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Ryan Donais started building the small modular homes this summer as he watched the city’s housing crisis becoming more dire. He said he didn’t want to go through another winter seeing people living on the streets, so he put his background in construction to use.
“I just don’t see any changes. It’s been many years with people outside and it’s not changing. I couldn’t imagine being outside for years, you know?”
Since then, Donais has built three homes at a cost of about $10,000 each, most of which has been paid for through donations to his GoFundMe page.
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We had something similar done in the US, but it got shut down i think.
God forbid homeless people get a equivalent of a tool shed to exist in. Think about all that lost rent landlord won’t be getting…
Just give it some time. Like most other projects aimed at giving tiny homes to the homeless, there needs to be a continuous source of operational funding in order maintain these homes which everyone forgets about. Then once these homes stop being mobile, cops will move in to confiscate them on yet another encampment clearing. Maybe they’ll even be nice enough to wait for the first winter thaw.
Shut down for the homeless, prices for them jacked up, and promoted to “cute and trendy” by the plaid shirt yuppies. We just can’t have anything nice in the US for the people who actually need it.
Soon to be made illegal by the city, province, or both.
the American way!
What this guy is doing is amazing, and I don’t want to sound like I’m knocking him or his project, but I do have to point out that one of the main factors that traps people in homelessness is how hard it is to interact with a lot of essential services if you don’t have an address. And, worse still, how hard it is to get a job. Even rental applications need a current address, and these days want a referral too.
Essentially, projects like this serve to create a better class of homelessness, but they don’t actually solve homelessness.
A study in Vancouver found that simply giving homeless people a one time payment of $7,500 significantly reduced homelessness among study participants. For all the heart and care this guy is putting into this project, he’d do far, far more good by simply taking the $10,000 it costs to make each home and giving that directly to the person instead.
I heard some places have a false address you can legit use as your “fixed” address and mail gets held at general delivery. This alone has given opportunity to people. And if I were cold on the street $7500 cash will get me robbed and still cold, I would rather a warm place to sleep. Hotel rooms would eat up $7500 in no time.
A false address is still fraud, like I said. I got no moral objection to that, but it comes with its own problems, and tends to be short lived. And you’re still missing my point. It’s not about what you would prefer. It’s about treating people like adults and letting them make their own choices. You’re still trying to decide everything for them.
It is not a false address, it has been purposely setup to give homepess people an address of service for forms. To get around beauracracy
That depends what the address is being used for. If you just need to collect mail, it’s not a problem, but in the examples I listed they’re specifically asking where you reside. You cannot simply put a PO box or a mail forwarding address.
Seems odd since some places only have PO Boxes.
In those situations you have an address, but mail intended for that address is placed at a holding location (usually a communal post box at the end of the lane) for you to collect. But it’s not like your drivers license says “PO BOX 12345678”. You still have a physical address that corresponds to a particular residence at a particular place.
The question is, if a cop needed to arrest you, where would they go? If a bank needed to send a lawyer to serve you papers, where would they go? What side of the local municipal and county boundaries are you on? Whose jurisdiction are you under? These are the things that matter when you’re using an address for legal purposes. It’s not just about where mail goes.
Where I grew up we had PO BOX as our address, not at end of street, but at the town’s Post office. Drivers license had PO BOX because that is how you would get mailed citations or new license. I am familiar with the rental style POBOX you reference, but these were municipal govt post boxes.
Ironically they renumbered our streets after about 30 years so the address changed LOL
As far as policing, I’m in Canada so we had provincial police, and province Im in now and others use federal police, so the jurisdiction stuff didn’t apply
If that’s the study I’m thinking of, then the methodology was flawed and highly dependent on selection bias. They basically chose people who were down on their luck and most likely to succeed within the study parameters.
They did not choose demographics most common in homeless individuals, like addicts or those with mental health issues.
In my mind, the study supports the benefits of a basic universal income, rather than a solution to homelessness.
I don’t think he’s aiming at curing the disease as much as he’s trying to make people feel comfortable and safe while they live with the disease.
And there’s nothing wrong with that.
OK, but if you’re suffering from a fatal illness, and you knew that I had the power to cure it, but I opted instead to simply make it easier for you to live with, you’d feel pretty upset about that, right?
It had been demonstrated that $10,000 will literally get someone off of the streets. This guy, instead, is opting to keep that person on the streets, but slightly more comfortably. His intentions are good, but those good intentions ended up being entirely subverted by the need to decide what’s best for people, rather than giving them the means to decide that for themselves.
This is the problem with so much of the conversation around homelessness. We’re still stuck in this Reaganesque mindset that homelessness is a choice, and that therefore homeless people cannot be trusted to make any choices for themselves. Our charity for the homeless is always constrained by the need to only ever give them things on our terms, never on theirs. We cannot bring ourselves to actually treat them like people.
What are your thoughts on this:
That $10,000 home isn’t a one time payment. It could theoretically be used for 3 months by the first person who needed it before they find stable housing, a week for the next person and a year and a half for the 3rd. We could either decide that eventually the house would be occupied by its final owner. Someone who needs more than a warm toolshed to pull themselves up, but in theory these houses could help dozens of people. Even more if a limit (a long one, a year or more) was put on them.
Don’t think I’m suggesting this is the answer, systematically we should be taking care of people. But if one dude can can build 3 “houses” that could help dozens, isn’t that better than “helping*” 3 people with a 1 time payment?
*Helping here meaning depending on who is selected that $10k could be very harmful, quite the opposite of what should be our goals.
Again, it comes back to the problem I mentioned in my original comment; these “homes” don’t come with addresses.
It’s a camper van. That’s a hell of a lot nicer than sleeping in the street or in a tent, no question of that, but without an actual address it is almost impossible to find work (not to mention how hard it is to access government services, or have legal ID, or a bank account). Employers know the addresses of shelters in their area, putting one of those down on an application sends it straight to the shredder. And you can’t exactly write “in the park.”
These “homes” do not help people out of homelessness, they only help them to survive it better. Surviving is better than not surviving, but it’s a poor use of the money compared to the alternatives.
I think you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
If this man spend another $30 a month for a postal box address or mail forward service for each “camper van” , would that resolve your concern? Should he sell the houses to some hipsters to fulfill their vantasies and just offer mail forwarding instead?
You think no one ever thought of putting a PO box on their job application? That’s just as much of a death sentence as a homeless shelter address. And you can’t apply for ID or a bank account with a PO box. It solves literally nothing.
There might actually be something to setting up residential addresses that homeless people could claim they live at, but to do that you’d be engaging in large scale fraud. Probably not a very long lived plan.
What people need is the means to start fixing their own lives, and money is by far the best means because it buys all the other things people need. This insistence on giving people things and services instead of just giving them the money to make their own choices with always comes back to the problem of how we infantilize the homeless and refuse to ever treat them as adults capable of making their own decisions.
For example, there is literally nothing stopping this man from going to a homeless person and saying “I have ten thousand dollars. I can spend it on making you a small portable shelter. Or I can give it to you to do what you want with. What would you prefer?” If they choose the shelter, fair deal, that’s their choice.
I’m trying not to be too hard on this guy. Like I said, his heart is in a good place, and I respect the energy and hard work he’s put into this. It’s admirable, and he seems like a genuinely good person who truly cares about making a difference in the world, no matter how small. But he’s subconsciously operating within a paradigm that refuses to actually engage with homeless people as human beings, and that pollutes his entire attitude to the problem, rendering all his work far less effective than it could be. That’s not a choice he’s consciously making, but it’s there all the same.
I understand your concern, and the validity of it. On a microscale, I was personally involved with helping a Syrian refugee family get established as part of a group I am a member of. It was insulting to sit at the meeting while a few of the members basically played “house” with this family, trying to decide how to get them the cheapest beds and where to get them clothes, instead of just setting them up with the absolute basics and then handing over the rest of the cash and being available to help them with language training and familiarizing them with the city and its services and inviting them to social groups.
But you seem like you have a chip on your shoulder. This person is using his labour, which is twice as valuable as any of the materials he is using, to make something, to help someone. The cure to homelessness is homes, and until the government actually starts caring about people like that, this guy is providing the best homes he can.
If you want me to say “you are right, this isn’t optimized for peak efficiency, so why are we bothering.” Then I’m afraid that’s where we will have to disagree.
Realistically we need to do both. $7,500 in cash is not going to solve the affordable housing shortage. Give them a roof over their heads for shelter, warmth, hygiene, privacy, security, autonomy, electricity for charging a phone. The psychological benefits alone seem huge to me. It would allow some of them to climb one or two rungs out of their situation. As you’ve said even a rental may not be guaranteed with $7,500 in cash. A tiny home guarantees a lot immediately, and it is a sustained investment that will last the lifetime of the home. I 100% agree that a basic income is proven to be beneficial. It doesn’t mean we stop doing everything else that we can. I’m sure you know the issue isn’t a lack of means, it’s a lack of will. If this helps in the short term, that’s great. If you also want to fight for basic income in the long term I will also support you in that. It’s not a zero sum game.
Since the article didn’t link to it, here’s the website: https://tinytinyhomes.ca/
I saw that little camper in St James park. Not sure I’m in love with the concept. It would be nice if the city or province could try and seriously solve this problem so the local park doesn’t need to be a favela. It isn’t like the people camping in the park treat it nicely aside from just the tents. They leave garbage and have all sorts of other problem behaviors that start to make the park unusable.
“Go be poor somewhere else”
You’d be shocked how hard it is to find a trashcan when you don’t live in a place that provides regular trash pickup.
Plenty of trash cans in that park going unused, unless you consider one being 10 meters from you too tricky to find.
Just wondering how much trash you picked up while you were checking how many bins were empty. 🤔
You can see the bins walking by https://maps.app.goo.gl/d86jJzGCeEDuBSTq5?g_st=ac and I do pick some up if I see it in the path when I pass through
Maybe drop off some bags for them next time you’re monitoring trash bin levels.
Look, I get it, you’re more interested in demonizing me for wanting to use the park than actually solving the problem.
I am more interested in you wanting to share the park with your fellow human beings who need a place to live.
