I accept millionaires.
I’ve yet to see moral billionaires.
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars. Although the millionaires have to stop clutching their pearls, step up and realize that they’re a lot closer in class to the homeless than the billionaires.
Yep, I’ve seen friends reach the seven figure area through steady seven day weeks and some luck picking their trade and finding industrial clients over a period of fifteen to twenty years. I have seen how little they slept and how kids were basically only possible because they were pretty self reliant from age 12 or 13 and helped a lot around the house. I have no idea how a human could possibly create a thousand times that value in their lifetime.
They can’t. Billionaires can only exist by taking value generated by others. Absolutely nothing Jeff Bezos could do within 60 seconds is worth continuously “earning” over 18.000$.
Well you sure as hell can’t have generally high moral standards and earn a billion from scratch. You have to either screw the environment on a very large scale and/or screw lots and lots of people.
And if you are in a context where you inherit a billion and think there is no problem with an individual having billions, odds are you are also not in a great position moral-wise.
Dude’s getting 20k/mo rent and helping the poor. That’s fucking awesome.
Considering utilities are included, I doubt he gets much of that
“I won the parent lottery, the education lottery, the country lottery,” LeBrun told Macleans. “It would be arrogant to say every piece of my ‘success’ was earned, when so much of it was received.”
Looks like he did this because he’s actually a decent reasonable person.
This is how fucking easy it is. This is a millionaire. Imagine what someone with hundreds of billions of dollars could do.
You can have a soul, or you can have billions of dollars; not both.
Honestly when I see “tech millionaire” and “altruism” in the same article, I don’t expect to see someone actually using their wealth to do something decent.
Millionaires still have their humanity on occasion.
Imagine if the public sector did this and didn’t limit it to a single development.
We could even build bigger-than-tiny sized units. Maybe include additional amenities like schools and health clinics and food malls in the immediate vicinity. Throw in a rail stop so people can get to the metro center easily. You know… actual urban development.
No idea where we could get money for that, though. Maybe if Canada didn’t exempt 50% of capital gains income from taxation for some reason… But no, that would never work.
“The word ‘philanthropy’ is often interpreted as someone who gives money,” he told the alumni magazine.
“But the Greek roots of the word ‘philos’ and ‘anthropos’ mean to love humans. What I have discovered is spending money is the easy thing, spending yourself is the hard thing. The 12 Neighbours project is how I can best spend myself.”yl
I’m not crying, you’re crying… Sniff
I also liked this:
“We have people who have been run over by trauma, by substance abuse, by all of these things,” LeBrun told Macleans. “It’s about excavating that person, buried under their circumstances, little by little.”
Seems like a decent dude.
I like this part as well:
“I won the parent lottery, the education lottery, the country lottery,” LeBrun told Macleans. “It would be arrogant to say every piece of my ‘success’ was earned, when so much of it was received.”
Someone must be cutting onions. Let’s add them to the billionaire stew.
When the time comes we let this one unbothered
I applaud the project but I’d still eat him. He is a near billionaire CEO throwing a few scraps to us commoners. Maybe his PR team can make me look good too as I go for seconds.
He gets a pass in my book. Maybe he did it because he wanted to be spared in the future.
We can pretend to eat him while we distribute his wealth.
Rent pricing is what the people should target first. Hard to fight the nutjobs when rent is so expensive
Simply approving more housing helps too https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/
Building more housing helps, but building new housing will remain expensive for as long as land is expensive, so it’s vital that we avoid wasting land. Which means density.
Some people read “density” and think “ah, taller buildings!”, but that’s only half the picture - you can save tremendous amounts of space by improving horizontal density - look at how dense OP’s one storey housing is, by shrinking the houses, and by ditching the front yard and dedicated sidewalks.
Except, most of the space is still empty! Those streets are oversized (take a look at traditional cities, most streets are under 20ft wide (6m wide) wall-to-wall), and the houses all have gaps next to them which look big enough to fit (or almost fit) another house. So you could easily more-than-double the density without even going up, assuming the housing isn’t car-centric (I’m guessing those empty spots might be car parks, and the streets are overly wide because they’re for cars).
If this sounds nitpicky, it’s not: building one-storey houses is dirt cheap; imagine trying to make a portable two-storey tent. It even makes it realistically possible to remove developers from the equation, without too much going horribly wrong. It just needs to be efficient with the land it uses.
240sqft = 22.3sqm
look at how dense OP’s one storey housing is, by shrinking the houses, and by ditching the front yard and dedicated sidewalks.
What the actual fuck are these suggestions. This sounds a lot like the conservative members of my area that argue homeless people don’t deserve anything. They want to cram the all into one building with no privacy, get rid of sidewalks and green spaces because people loiter, and generally make life as uncomfortable as possible for the destitute instead of treating them like normal human beings.
For reference, your standard wheelchair accessible hotel room will not be less than 20sqm.
I want cities to be more like Venice or Florence or basically any city built before the 1780s. They worked just fine. There are places like that in the city I live in, but they’re horrifically expensive because it’s literally illegal to build more of them.
And to be clear, I’m not saying “I want to put homeless people in these places”, I’m saying “I want to live in these places, and lots of others do to so stop making them fucking illegal to build more of.”
I don’t entirely disagree, but that article lost me when it said “this is as human scale as it gets” and shows a photo of stairs, which are a nightmare for people with mobility problems, and there aren’t any people in the photo. I did finish reading it, but it did little to address my concerns.
I will also forever have a chip on my shoulder about city planning and transit because I loved living in a walkable city while I was homeless. However, it being a nice place to live is why I couldn’t actually find affordable housing there. Thanks to the ass-backwards tax structure in the state, public transit is mostly funded via vehicle taxes, which sounds great until you’re being forced to buy a car because of lack of transit outside the city, then you realize it’s really just a tax on being too poor to live in the city.
The county is focusing all efforts into continued improvement on the city, but refuses to expand the county bus service. As if a bus packed with standing people going 50mph down a bumpy county highway isn’t dangerous. I talk to friends about it, and they go “well, it’s a rural red area and they don’t want it anyways, so fuckem”, completely ignoring that 1) It has more than doubled in population since Covid, 2) It’s blue enough to have drag queens at the bar, 3) We do want it.
When people in my situation read the article you linked, I assume it’s not going to be somewhere I will ever afford to live. Even the article doesn’t really address it. It’s got a spot for responding to criticism, and admits that cost is one of the criticisms, but it just says “it’s not expensive” and then tries to say gentrification is a good thing actually.
It concludes with this: “People spend their life savings just to spend a week in a place like that. What if you could create that in your city?”
The answer is no. I don’t want to build another city that’s so expensive it takes your life savings to visit for a week. Because that’s exactly how it would go in America.
This is fine, but millionaires won’t save us
This could be pointed to as a successful test case to get the gov off it’s ass and implement this at a macro level.
You are correct millionaires will not save us, however we should reward behavior we want to see. Lest we get more billionaires who are a net drag on society.
He did actually save those homeless people.
Are these houses good shelters for tornados?
They don’t look like they would be. That alone kills the tiny house for a huge chunk of the US :/.
Generally this can be solved with hurricane ties (to prevent the structure from completely flying) and a community tornado shelter in affected regions. It won’t eliminate damage but will reduce it as much as can be.
This is good, but if we address this at a systemic level, we don’t need to put people in tiny low-density homes unconnected to anything for it to be affordable.
Presumably local governments have some mechanism for when they know a house costs X materials and Y labor, and they see new construction costing significantly more than that.
The result is detached homes@avg 75USD/sqft and apartments@55/sqft. With current interest rates of 6.768%, you’d get ~400 sqft homes with a $200/mo 30 year mortgage at those prices, 600sqft if interest rates were 3%.
I was like, holy shit that 55/sqft must be some 10 times as much as my rent (I’m not sure how much a foot is; I think I’m paying about 20-25€/m^2 per month). And then I realized those are BUYING prices. Holy shit.
827USD/m2
To be clear, this isn’t exactly an apples to apples comparison; even if the US did free trade school with subsidies for living costs and everything, you’re not going to get skilled metal workers and carpenters working for $35/day. While labor costs are only ~25% of the cost of construction, the same applies to how low you can get material costs, even when you’ve got central planning for concrete and steel industries.
