice until you realize what a horrid dystopia we have created for ourselves; and I am sick of it.
That is a solvable problem, however I expect if you can use your parent’s bathroom dealing with a composting toilet is an avoidable smell. Another option would be something like a Laveo Dry Flush Toilet, but while they are pretty easy to use, don’t smell, they end up costing a bit over $1 a “flush”, and generate a bag of trash every 17 or so flushes (which is legal as trash under the same grounds that disposable diapers are…however like disposable diapers it is more stuff to the landfill, so not overall great for everyone else, but YOU get a toilet you don’t need plumbing for).
I’m not sure I would want to run that electric space heater over a very long extension coord. I think I would go for one of the indoor qualified propane heaters and a fan. Alternately get a professional install of a run of buried Romex from the house so you can have “real” power…although I think the only thing I would add is a microwave. Oh, and a fridge, although you can get like 65gal chest fridges that use extremely little power (like 60W at 12V, so very very little at 120V!).
…housing isn’t expensive. The land is. Which is why she can live in her parent’s back yard for $10k. You could live in luxury there at under $100k except that sort of construction project would definitely get stopped.
You are 100% absolutely right, but as a PSA, I want to expand on this a bit more.
The amount (amperage) of electricity you are going to pull through an extension cord is very important. While all extension cords are rated for 110 volts, it’s the amperage that causes problems; and they are not all rated the same. Even though they are all designed to be plugged into an outlet that supplies up to 20 amps. And I have never seen an extension cord with a fuse built in to prevent you from using it to move too much power, even though it would be cheap and easy to put in.
An extension cord’s ability to handle amperage is based on how big the wires inside the extension cord are. Wires are measured in gauge. As gauge goes up, the size goes down. An 8 gauge wire is bigger than a 10 gauge wire, which is bigger than a 16 gauge wire. So an extension cord with 10 gauge wire can handle more amperage safely than an extension cord with 16 gauge wire.
Over a 100 foot length, you would need an extension cord with 10 gauge wire to handle that 15 amp load. They do make extension cables like this. They are very, very expensive - about $150.
So, what happens if you use too small of a cable? Simple - it can get hot and start a fire. Seriously, it can get hot enough to light the insulation and anything near the cable that can burn.
The normal, cheap orange outdoor extension cords are normally about 14 or 16 gauge. If you tried to use one of those for a 15 amp load, it would quite possibly start a fire.
Even short “lamp” extension cords… you have to be really, really careful with them. They are very small, and they cannot carry much amperage.
Yes, but not recently and never by relying soley on market rate housing or restricting large areas of the city to single family housing. Boom time Cleveland (early 20th century) massively increase construction, converted a large percentage of single family homes to duplexes and more, constructed tens of thousands of temporary units, and created a massive early public housing system. In roughly the same period Vienna didn’t solve their housing crisis, but greatly alleviated it by building enough public housing for roughly 10% of the population. I would say they fixed it, but other demographic changes immediately following WW1 did some heavy lifting to close the gap.
A little, but nothing like the percentages for induced demand. Anything that makes a city marginally more appealing, like lower rents will shift a few people off the fence about a move, but the other barriers to inter-metro relocation are so high that modest rent changes are a small incentive. You could own a home in parts of Cleveland for less than a year’s rent in SF, but you don’t see people flocking to Central from the coasts. Even within a city almost no one takes the single cheapest unit, they take the nicest thing in their budget.
