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posted by takyon on Monday September 26 2016, @08:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the small-change dept.

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.
...
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?


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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:17AM

    by edIII (791) on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:17AM (#406815)

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @10:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @10:42AM (#406905)

    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.