“The word ‘philanthropy’ is often interpreted as someone who gives money,” he told the alumni magazine.
“But the Greek roots of the word ‘philos’ and ‘anthropos’ mean to love humans. What I have discovered is spending money is the easy thing, spending yourself is the hard thing. The 12 Neighbours project is how I can best spend myself.”yl
I’m not crying, you’re crying… Sniff
I also liked this:
“We have people who have been run over by trauma, by substance abuse, by all of these things,” LeBrun told Macleans. “It’s about excavating that person, buried under their circumstances, little by little.”
Seems like a decent dude.
I like this part as well:
“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.”
Someone must be cutting onions. Let’s add them to the billionaire stew.
Impressive, it’s even a walkable place seen that it is a mixed use neighborhood with commercial buildings too
Eat this guy last
He can sit on my side of the table if he keeps this up
I have a feeling by the time we eat the other billionaires, he’d have donated it all away. We won’t have to eat him if what his PR team says is really true.
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 🫣
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
Those houses don’t cost 40K. I’ve seen that kind of houses for 20K and less. Either in wood or sandwich panels.
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/
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”
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
look at how dense OP’s one storey housing is, by shrinking the houses, and by ditching the front yard and dedicated sidewalks.
What the actual fuck are these suggestions. This sounds a lot like the conservative members of my area that argue homeless people don’t deserve anything. They want to cram the all into one building with no privacy, get rid of sidewalks and green spaces because people loiter, and generally make life as uncomfortable as possible for the destitute instead of treating them like normal human beings.
For reference, your standard wheelchair accessible hotel room will not be less than 20sqm.
I want cities to be more like Venice or Florence or basically any city built before the 1780s. They worked just fine. There are places like that in the city I live in, but they’re horrifically expensive because it’s literally illegal to build more of them.
And to be clear, I’m not saying “I want to put homeless people in these places”, I’m saying “I want to live in these places, and lots of others do to so stop making them fucking illegal to build more of.”
I don’t entirely disagree, but that article lost me when it said “this is as human scale as it gets” and shows a photo of stairs, which are a nightmare for people with mobility problems, and there aren’t any people in the photo. I did finish reading it, but it did little to address my concerns.
I will also forever have a chip on my shoulder about city planning and transit because I loved living in a walkable city while I was homeless. However, it being a nice place to live is why I couldn’t actually find affordable housing there. Thanks to the ass-backwards tax structure in the state, public transit is mostly funded via vehicle taxes, which sounds great until you’re being forced to buy a car because of lack of transit outside the city, then you realize it’s really just a tax on being too poor to live in the city.
The county is focusing all efforts into continued improvement on the city, but refuses to expand the county bus service. As if a bus packed with standing people going 50mph down a bumpy county highway isn’t dangerous. I talk to friends about it, and they go “well, it’s a rural red area and they don’t want it anyways, so fuckem”, completely ignoring that 1) It has more than doubled in population since Covid, 2) It’s blue enough to have drag queens at the bar, 3) We do want it.
When people in my situation read the article you linked, I assume it’s not going to be somewhere I will ever afford to live. Even the article doesn’t really address it. It’s got a spot for responding to criticism, and admits that cost is one of the criticisms, but it just says “it’s not expensive” and then tries to say gentrification is a good thing actually.
It concludes with this: “People spend their life savings just to spend a week in a place like that. What if you could create that in your city?”
The answer is no. I don’t want to build another city that’s so expensive it takes your life savings to visit for a week. Because that’s exactly how it would go in America.
My grandma lived in this trailer park for 40 years until she died. Pretty low overhead.
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.
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.
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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$.
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.
fair point, for creative stuff whether or not its worth is really billions is another discussion which might touch ethics but is not always an obv violation.
It can really be a grey zone though since some inventions could really improve humanity as a whole (such as those in medicine) but when capitalised becomes accessible only by a certain class and makes the inventor possibly a billionaire. Now if you categorize earning billions from this as non-ethical but earning billions from other creative processes as ethical this will likely create a loophole. So I am still in favor of putting these in the same bag.
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.
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
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
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 ?
Yeah I was kind of working on a long effort post in Jerboa over the course of my day, which is already risky since it doesn’t save drafts, but I think somehow switching apps resulted in my posting three times to this thread when I had not intended to post anything at all yet.
So now there are three comments from me on this thread, this one, another without the partial sentence at all, and one completely blank.
Looks goofy as hell but I’m gonna leave them up anyway.
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
Based
Rember kids; philanthropy is advantageous upon failure of collective efforts
Very smart to put solar panels on each unit. I hope the residents will be allowed to plant some flowers, bushes, and trees to brighten up the area.
This is in my town. They are allowed and encouraged to do so. Their place is THEIR place, it fosters a sense of community and ownership of the community.
This project really kicks ass and it’s making waves. I know the guy is a millionaire, but I’ve listened to a few interviews and his heart is at the right place. He genuinely cares and is being pragmatic about it.
I wish I could say the same for the billionaires of this province. Looking at you, Irving shitbags.
It’s actually not as crazy being a tech millionaire nowadays since so many people build a great service and then just have it bought up by the competition.
It said right in the article Salesforce bought his product in 2011 and thats what made him a millionaire. Pretty good way to use that life changing money for the better of others and not just himself.
A million dollars ain’t what it used to be. Won’t even buy a house in many cities anymore.
A million will get you a home in just about any city. Whether it’s a really nice one or not is the question.
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.
Honestly when I see “tech millionaire” and “altruism” in the same article, I don’t expect to see someone actually using their wealth to do something decent.
Millionaires still have their humanity on occasion.
