Tiny Houses for the Homeless: The Big Myth. Louis Shalako.

 

The challenge of 'narrowness'.

Louis Shalako

The Myth of the Tiny Home.

 

The tiny home, certainly as a solution for homelessness, is a sorry myth, just one more lie from the sort of people who really should know better.

Their plan calls for dozens of the things in the middle of a muddy bean field out by the airport…

Yet city council seems to think it’s a good idea. The only question, is where to put them—the fact the new homelessness encampment protocol calls for one hundred metres of setback, yes, you heard that right—one hundred metres of setback, tells you just how seriously they take themselves.

...essentially, they have made any new encampment both illegal and impossible, which is the result of their own rules. So, where you gonna put that...??? If I may inquire, what does that do for the homeless encampment you already have...???

So, I downloaded a PDF of ruled graph paper, and I can print out as many sheets as I need.

Let’s take a look at the structure itself.

Drawing.

Calculated at 410 sq. ft. although interior space would be a little smaller. Based upon an 8.5'W x 20'L x 8.5'T shipping container for the base. The floor of the upper space is framed with 2" x 6" spruce studs, the floor with 3/4" ply. This doesn’t stand up to the building codes you say. Fine, but then neither do tents pitched in a public park. With framing, insulation, vapour barrier and probably 3/8" drywall in the upper floor, and a bay window, lower left, a proper 3' x 7' door, windows with screens, a skylight upper left, and provision for a stove, what's missing is a floor plan and proper hookups for sewer, water, electricity and possibly gas. It is, of course,  uninsurable. (This is where all that very useful stigma comes in.) Where you put the steps in an 8.5' wide space is very important, I reckon they'd be at least 2.5' wide, hopefully with a straight run, although there is a case to be made for a turn part way up. Simple geometry dictates that a stair that climbs 8.5' at forty-five degrees requires the same length, right.

I really ought to check the geometry. With a 12’ rise from the second floor to the peak, the upper story is a bit of a sail in a really big wind, and you need to bolt that down, rather than just throwing a few spikes in there. The presumed occupant needs to be able to climb stairs, so it’s not for the disabled or the truly elderly.

In my view, it’s better to set the shipping container on a pad of reinforced concrete, rather than just letting it sink into a mud-hole. Services like water and sewage, whether it’s a septic tank or otherwise, must be in place. The shipping container would have to be carefully placed, as the holes for services have to line up.

The challenge of the shipping container house is that the width is limited to 8.5' or you're joining two together. Once you start cutting out large sections in order to do that, the question of loading comes into play, and why didn’t you just frame it properly in the first place. Going to the 40' length merely accentuates the problem. This 410 sq. ft. concept has a kitchen, bath and living room on the ground floor, and a loft style bedroom up above. So you walk in, and the landing for the stairs has two angled steps, turn right and up you go. The upper deck is wider in order to get headroom at the top of the stairs, and to make a livable space. Looking at the end view, you see the limitation of 'narrowness'. Also, the land, the services, those are fixed costs, relatively speaking, no matter how small or efficient the structure. A local guy built a tiny home on wheels, with fridge, stove, heat, toilet, shower, electricity, wifi, big-screen TV, water tanks, and what must be very small washer and dryer. He was asking $45,000.00 and didn't seem to get too many offers. The bathroom, under the sleeping platform, can't be five feet tall. It just can't. As for offers, or lack of them, that’s because the stairs go up to within a foot of the ceiling, and once you get a mattress onto the sleeping platform, you have eleven inches of clearance and you have to get out of bed in order to turn over.

Towing that overloaded, top heavy thing down the road must have been a real nightmare.

How in the hell he got that 25 k out to Reese’s Corners is a very good question. I reckon he’ll never do it again—

...terribly narrow, right.

Services like water and sewage, city or septic, must be in place and the shipping container would have to be carefully placed on a reinforced concrete pad. The holes have to line up.

Construction trailers.

The typical construction trailer is more like 12’ wide. You can get them down a road. They are insulated, some have heat and a/c, some have a washroom and holding tanks, presumably, for water and effluents. You can plug them in and run power from a portable generator.

City council is looking into building 80 sq. ft. doghouses for the homeless. With ‘wraparound’ supports, due to all the mental health addictions and stigma. They honestly think they can build them for five grand, and will set them down in a bean field, with one hundred metres of setback from all other roads, trails, parks, schools, retail, industry, ditches, trees, groundhog dens, pretty rocks or any other sidewalk, bus stop, or other amenities such as fire hydrants, ladies and gentlemen.

There are dozens of these in a field south of town...

Shortly after the 2018 municipal elections, county council voted unanimously for a five-year study of housing and homelessness.

It was a cop-out, it bought them five years of idleness, and they did nothing with it except bloviate at various housing summits, all of which were reported on by Canadian journalists, presumably with a straight face and without puking up a little bit into their mouths and having to swallow it all back down again.

The funny thing is, you can get a used camper trailer for five or six grand. Don't worry, that won't happen either.

 

END

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Google Play. A Stranger In Paris is currently free in audio format.

Council Approves Inaction Plan for Microscopic Doghouses for ‘Our Most Vulnerable’ People.

(One year from now, there will not be a single tiny home anywhere in this municipality. - ed.) 

Everybody needs a home.

Added link, (CBC Sept 22/24) Man Designs Tiny Homes. If you read the article and look at the pictures, you may see what might be a bed, very high over the kitchenette area. There appears to be a ladder leading up there. One, that ladder looks extremely dangerous due to structural weakness, and you probably don't want to fall out of bed or have that ladder break while you're climing up there. I am hoping that is a storage area, and the bed is in a more desirable location, but the pictures are limited. This is why I put a proper set of stairs up to a proper bedroom in my own design, and of course there would be a handrail, and the bed is just a bed, not a cubby eight feet off the floor.

So, in order to remove barriers to housing for our most vulnerable citizens, we ask them to climb eight feet up a vertical ladder, 90 degrees, straight up and no fucking slope at all, like Spider Man or something, and somehow clamber into and out of bed via ladder at the foot of a space which cannot be more than about thirty-two inches at its highest. Are we fucking monkey's then. Fuck off.

Nice as the colours are, this thing was clearly drawn by a member of the #bourgeoisie.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

In Depth. What Do We Do With Sarnia Airport. Louis Shalako.

Eighteen passengers, on a good day.

Louis Shalako

What would happen if we gave up Sarnia Airport?

Would we ever be able to replace it? 

How much passenger traffic would it take to sustain Sarnia Airport at a break-even or even profitable level? How much does it even cost, and is there any benefit, in sustaining the thing in limbo for any great length of time. Is there any potential for that sustainable level of air traffic in the local market, barring any great increase in the local population, which doesn’t seem very likely in the short term.

The population of Sarnia and Sarnia-Lambton has been stable, if not stagnant, for many years. We do have a sizable population of foreign students, who may or may not stick around for the longer term. Foreign students are, for the most part, not buying five or six hundred thousand dollar new-build homes, and they don’t take affordable, geared-to-income housing because they aren’t eligible. What they do take, are apartments, in the lower range of the scale in terms of pricing. They take them for the short term, which means when they vacate landlords can take a look at the local going rate and jack the rents accordingly.

How much land is involved in the operation of Sarnia Airport. What happens if the airport loses any certifications that it might have. What are the chances of any major or smaller air-carrier bringing passenger or charter flight services to the Sarnia area? How long can we hang on, waiting for such an outcome.

If we closed Sarnia Airport to any flight operations at all, what would we do with it? Is there any real chance of replacing Sarnia Airport, in some other location, at some future date. That doesn’t seem very likely. Where else would you put it, and if there really are economic benefits, how would we like seeing those benefits going to a neighbouring municipality.

Use it or lose it, in other words.

What value does private flying, what value does a small flight school, what economic or social benefit, or any other public good does that bring to the municipality. If they lost the privilege, where would all the private pilots and flight students go?

What upgrades would be required to bring Sarnia Airport up to snuff, in order to attract any air carrier to the Sarnia area. Where is the demand. Back in the 1960s, ‘Great Lakes Aviation’ operated air services, flying DC-3s of WW II vintage on short, regional routes. These were twin-engine tail-draggers of about 28 passengers. This was superseded by ‘Air Ontario’, flying Convair 440 aircraft; piston-engine, twin-engine aircraft with nose-wheel landing gear. Those were good for 52 passengers, they were noisy, nearing the end of their service life, and no doubt expensive to maintain.

For some years, small, twin-engine turbine aircraft provided the service, for the life of me I cannot recall the name of the company…

In a personal note, my buddy Bill Stone and I rode our little banana bikes out to the airport, from the Bright St. and Germain Park area, when we were twelve or thirteen years old. (It was summer and we fished for catfish and suckers out there in Wawanosh Drain as well.) We went into the ‘new’ terminal and got an airline schedule from the nice lady behind the counter…the security guard sort of grinned and shook his head when he saw us coming. I guess you could say we liked aircraft. We rode out there to see them landing and taking off. It’s probably a good thing our parents didn’t know too much about all this—

The cockpit of the Convair 440.

***

Late on many a hot summer night, with the windows open, laying in bed, one could hear the bigger planes landing at Sarnia Airport. They would put the propellers into reverse pitch, pushing full throttle, in order to brake on the relatively short runway—rather than plunge off the NW end of the runway and fall into Wawanosh Drain. We used to go out there and cluster at the end of the runway when Canada’s Snowbirds came and went, although it has been a while…considering the age of the Tudor training aircraft, perhaps that is understandable. Our age, too.

Some of this was before the opening of the Highway 402 in about 1980. Traffic between Sarnia and London meant travelling on the two-lane, very narrow Highway 22, which did have one centre passing lane—one result of which was head-on collisions when folks misjudged the distance and the speed. This community doesn’t support the costs of passenger rail traffic, it all has to be subsidized at a loss, and one wonders about the intercity bus service as well. It’s all very well to read about it or see it on the evening news. What is it like to actually ride upon it…??? Ten or eleven people on a train going one hundred kilometres, isn’t very profitable, or ticket prices quickly become prohibitive.

***

How much would all that cost, and would the economic, spin-off benefits offset those costs.

This holds true for any form of transportation service.

What would happen if an actual cruise ship, actually docked in Sarnia Harbour…and what would that actually do for downtown…???

What would it do for Bright’s Grove. This is where most of our politicians live, after all.

The real question we need to ask ourselves here, is what would this do for Bright's Grove.

What alternative uses might the existing airport footprint support, bearing in mind Badger Daylighting and other services onsite, and bearing in mind present and future zoning requirements. How does this all fit into the official plan?

Surrounding the airport are areas zoned for agriculture, commercial and light industrial. There are farms and residences along Telfer Road, Michigan Avenue and Blackwell Road. There are businesses along London Line, including the municipal business park.

How would they be affected by major changes to the site, and how would that be perceived. They’ve lived with it this long, what would they think if the land was sold off for some major industrial operation? It is the largest single parcel of land in the city--it is available, in some sense.

Some kind of mega battery or EV plant might fit there—only problem there is, we still lose the airport and the NIMBYs would be well and truly out for blood…

Backtracking just a little bit, there is plenty of room already, for middle-class and high-end housing development.  Called Zone 2, it’s in the official plan. An increase in development land near Bright’s Grove has been rejected the last I have heard. Any form of affordable, geared-to-income housing will be a hard sell in any neighbourhood, this in spite of all the efforts of ineffectual do-gooders, (sandals-wearing, shorts-wearing, floral shirts-wearing, weak and ineffectual, slightly-incompetent socialist bureaucrat-gender-tag-wearing people), going down on the riverbank and burning candles in order to raise awareness of the need to reduce stigma, which they have just reinforced with the success in getting front-page coverage with what is an otherwise bogus endeavour…to put that sort of development in an area that is ‘desirable’, merely rubs salt in the wounds of the long-suffering bourgeoisie. Who, as we all know, have been having it pretty rough lately.

We already have thousands of approvals, very few of which represent ‘shovels in the ground’. Many of them have simply been forgotten.

Perhaps the Ineos/Styrolutions site will come available soon, and of course this is much more suitable when you consider the encampment at Rainbow Park, and the fact that the intersection of Tashmoo and Churchill Road/Highway 40 is so much closer to the addictions and mental health services people require—or does that sound snarky. We could always bus them in—the social workers, I mean.

We could always nail up a sign and call it a ‘leper colony’, or ‘Free Gaza’, or ‘Ford City’, or something like that.

It’s crazy enough, it might just work. Why, that big old airport can house any number of homeless people, in tiny little fibreglass veal-calf sheds, or maybe we could just put in a few hundred McMansions for the Sarnia City Councilor Bill Dennis’s of this world.

 

END

They just liked aircraft.

Badger Daylighting.

So, here’s this story where Council was looking to sell Sarnia Airport.

Here’s a Master Plan for Sarnia Airport. Be prepared for your bum to fall asleep.

This link is from 2018. Some Canadian journalist really ought to follow up.

Okay,leaving Sarnia for Toronto at 8:40 a.m. $48.00VIA rail. One would hope there is some kind of return ticket—

Red Wigglers, the Cadillac of Worms. Because you never know when you’re going to fish in Wawanosh Drain.

DC-3A Great Lakes Aviation.

Scottsdale Aviation.

The Sarnia Airport claims hundreds of thousands of trips in 2019. This seems like nonsense, what is a ‘catchment area’ and how can the local population produce 472,000 trips.

The last air carrier at Sarnia Airport operated aircraft very similar to the Jetstream.

Images. Top photo. Alan Wilson, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories abounding upon Amazon.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.