“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.
Imagine what WE could do if we taxed millionaires and billionaires.
We could build these in every city in the country.
These units may be basically sheds, but I’ve seen people pay half a million to have the same thing three floors up in central London.
If I was homeless I’d take solid four walls the size of a medium-sized tent if it meant warmth, utility services, your own toilet and anything else I’d need to even be able to focus on caring for myself or even others more than merely survive. Those tiny buildings might be the minimum, but they ARE something you can call a safe home.
I’m wondering though, how was this more cost-effective to build than a long apartment complex…? Do those tiny things not need any concrete foundation, perhaps regulatory stuff…?
Looking at the video, they’re basically trailers. How much does it take to set up a trailer park? Fill a base with concrete, slap in some plumbing and electrical points. Probably quite economical to do it all in one go.
I suspect the most expensive part is the land in most places. Looks like this town has plenty of room around it. Probably costs a bit to heat them though, being where it is.
And I got to be honest, a small separate home looks a lot nicer to live in than an apartment building. Especially if it’s built from wood like these are. Being able to hear constant noise from 10 other people around you just walking about is not for me.
There are ways to build apartment complexes rather sound-proof, however probably not as economically. Just hope the long-term costs of these tiny houses won’t eat up any savings; at least in terms of energy everyone got solar panels, that should offset the probably rather weak insulation.
Off topic, they look like detached homes. Was there a conscious choice not to make duplexes, quads, or an apartment building? Tiny homes are just so weird to me… People will really do anything except stick units next to each other
It’s nice not to have to listen to your neighbours through the walls
If you insulate against noise properly, you won’t.
They’re easy to manufacture and move into place and remove if theres problems(pests, fire, etc). Depending on how he selects people a lot of the unhoused population are not mentally well and/or have substance abuse problems. This means if someone is a hoarder or sets their own place on fire it is not as consequential to their neighbors. It also is less likely to cause problems with neighbors if you have just a little bit of room. I would imagine for something like this to thrive you would want to build community and if people are annoyed with their neighbors because they are sharing a wall it would cause problems. I don’t know the real reason just throwing out ideas.
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 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.
Most millionaires probably don’t even know it and certainly don’t feel it. It’s old people who’ve been living in the same house for 50 years, who still worry about the price of beans.
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.
I think the main ethical pathway to billions is through intellectual property. Write a beloved book series where each installment sells over 10 million copies, gets adapted into a movie cinematic universe that grosses billions, sells a shitload of merchandise, etc., and taking a fair cut of all that economic activity might result in a billion dollars.
Yes, in a sense it’s still rent seeking of being paid some kind of toll for someone else building on your work, but that foundation is still your own work.
On a smaller scale, you’ve got songwriters, filmmakers, other entertainers, who can do one thing that gets seen/appreciated by billions. Same with inventors or artists.
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$.
deleted by creator
This is really great to see. So glad there are people like this out there willing to extend empathy to people who are struggling. I love that this project also respects their clients’ autonomy as well. The fact that you don’t have to stay sober to be there, I think it’s great. Just give someone a stable roof over their head, a small support network, and I believe they can turn around their addictions and their lives.
Damn, $200 sounds low, on the other hand 30% is a crazy share. I’m targeting 10-15% at most.
30% is a good target for keeping things balanced because theoretically youd spend 30% on housing, 30% on food and necessities and 15% for savings and 15% for fun stuff. But reality is for most people the required costs are much higher so you end up with most income going to housing and transportation
In France the law does not allow rent (or mortgage) payments higher than 1/3 of net monthly income.
It is pretty effective at keeping the housing market vaguely in check.
Fell apart after COVID when a bunch of Parisians sold their little apartments and arrived in the provinces with a million in their pocket. The law has kept it level after that big jump though I think.
German here, 30% of income after taxes was the rule since a few decades, but in reality many people are closer to 50% now. How do you manage 15%?
EDIT: Oh, right, just saw the 8k income. That’s C-Level money here.
I am C-level and also German.
It’s a lot but certainly nowhere near C-level.
High risk, high reward I guess. Less social security, more immediate gain.
You misunderstand me, I’m German myself. That’s nowhere near C-level, at least not in the bigger corporations. 8k a month is not even 100k a year. Engineers can earn that.
8k after taxes? That’s like 16k before.
I was thinking before actually. There’s our misunderstanding. Never mind.
In fairness seems to also include all utilities (wonder if internet counts as a utility?)
Wait what? Your rent is 10-15% of your income? What’s that like in absolute numbers?
Closer to 9% right now, 700 USD vs. 8k income after tax. But I generally don’t spend more than 1k regardless, it’s a hard limit for me.
Do you work remotely? I’m finding it hard to imagine a high salary in a very low rent area.
Where I live, 8000 net would be 150k a year. That’s a high salary around here and rent is not less than 2k a month for a basic apartment for one.
Yes I do, but my office is pretty much exactly 40 miles from where I live, so I could technically commute if I had to. Takes me about 45 min to get there on a good day, with traffic can be 1:15h.
You have a pretty good deal! Do you live in a swamp or something? 😂
The thought of 700USD for housing just gave me a boner
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
approving more housing is like realizing that hey maybe i should stop actively hammering the splinter into my toe!
i mean yeah, you should do that, but if that’s the point we’re at maybe it’s time to start screaming about it rather than going “man this situation is suboptimal”
Based
If it was possible to build co-ops of these it’d be what I’ve been suggesting for like 9 years.
Look up “housing cooperative” in your area, there might actually be one, as there’s a pretty substantial number of them scattered across many locations. My area has at least 10.
I have and there aren’t any. Regardless they should be the standard, not the exception.
My grandma lived in this trailer park for 40 years until she died. Pretty low overhead.
Honestly when I see “tech millionaire” and “altruism” in the same article, I expect to seese seriously ghoulish shit.
I still have concerns around the long-term outcome - the land is ostensibly still privately held, and I assume the homes are as well. I’d like to
It said former, he sold his business 14 years ago and looks like he doesn’t work in tech anymore.
Did you forget to finish that last sentence before you hit post ?
Worst case the business will forcibly close due to lack of rent payments, though, right?
Or he is doing millionaire thing and looking for new kidney.
As long as he pays, capitalism lives on
As for the residents of the houses, rent is kept at 30% of income, which means the large majority of residents pay a maximum of $200 — including all utilities and internet — every month.
How are they planning to sustain this long-term?
Surely, someone is paying for the difference. Unless I totally missed it from the article 🫣
He donated money to pay for the housing units, possibly the land. So that’s probably all paid off. There are still taxes and utilities to pay for, which is probably where the rent is going.
This is just an educated guess though.
You’re one of today’s lucky 10,000! Landlords typically charge even more than the cost of building and maintaining the house, and then just pocket the rest as profit. It’s bonkers!
It’s why the tech millionaire financing this isn’t a tech billionaire.
I get that he’s financing it, but that’s not sustainable if you want to implement something similar around the country.
I love the idea, and the tiny house village looks amazing! But if it relies on a millionaire to voluntarily subsidize the project, I can’t see it lasting too long.
Now, that brings us to a wonderful new option: tax the rich more than we do.
The top 5 billionaires could fund 1000s of these tiny home villages with just a fraction of a percent increase on their hoarded wealth.
I love the idea, and the tiny house village looks amazing! But if it relies on a millionaire to voluntarily subsidize the project, I can’t see it lasting too lang.
Which is why this needs to be a government task, and the rich shouldn’t be begged for voluntary charity, they should be taxed.
Sure it is. You have to have government fund it, like a normal social democracy would do.
like a normal social democracy would do.
Any examples?
Sweden had the Million Programme back in ~1960, which produced a significant amount of the housing people live in to this day. Just shitloads of commie blocks (and houses, actually) because they recognized that people needed a place to live.
You can find apartments in these buildings for $200 per month, they’ll be tiny but they’re fine. $600 is pretty standard and gets you something i’d almost consider luxurious for a single person.And these days there’s still a lot of subsidies going into housing, plus the fact that a lot of the apartment buildings are commissioned by municipal housing companies (i.e. owned by the municipality, and not operated for profit) or by what are effectively housing co-ops.
Look at riksbyggen for example, they’re kind of the bread and butter housing here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riksbyggen
Public services don’t need to be profitable to be sustainable. You just need to tax base to be okay with it.
Hell at the government level they can even just create money if needed. There’s a growing body of evidence that careful and measured “money printing” can actually be beneficial to an economy, and I suspect will become crucial to maintaining economies as populations decline and eventually stabilize
Yeah, I don’t want them to be profitable, but sustainable.
Even if taxpayers are paying for it, you can’t rely on the (struggling) general population to lift people out of homelessness. Let the rich carry that burden. They are the ones who’ve hoarded money that should have gone to everyone else.
hoarded money that should have gone to everyone else
That’s not how money works?
Yes, because hoarding billions means it was stolen from someone else. Either through low wages, low taxes, loopholes, or unethical business practices.
Nobody should ever be able to accumulate billions of dollars. We have people who will be trillionaires in our lifetime. Unjustifiable.
means it was stolen from someone else
No it isn’t? Usually it just means owning stock in a company, that others want to buy. That stock isn’t “stolen”, neither is the value that others assign to it.
These places are tiny at 240 square feet. There’s not going to be much $$ tied up in them for material and utility costs can’t possibly be that hught because the homes are so compact.
If each home cost $40k, which is probably generous, over 30 years that’s $111/mo. Internet is probably a commercial line to the site and then a local network type setup. The real question is how much the land cost.
Rent might not cover everything 100%, but it would be close. It wouldn’t surprise me if some money from the locality was involved since people living on the streets isn’t free and simply providing housing can be a massive first step to getting people reintegrated back into society.
Those houses don’t cost 40K. I’ve seen that kind of houses for 20K and less. Either in wood or sandwich panels.
I would estimate their construction cost is closer to $100k CAD than $40k. Maybe somewhere in the middle. Construction costs can be very high for a tiny home, which is what these are. They are built on a trailer.
That’s nuts from a construction cost per square foot perspective. In the US at least, you can buy a complete single wide and have it shipped to your location for well under $50k. Building them on site, on footings, seems like it would be even cheaper. I wonder where that cost came from.
If each home cost $40k
“Lowest cost for a Canadian tiny home: $80,000 to $150,000” (SOURCE)
Yes, probably less if they are building them all themselves, but $80,000 seems to be the norm for temporary tiny homes. Uxbridge priced tiny homes made from trailer containers at $80,000, too.
I think they could be sustainable as far as electricity (solar) and even water and heating (propane), so that’s not a bad thing.
But how is the land being paid for? Taxes? etc.
Every tiny home project I’ve heard about has these barriers that get in the way. What needs to change so we can build more of these, instead of single, detached homes with massive yards??
We need more of these!
There is no way you can’t cut that 80k number in half if you’re actually trying to build something with the goal of being affordable. Those are companies that are trying to make a manufactured home sound hot and trendy for profit, not an organization trying to make affordable housing.
Canada doesn’t have the single family zoning problem that is prevalent in the US. Lots of Canadians live in high rise apartments.
This is proby a smaller community though.
I contribute to the OpenStreetMap project, and there are a lot of detached homes here. Some areas have like 20 homes in a space that could house thousands of people. It’s pretty disgusting, actually.
We should be building up, and not contribute to sprawl.
But tiny homes are a great solution for keeping land space confined, while still offering functional homes in very little time.
Single family homes and their land should be smaller. How does two people in 2000+ square feet of house make any sense? I can tell you right now, in my ~1400 sq foot house with 2 kids and 2 adults we have two rooms that are largely unused, so I cant imagine the amount of waste in a larger house.
And the lawns! Ever since I measured some standard 1970s era suburbs and saw just how huge those expanses of grass that exist just for grass’s sake I can’t stop thinking about how rediculous many lot sizes are. 50 feet by 100 feet of grass. No flowers, no gardens. Just pure grass. There’s no reason for that much land to be wasted on fucking grass. And then you measure from front door to front door across the street and it’s over 150 feet! Because the road and sidewalks are about 60 feet wide for a road with 20 houses on it!
I have done zero research, but that figure seems crazy. I could see it holding up if you were trying to build a single tiny home as each of the contractors will want to ensure a full day’s worth of income. However, if you’re build 100 units the piece cost should fall substantially. 240 square feet is truly tiny, so it should be pretty fast to assemble and wouldn’t take much raw materials. One other possibility for keeping costs down is volunteer labor, similar to habitat for humanity. That type of model won’t scale, but it can help keep prices low for a handful of jobs.
You would be surprised. There are a lot of fixed costs for building tiny homes, you have all of the appliances that need to be installed, trailer bed, plus framing, siding and roofing trades that need to happen.
Plus there is sitework, sewer, electrical water, and development fees.
Hopefully they got economies of scale to work here but they still can be a bit pricey.
