Good News Everyone

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 🫣

This is good, but if we address this at a systemic level, we don't need to put people in tiny low-density homes unconnected to anything for it to be affordable.

China addresses it by looking at how much labor and materials is required and ensuring the price of concrete, steel, glass, etc is sufficiently low for the number of homes they need constructed, and that there is enough of each type of skilled labor that goes into building a home.

Presumably local governments have some mechanism for when they know a house costs X materials and Y labor, and they see new construction costing significantly more than that.

The result is detached homes@avg 75USD/sqft and apartments@55/sqft. With current interest rates of 6.768%, you'd get ~400 sqft homes with a $200/mo 30 year mortgage at those prices, 600sqft if interest rates were 3%.

When I lived in germany full time, I would've loved to live in a tiny home, but germany would've rather put me on the street than allow a tiny home lmaoo.

My grandma lived in this trailer park for 40 years until she died. Pretty low overhead.

Eat this guy last

Damn, $200 sounds low, on the other hand 30% is a crazy share. I'm targeting 10-15% at most.

Rember kids; philanthropy is advantageous upon failure of collective efforts