An abandoned office park in Sacramento will be the site of the first group of 1,200 tiny homes to be built in four cities to address California’s homelessness crisis, the governor’s office announced Wednesday after being criticized for the project experiencing multiple delays.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is under pressure to make good on his promise to show he’s tackling the issue. In March, the Democratic governor announced a plan to gift several California cities hundreds of tiny homes by the fall to create space to help clear homeless encampments that have sprung up across the state’s major cities. The $30 million project would create homes, some as small as 120 square feet (11 square meters), that can be assembled in 90 minutes and cost a fraction of what it takes to build permanent housing.
More than 171,000 homeless people live in California, making up about 30% of the nation’s homeless population. The state has spent roughly $30 billion in the last few years to help them, with mixed results.
High density housing specifically dedicated to housing homeless people also seems like a really bad idea.
We have many, many decades of experience of segregating socially disadvantaged people into high density "projects," and it never led to any desirable results.
Much better to set aside a certain quota of new high density housing for socially disadvantaged people, one apartment at a time, and give people the opportunity to integrate with a community without the stigma of giving them an address in the undesirable stigmatized "projects."