> In Portland, they passed some radical new zoning laws a few years ago that allowed anyone, anywhere the ability to zone ADUs on their property. And the cost to get permits is almost nothing.
Yeah, see, this mindset is exactly the problem.
Letting anyone put a granny flat on their property if they have space for it is radical? Come on, that's a moderate change at most.
And yeah, that kind of thing is never going to make a big difference over the short or even medium term. You want a big impact quickly, you need bigger changes: allow for higher density "missing middle" housing across the whole city, drastically streamline the approval process to be "as of right", get rid of all mandatory parking minimums, invest tens of millions of tax dollars every year into new public housing, etc.
An SRO costs 25% as much to build as a studio apartment.
The real obvious solution is to take all of the money we are pumping into "long-term" affordable housing options into basically just dormitories. If it's good enough for college students, it should be good enough for anyone looking to get off the streets.
I think people really underrate how much of a knock-on affect there would be if we built enough SROs to meet demand. It would essentially establish a housing "floor" in any housing market, and undercut the ability to rent-seek up the rest of the housing market.
Yeah, I think form factors like this should be part of the answer. But part of it has to be getting costs down for regular apartments too. It's not uncommon to see that even non-profit orgs take 400k or 500k per 1br apartment in a building in major cities, which is just crazy.
Shipping containers are a huge red flag that a project is a gimmick.
People have this mistaken idea that there are a ton of shipping containers that need to be recycled (there was a brief period in the mid aughts where this may have been true). But a used shipping container is neither cheap nor a great material to build a home from.
Last I checked you could get a 20 ft container for what, 6 grand? That's 160 sq ft. And you need a foundation. And to frame inside for insulation. If you go Amish style without mains power you could finish out a kacynziski sized studio for under 20k.
I am for that as well. Build dormitories as housing of last resort. Limit tenants rights to make eviction of non-payers easier. As it is landlords take all the risk and it makes life of honest tenants much expensive and more difficult. It should be easy to rent and it should be easy to evict non-paying tenants. If the society thinks we should house everyone then that cost should be on tax payers in general not the unlucky landlord.
Yeah, see, this mindset is exactly the problem.
Letting anyone put a granny flat on their property if they have space for it is radical? Come on, that's a moderate change at most.
And yeah, that kind of thing is never going to make a big difference over the short or even medium term. You want a big impact quickly, you need bigger changes: allow for higher density "missing middle" housing across the whole city, drastically streamline the approval process to be "as of right", get rid of all mandatory parking minimums, invest tens of millions of tax dollars every year into new public housing, etc.