Re:I hate living in my tiny house
by DoreenMichele on Monday October 07, 2019 @02:13AM
(#21177972)
California has really serious problems. Their housing policies are an issue statewide. I ultimately left the state get back into housing.
I spent over two years in Fresno which has housing costs more in line with the national average than is typical for most California cities. I still couldn't find housing that worked for me.
And that's partly because low end housing in Fresno is often a trailer in a trailer court. For health reasons, I'm unwilling to ever live in a trailer again.
I lived in a trailer for a few months in my twenties. It was horrible and I was deathly ill in it.
We no longer want SROs in the US and the reality is this means a lot of poor Americans are living in trailers which are such lousy housing that you have trouble financing them because their value goes down, not up, over time.
The widespread use of trailers is testimony that if you try to zone "affordable housing" out of existence because poor people shouldn't exist or something, it just slips through the cracks in the system and calls itself a vehicle or whatever to get around that.
In fact, the Tiny House movement probably goes back to some guy who literally put his tiny house on wheels and called it a "trailer" to get around housing regulations because it's not legal in most parts of the US to build a really small house.
And these rules go bad places on a regular basis. Apple Valley, California is full of mansions with crazy large yards because the town set some crazy large minimum lot size intended to "preserve the character" of the rural small town surrounded by farmland and not have it become suburban sprawl. It became suburban sprawl anyway, just on steroids.
The real way to preserve farmland is to create multifamily homes and set aside actual farmland. There are institutions that have studied this. A lot of well-meaning policies don't do what they were intended to do. They all too often do the exact opposite.
Policies have to be more than well intended. They gave to also be well researched and we'll designed.
I spent over two years in Fresno which has housing costs more in line with the national average than is typical for most California cities. I still couldn't find housing that worked for me.
And that's partly because low end housing in Fresno is often a trailer in a trailer court. For health reasons, I'm unwilling to ever live in a trailer again.
I lived in a trailer for a few months in my twenties. It was horrible and I was deathly ill in it.
We no longer want SROs in the US and the reality is this means a lot of poor Americans are living in trailers which are such lousy housing that you have trouble financing them because their value goes down, not up, over time.
The widespread use of trailers is testimony that if you try to zone "affordable housing" out of existence because poor people shouldn't exist or something, it just slips through the cracks in the system and calls itself a vehicle or whatever to get around that.
In fact, the Tiny House movement probably goes back to some guy who literally put his tiny house on wheels and called it a "trailer" to get around housing regulations because it's not legal in most parts of the US to build a really small house.
And these rules go bad places on a regular basis. Apple Valley, California is full of mansions with crazy large yards because the town set some crazy large minimum lot size intended to "preserve the character" of the rural small town surrounded by farmland and not have it become suburban sprawl. It became suburban sprawl anyway, just on steroids.
The real way to preserve farmland is to create multifamily homes and set aside actual farmland. There are institutions that have studied this. A lot of well-meaning policies don't do what they were intended to do. They all too often do the exact opposite.
Policies have to be more than well intended. They gave to also be well researched and we'll designed.