By Chronicle Editorial Board : sfchronicle – excerpt
Tiny home communities are one way to get homeless people off the street, fast. Why isn’t San Francisco leveraging this option?
For years, the parking lot behind a shuttered Walgreens at 1979 Mission St. in San Francisco has sat empty, despite its proximity to the 16th Street Mission BART station. After a nearly decade-long push-and-pull battle between neighborhood residents and developers, the site is now earmarked for hundreds of affordable housing units. But construction won’t start for at least another two years.
In late 2022, Supervisor Hillary Ronen came up with a pragmatic plan: While the development waits to break ground, the lot could be used as a tiny home community for unhoused San Franciscans. Just like an existing site at 33 Gough St., the vacant space could be filled with dozens of small, shed-like structures that would help stabilize people experiencing homelessness before they move on to permanent housing.
In typical San Francisco fashion, however, that plan was stymied by exorbitant costs, bureaucracy and neighborhood opposition. While people slept in doorways, in vehicles and on public transit, the city and neighborhood residents engaged in an all-out war over the site until an agreement was finally made to start construction of the homes this winter. The cost: $104,000 per unit and even more for offices, a community room and a full-time staffer to field community complaints…(more)
Just for jollies I checked the price of trailers. They can be purchased of a lot less than the tiny homes we see listed here. Depending on the size, they start at around 35K. You can go smaller or larger depending on what you want. Tiny houses and trailers appear to be as cheap as $18K. Not sure why the cost of SF tiny houses is so much more expensive than trailers, and, the trailers come with all those amenities built in that you want in a home. Designers have been working on the perfecting them for a long time. I think they proably have it down by now. All you need is a place to put them. You might request FEMA trailers or some others that are already manufactured and have them here in a week, especially if you waved all the red tape associated with building permits, since all yo need to do is hook them up to utilities.