$10k per house per million?
I hope he was a millionaire several times over…
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what kind of math?
Tap for spoiler
It was literally the first sentence of my comment 🤣
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it’s real. the ‘millionaire’ sold a startup for $340m. the homes are in new brunswick and cost $50k ea to build and furnish. the land was $500k. the houses are ~ 240-300 sq ft tiny homes. rent (at the time that source was written) starts at $200.
Almost certainly. Having $1M is unremarkable these days. Technically a millionaire is someone with more than a million and less than a billion, but usually these days it refers to people with hundreds of millions.
A million could buy you like… Two houses. Maybe 3 or 4 at a push if they’re small.
Where I am in SoCal, it barely buys you one.
House on my street recently sold for a bit over a million. 3 bed, 2 bath, ok view of the ocean, on a quarter acre. Ludicrous.
With an ocean view and that big a house? Damn cheap
(Crying in a town where lots are in “square feet”, because no one has lots that big)
Yeah, not up here in the northeast. Maybe two condos if they’re small enough and old enough
Source? Did it actually work? Very cool if so.
If you give a homeless person a home, then by definition, they are no longer homeless.
On a less pedantic note, yes, it should. Some countries (like mine) provide a secure place to live as step one, when helping the homeless. Having somewhere safe to sleep, keep your property, etc. makes all the other steps involved in solving your problems much easier, leading to a better success rate in getting people back on their feet.
Further it enables them to apply for all manners of documents as they have an address to their name. Try getting any sort of document from a bank or governmental branch without an address. Trying to get a passport without address? Nope. No address no ID, no Bank account and mostly no employment anywhere without either of the two.
This is what I found: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/12-neighbours-founder-transitional-housing-1.7510785
But basically, this is something that works in Finland well enough https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/look-finlands-housing-first-initiative
I used to live in a town that did something very similar to this. It sorta worked but mostly did not. But as another commenter pointed out you need more than just homes. Obviously they help a ton but a lot of people need more help than just a roof over their head. Financially, medically, mentally, employment… It’s a bigger, more complicated problem.
But it goes without saying that this is a step in the right direction and absolutely better than collectively shrugging our shoulders and walking away.
Housing is the basis for addressing most of those other issues.
My city does something like this as part of our homeless program and we’re at “net-zero” homeless. It doesn’t work on it’s own, but the tiny homes give people a stable place to keep their stuff safe and the elements off their bodies, it gives them an address they can use for things like mail and applications, and it gives social workers a place to find them reliably. It’s the start of a long process to help them back to their feet.
Being on the streets is also incredibly dangerous. Putting drug users around other drug users as well doesn’t keep them off drugs.
Here’s one article about it.
https://macleans.ca/society/tiny-homes-fredericton/
I don’t remember where I saw this the first time, but it did mention that this had become a thing in a few American cities too (this story was from Fredericton, Canada)
i hope it works and contains a forever lease and not just a month to month where the land will be improved by these houses then said millionaire sells the land for a profit and the people living there are screwed yet again.
A forever lease dude? If that’s in the deal then imma be honest with you and tell you me and my hommies are declaring homelessness and moving to wherever this meme is from. We can rebuild our lives from a point of never paying rent again.
I mean that homeownership. i pay prop taxes but own my home. Forgive me. i was pooping and reading and forgot my words. 😂
If you have a hatred of hierarchy and a love of nature send me a DM. I’m interviewing people for an intentional community.
The first 5 people that pass the vibe check will get a one dollar, 99 year lease, on .5 acres to call your own. As long as you also partake in fixing/improving central infra.
Oh and one heavy caveat… You gotta be cool with winter. We are in Canada.
I hope the opposite: that these are more transitional, with associated services to help people get back on their feet for an eventual move to more standard housing when they are ready
all are good things imho!
Millionaire? Nice. Billionaires should follow suit, but 1000x
(With ~800 billionaires in the US, that’s 79,200,000 homes)
Except it would be unethical for a billionaire to throw that much power around. They should relinquish the value back to the communities from where they took it.
That’s my takeaway. The positive effect of the charity of this mere millionaire really does a great job showing just how fucking evil billionaires are. So much potential for positive change in the world siphoned into yachts and propaganda
They didn’t become billionaires by being charitable.
Quite the contrary. You CAN’T accumulate that much money except by exploiting others, creating issues like homelessness.
How many homes do we actually need?
Drive through a small town, and all of your questions will be answered.
This is not a housing problem, it’s not a mental health problem, it’s a fucking unadulterated greed problem.
Please arm yourselves. The opposition will.
I’ve heard elsewhere that we already have enough vacant homes being reverse squatted by property management companies to house every homeless person.
Vacant homes in general, yes. Similar numbers of people have second homes for vacations as are homeless in the US. There are also quite a few abandoned homes in dying rural communities with no jobs.
Property management companies are managing rentals, not squatting. Some investors hold properties empty, but they aren’t in large enough numbers to be THE problem.
Funny story, we actually have enough housing for everyone. It just isn’t always where people want to live, and corporate landlords would rather leave a space vacant to drive up rents than make all of their inventory available, so there is a shit ton of residential (and commercial) property that is basically abandoned.
What we need is tax on vacant property. Make it a ladder system so its worse based on number of vacant units and value.
It would have to take into account how long it’s been vacant though.
I don’t want to punish property owners the literal second someone moves out, and it’s technically vacant. I also don’t want to punish them if they need to make repairs or updates to the property in between tenants.
So lets call it a tax forgiveness period of 1 year. I figure thats enough time to get the property renovated, and advertised as being available for rent.
And yes, I’m sure theres going to be someone who abuses the rule by just keeping it vacant for 11 months, and trying to rent it that last month. But here’s the thing. Those minded people will get burned. Because it takes time to rent properties. They’ll find it may take 2 or 3 months to find a tenant. Or maybe on the 11th month, they’ll realize they can’t rent it because in the time the property sat abandoned, uninspected, rats infested the property. Now it needs extermination services and renovations which will take 5 months. Oh well. There’s always SOME delay if you wait until the last minute. Which is why I gave it a generous year. Honest landlords won’t get burned with that grace period. Scammers will.
I’d say 3-6 months vacant is considered empty. Especially in high COL areas.
This forces property owners to lower rent to get the property filled if they can’t get a tenant. Thus bringing down rates.
The problem with that is, sometimes renovations take longer than 6 months. I don’t want to punish honest landlords, because then that incentivizes honest landlords to seek out ways to cheat the system, because the system cheated them.
It’s the same reason piracy is so popular in times when the official sources are either too convoluted or expensive to follow the official way.
Most customers would be happy to follow the rules, but if you want to watch 1 single NFL team through all 17 regular season games, my local team would require you to have access to an OTA broadcast tv source, and 5 different paid subscription services. Most of which are only broadcasting 1 game.
And now the NFL is seeing a MASSIVE rise in piracy. Yeah. No shit.
Same concept here. If you punish the honest landlords for undertaking a major renovation, then you push them to seek out other ways to cheat the system. And once they start, theres nothing saying they’ll stop.
And eliminate corporate ownership of residential property. Tax the shit out of anyone owning more than three residences, and bring property values back down to earth. Bail out homeowners who owe mortgages for more than the value of the properties, and let the market self-correct.
I’d go so far as to attack the idea of a corporation. Letting a business own property or act as a liability shield for human choices is clearly bad for society.
It goes both ways though. I have a corporation for my contracting business to shield possible frivolous lawsuits from unscrupulous people. I do my best to screen clients and not work for wackos, but that’s not necessarily enough to protect myself and family.
Same. Different entities for different concerns keeps each siloed WRT finance and liability. But that should have no bearing on what I believe is true.
TLDR: Thomas Jefferson asked us to “crush” them. Better late than never.
Corporate entities in the USA are out of control and absolutely must be reigned in at every level of government. Their overreach is not a new problem. Thomas Jefferson said it had already begun in a letter from 1816:
I hope we shall take warning from the example [of the lawless English aristocracy] and crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations (emphasis mine) which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country.
Spoiler, we didn’t. We just let them bribe legislators to change the laws so they no longer even had to defy them. And of course a few of the largest corporations recently purchased the republic outright for a relatively paltry sum, as if it were a startup acquisition.
It’s obvious to anyone who owns corporations that they make nearly everything easier. So much about the economy and government has been hugely optimized for them, while the real flesh-and-blood citizenry experience greater friction year over year.
Edit: TLDR because no one reads walls of text
There’s also the fact that many of those houses have sat vacant and have been left to rot for many years, meaning that plenty of them need to be demolished and rebuilt before they can be lived in. Small towns have been dying for decades as suburban sprawl consumes ever-increasing amounts of land and bleeds our cities dry of tax revenue, forcing them to continue making more suburbs to pay off the previous ones.
Some estimates say there are as many as 12 vacant homes per homeless person this country.
Last estimates I saw before the pandemic had the rate above 30:1. I haven’t looked since then, but I’m certain it’s only gotten worse.
Yeah, we were gonna do that anyway. After covid, I lost faith in humanities ability to be decent.
Took you that long? Wow. I had lost faith by the late 80s. For context I was only born in the early 80s. Once I went to kindergarten I realized society was awful and this planet sucks.
Unfortunately I haven’t found another planet that hosts life I can move to.
Well, I wasn’t alive in the 80s, so hard to lose faith in humans pre-emptiness. Lol
The official homeless number for 2024 in the US was 771,480. That’s probably just reported and not actual.
Analysts think we’re about 4.5 million homes short of what we would need to a well-functioning housing market. I’m not sure exactly how they’re defining that.
I would assume that figure takes into account not just how many homeless there are, but renters and home prices vs wages as well. There isn’t a single county in the US where a worker with the average annual wage can afford to buy a house at the average price range in that area, for example.
The wealthy do not deserve praise for spending the money they leeched from society to solve problems that could have been paid for by taxes they avoided paying. The wealthy are NOT going to solve society’s problems long term, just drag them out so society relies on them instead of solving it themselves.
Inbe4 the starter-home priced housing is bought up, demolished, rebuilt, and sold as luxury housing on the market, as airbnbs, or rentals with no rent control.
Do you chuds ever get tired of repeating the same drivel over and over?
Yeah I’m am pretty glad my taxes totally went to buy more missiles and tanks. /s
No, we want taxes to help the homeless and other members of society in need dumbass.
Yeah, ok. Look at our governments since the dawn of time and tell me when that’s happening moron.
Look at the wealthy aince the dawn of time and tell me that they are a net benefit to society.
Such a problem that has yet to be solved by any government.
And you expect those same governments to just magically spend that money wisely.
Hilarious.
He’s a millionaire, not a billionaire. Calm down. A millionaire most likely worked hard and earned their wealth. It’s billionaires who cheat.
Millionaire covers everyone from having a million or two due to home equity all the way to 999 million because they just haven’t hit a billion yet. Someone who can drop a million dollars or more and still be a millionaire has multiple millions.
Equating the two is “not all millionaires”.
I think the term “homeless” is really a euphemism that makes it easier for wealthy people to talk about poor people (if you have shelter, food, and are not living paycheck to paycheck you count as wealthy), and it results in misunderstandings about what the real problems are.
Giving a house to someone who lives on the streets is a nice gesture but it doesn’t address the underlying problems - unemployment, unemployability, health problems, psychological problems, lack of social support structure, lack of supportive relationships (e.g. friends and family) - you can’t just fix someone’s life with a building.
It’s like a grade-school-level understanding of the problem (“just give the homeless people homes! then they’re not homeless anymore! problem solved!”). Without putting in a real effort to support these individuals’ lives, to understand and address what put them in that situation in the first place, this is a temporary patch that will end in relapse.
It’s still a huge help. You don’t have to solve all of a persons problems to help them with one of their problems.
Arguably the most immediate of their problems, that gets in the way of them addressing ALL of their other problems.
I see no reason to believe that letting this guy make unilateral decisions is somehow better than taxing him appropriately and using the revenue to build public housing.
What makes you think Trump’s administration will make better use of that money?
Did anyone say that it was better this way? He could just go buy another yatch instead.
Dont let perfection be the enemy of better
Man, Im starting to think I’m tarded. Something about this isn’t letting my brain work, please do more sentences
People are downvoting because “retarded” is increasingly considered a slur or hateful term (just providing context, do with that what you will)
Did anyone say that it was better this way? He could just go buy another yatch instead.
No one is saying it’s better for rich people to independently spend money on charity pet projects. Appropriate taxation is better but this was still a good way for him to spend his money, it’s still good for him to help his community (he could have just spent that money on a yacht)
Dont let perfection be the enemy of better
This is a variation on the saying “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. Which means don’t reject good things just because they aren’t perfect. Perfect is an ideal that doesn’t exist, and good is still worth celebrating.
In this case, the commenter is saying that perfect would be better taxation and government programs that provide this service to the people. But a private citizen helping people with their private wealth still helps people. That’s a good thing even if it’s not the perfect ideal solution
Personally I am a huge advocate of the “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” mentality :) hope this helps and I hope you have a good day!
I probably shouldn’t have said that. I’m gonna double down though a little and say I’m not out here to hurt anyone or make anyone feel hurt, I’m just trying to add voice to my writing. Sort of a tension cutting tool. Some of my favorite people are tarded, like my wife. She’s a pilot now.
Joking aside though, I appreciate the effort of you ELI5ing this to me, and I should have been more direct. I just don’t get why this guy commented this when what he’s commenting on essentially said the same thing. I’m just more surprised that almost the same amount of people upvoted both. They’re both valid in the same way.
If you carefully read the negatives and positives he’s saying kinda the opposite of the first guy :)
I see no reason to believe that letting this guy make unilateral decisions is somehow better than taxing him appropriately and using the revenue to build public housing.
“I don’t believe letting them just spend their money this way is better than doing it with taxes”
And then even more simplified (obviously loosing nuance)
“I don’t think this is as good as doing this with taxes”
Dude, you are just a gem.
I’ve been drinking a bit tonight, and I’m going to look at this tomorrow. I imagine that it’s all going to flow together nicely, but it’s never going to be as nice as you’ve been.
Thank you, and just be proud of how kind you are. I’m astonished currently. I’ll see you tomorrow, and we’ll get to the bottom of this:)
Lol, I really appreciate that. Drink some water and rest well man!
millionares($) wouldn’t be able to afford multiple yachts, or even so large of a yacht. billionares, those who offshoring wealth makes sense for, are the problem.
not the docter nor lawyer, but the whale.
millionares pay about 48%-49%, at least where im from.
Sure there are lots of failures to the way we govern ourselves. This shouldn’t be a need. The reality is that it is a need and that person did what he could. Have you?
Corruption could make that money go to some people’s 3rd, 4rd or their relatives houses UNFORTUNATELY . The question here is: what about those who pay a rent???
So we’re so scared of corruption that (checks notes) we stop even trying for fairness and instead just let rich fucks make all the decisions and hope for the best?
Corruption already makes most millionaires’ and billionaires’ money go to that anyway. At least if it’s taxed some of it will actually go to toward necessary housing, maybe even frequently enough that it’s not newsworthy when it does, the way it is now.
I did not understand what you said, sorry
You’re worried that if we collect money from the wealthy through taxation, it might not be used to reduce homelessness. However, if we don’t tax the wealthy, they’ll spend the money on their own goals, which definitely won’t be to reduce homelessness. While you’re right that taxes are largely wasted, they do still fund important things such as fire departments, medical research, and yes, government housing. It’s true that we need to implement better tax management systems, but we also need a wealth tax.
This statement might be true, but we’re not taxing him. Should he just donate his money to the government?
I don’t even think you can do that.
Especially because his unilateral decision is optional. Someone got lucky with his choice vs someone was guaranteed an outcome.
Absolutely. We don’t need kings making decisions like this. The downside is the difficulty in forcing government the anti-help-anyone segment of our society to spend such taxation correctly to actually help people.
I’m also angry he did a good thing despite the government’s abject failure to tax the rich.
If every billionaire did this and ended homelessness perhaps they would have a point about their wealth hoarding. I won’t be holding my breath for this to happen though. Tax the rich!
I see one: he actually did something instead of a council that blows all of the money on meetings
This is obviously way better, come on. Why involve middle men in something like this? Add more layers and it becomes less efficient. Less of the money goes to helping people and it gets spread around to different agencies, or even worse goes to government contractors who can charge ridiculous rates because they know someone and didn’t have to compete for the contract. I worked at a place once where we got a couple hundred thousand dollars for a useless study because if the money didn’t get used it would make their budget smaller for next year. That kind of thing happens all the time.
I’m chill with rich people as long as some of their money goes to helping people
If the photo is accurate, those ‘homes’ are tiny. Barely bigger than a garage compared to the cars next to them.
My garage is bigger than my house and I’m very very happy with my house.
My garage is really not that big. Just that our house is 12 ft by 24 ft…
A safe place to sleep, store some shit, shower. Could be better, but sounds great to me.
Okay, and? Infinitely better than being on the street. Someone does something nice and people like you still complain.
Sure, I guess as a starter to get off the streets they’re definitely better than nothing.
Good start, weird that it’s built like a CPU heat sink. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to build duplexes or quadplexes? Fewer walls, less insulation per person…
What !? Sharing a wall with someone else because it’s more efficient in terms construction and maintenance costs?! Get outta here you commi!
Even lower income people want a places they can call their own. Even lower income people prefer not to deal with other people’s noise or stomping or flooded sink. Even lower income people don’t want to deal with a building manager for repairs. Even lower income people want to be able to make choices in their living accommodations.
Plus these are probably all factory built and I see a simple gravel foundation. Cheap and fast to set up, but it’s still a house. Probably much cheaper than full scale houses
probably zoning laws. that’s a HUGE part of why we don’t just build more apartments in many places. it’s why people get so passionate about the “white flight” as it’s known and nimbyism. everyone wants to fix homelessness, but in any of the places that one could effectively build community housing it is illegal to make anything that provides housing to more than 1 or 2 families. the people that live there want homelessness to go away, but when it’s proposed to build low income housing nearby they freak out and say “poor people and drug addicts? they do crime. low income housing is cool, but not in my backyard”.
being poor in america has such a stigma that homeowners consistently vote to ban them from living nearby by banning apartments. to be perfectly honest, I’m just waiting for zoning laws to try and make these tiny homes illegal now that people are building them for the poor.
And building codes. The foundation alone can be the reason. A regular full scale building requires a concrete or piered foundation or slab depend8ng on the area, which is fairly expensive and time consuming. These look like simple gravel foundations, which is fine for that size structure
These are tiny homes that are built in a shop and just dropped onto the little concrete pad once they’re done. A small crew was able to build them out over time, so I can’t say which option exactly is cheaper. One advantage was they were able to move people in as they were built too.
Edit to add a word
99 is not nearly enough but it’s a start at least
Not nearly enough? How many homeless people were in this guy’s town?!
99 would take in every homeless person in a wide berth around here. WIDE. And I’m next door to the second poorest county in Florida.
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i mean depends how big the town is
I would say that this particular millionaire did his part to help out. If every millionaire/billionaire spend the same percentage of their wealth on similar projects we would be in pretty good shape as far as homelessness goes.
How many stories have I seen about billionaires building housing? Zero. Though, to be fair, I’ve only seen a meme about a millionaire doing so. No verification that it happened.
https://themindcircle.com/millionaire-builds-99-homes-to-reduce-homelessness/
Seems to be true :).
There’s someone in Kelowna doing something similar.
is this a joke? any of those buildings are smaller then the cars they have!
I’m sorry, are the free houses you built for the homeless much larger than that?
They’re homeless, not mansionless. A large number of tiny houses is absolutely a fantastic way to help.
Exactly, one of the major hurdles of being unhoused is not having a house. You have to have an address to begin the process of getting assistance in most places.
Look up articles about ADUs (accessory dwelling units). This is a legitimate housing category based on the tiny house fad
Considering everything some of them own can fit in a shopping cart, they are mansions.
The government should have done that. At least Trump will build homes for the homeless veterans at least. This guy is doing his charitable work. Good for him. Even if it isn’t his responsibility just because he’s wealthy.
Trump ain’t doing shit
He only just signed an executive order stating as such lol
https://veterans.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=6702
i think there’s an area in project zomboid that looks like that
