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South LA resident Elvis Summers only got started building tiny homes in 2015, but his work has received a tremendous amount of attention since then. Last year, his colorful little dwellings—built for members of the city's growing homeless population—began popping up on sidewalks and freeway overpasses around the city.
A successful crowdfunding campaign, helped by a feature in People, brought in nearly $100,000 to finance the homes. In February, however, citing health and safety concerns, city officials began confiscating the houses. Eventually, after a run of bad press, the city gave the houses back to Summers.
Since the city tightened its unattended property ordinance, however, Summers has been forced to find private property on which to keep the homes. In spite of this complication, he's continued with his project, and has begun constructing mobile shower units as well. We checked in with him to see how his work is coming along.
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They're roughly six feet wide by eight feet long and about seven feet tall inside. There's two windows on each side. Every house has a steel reinforced door, American flag and address, smoke detectors, alarms on the windows, solar panel on the roof—which powers two lightbulbs and has a port to charge a cellphone—brand new carpet, and I provide everyone with a compost toilet.
Tiny houses and homelessness are not usual Soylent topics, but DIY (Do It Yourself) projects are. Are DIY projects like this a better way to tackle our challenges as a society than waiting for the government to take care of them?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Monday September 26 2016, @10:16PM
Your objections are all valid and reasonable.
The problem is that they all exist whether or not the homeless live in these tiny houses.
So the question isn't whether or not the homeless are going to block the sidewalks, whether their accommodations will deteriorate, whether there will be sanitation problems, how they'll get access to basic necessities.
Those are already all problems.
The only question, as far as this project is concerned, whether or not we'll have all those problems and also have homeless people without minimal protection from theft and the elements and the other minor amenities these tiny houses provide.
Or, another way to look at it: that smelly homeless dude is going to be living in a box on that vacant lot. Would you rather his box be made of cardboard, or would you rather it be an easily-paintable metal box with an included composting toilet? And when the homeless guy shows up at your construction jobsite looking for temporary make-work, would you rather he did so in the same clothes he slept in in the cardboard box, or that he wore the not-as-raggedy ones he was able to keep folded and out of the mud in his tiny home after he washed them in the gas station bathroom?
Make no mistrake: it's a really sorry condemnation of our society that we have to resort to such pathetic accommodations as these. But, at the same time, they're a very significant step up from the status quo we're currently in. Which, of course, is another entire level of indictment...
...but, if we've any hope of clawing ourselves out of the mess we're in, it's going to require initial baby steps like this.
And, yes, of course. Let's work on the big-picture social changes we need. We absolutely need a Scandinavian-style social safety net, including solid education and universal health care and unemployment insurance and the rest -- and, yes, that means we all get much wealthier even as the government takes more taxes out of our paychecks, a not-paradox that the archetypal dumb American is far too stupid to understand.
But let's also not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
These tiny homes make the world a better place. Not much of a better place, but it's much better to make things a little bit better than to let them keep getting worse.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26 2016, @10:25PM
> But let's also not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
You must be new here. Bitching is the currency of the realm. Being constructive is for quislings.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday September 26 2016, @10:42PM
Many people do not want those structures because of their essentially permanent status.
The cardboard box may have to be replaced, the local cop tired of the bum behind the transformer, and the local source of food may fail, causing the Undesirable to migrate elsewhere.
A somewhat permanent shelter is both a reason for the poor to settle, and for the people tasked to help them solve their original problems to prematurely dismiss the cases as solved.
I did read great feedback on the effectiveness at improving the homeless' daily lives when a few of these houses are grouped in a legal vacant lot.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26 2016, @10:55PM
> A somewhat permanent shelter is both a reason for the poor to settle,
More importantly, it is a tool that enables them to start climbing back up into society again. Being homeless is a massive timesink and resource vacuum. A minimum level of safety and consistency is the first step on the ladder to getting their life back in order again. Kicking someone when they are down is not an effective way to help them succeed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @01:42AM
well sure. Huge timesink. That's the real problem. Homeless peoples' days are usually jam packed with lying around in alleys and aggressively demanding spare change. Takes it all out of you.
(Score: 5, Informative) by edIII on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:11AM
You're a fucking idiot. Try spending a day with the homeless in an outreach program and educate your sorry ass.
If you lay around the whole time.... you don't get water. You don't get food. You don't get to go to bathroom anywhere but someplace close by you.
Aggressively demanding? Fuck you. Holding a sign begging for food is hardly aggressive, and they don't do that (by and large), because then they get run off. You don't catch flies with vinegar.
What do they spend their time on? Sitting in government offices for 3 fucking hours waiting for a social worker to talk to. They sit in a community health clinic for 5 fucking hours waiting for somebody to see them. They walk 5 fucking miles to a soup kitchen or food pantry, sometimes pushing a grocery cart.
Have you pushed a solid steel fucking grocery cart a mile? Now push it full of everything you possess.
You have a backasswards perspective on the homeless that only remotely made sense when the homeless seemingly existed because of problems with their character, of pure mental illness. The 65 year old man that was fired from HP after training his H1B replacement was never lazy, and now he works harder than he has in 20 years just to survive.
I fucking dare you to become homeless for a week and just lay around. See how far you get doing that.
Go to hell you piece of shit.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @04:52AM
Thanks for saying that. If you replaced "homeless" with "destitute women" you will find the solutions knocking on your door. A very large number of issues we have in this world is because while women are united as a vote-bank, men are busy putting each other down. "Homeless? Pfft.. he probably deserved it."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:26PM
Same with being poor. The US has by and large lost all compassion. We are a nation run by thieves and its screwing up all kinds of things in our society. We shit on the poor and homeless, and offer very little assistance to get people back on their feet. Tie that together with the bootstrapping American dream and you now have a recipe for callous behavior lacking all compassion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @06:18PM
In my experience working with the homeless, those that are capable of reentering society usually find their way into shelters and government/privately run programs to help them back onto their feet. Unfortunately many are mentally ill, or otherwise disturbed, and have little hope. I applaud this man's efforts, and wonder if this is a solution for some limited situations. That said, the challenges of keeping these clean/in good repair, and finding an appropriate place for them are significant. I would gladly put one in my yard, but where does the resident get clean water, and access to sanitation. Who monitors it to ensure their stay is temporary. Otherwise, is this any different than opening an abandon building?
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:17AM
a not-paradox that the archetypal dumb American is far too stupid to understand.
That's just plain wrong. Many Americans are smart enough to understand it, and call for all the reforms you've mentioned. We're also smart enough to look at other countries with higher standards of living and wonder, "Gee, I wonder what they do different?". Not just that, but we can pull our patriotic heads out of our asses, set our epic sized egos aside, and see that we are lacking and not getting the job done.
The problem is that we have no control whatsoever of the people at the top, and our government was hijacked by the elites (for at least 50 years) alongside incredible manipulations via propaganda and junk science.
It's not as if we have a choice, and anytime something progressive happens in California, a lawsuit at the federal level undoes whatever progressive work was accomplished.
We're quite literally not allowed to have the niceties you mention.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @10:42AM
The problem is that we have no control whatsoever of the people at the top,
I think the real problem is your voters. Seriously the voters do have control. Otherwise Clinton wouldn't be collapsing and getting dragged by her bodyguards into limos and Trump would be too busy ogling his daughter and other women. I mean why else would Trump bother to attend a debate that he clearly wasn't enjoying? It's for the voters.
Just look at the Dictators. That Kim guy in North Korea sure doesn't have to bother to put up with such inconveniences. His people suffer so that he doesn't.
That Trump has even a conceivable chance shows how bad the your voters are. If you really wanted something different and not so evil you'd have gone for Jill Stein (who has weird ideas about WiFi but Stein with nukes sure sounds better to me than Clinton or Trump with nukes).
If Jill Stein actually won she would get mostly shut out by a hostile Congress but that's a feature not a bug - meanwhile both the Republicans and the Democrats would be scrambling to _improve_ for a change, because Stein would be a warning shot.
But as it is, why should those two parties bother changing much? There's no warning shot. Most of the voters who bother voting keep voting for them.
So that's the thing about democracy - you often end up with the Government you deserve.