People live on small boats. People live in RVs. Microhousing comes in many forms. The idea of dropping these cubes in parking garages has some novelty value, but the cubes themselves are not an especially radical idea. My question has more to do with the market. There is clearly a shortage of affordable housing in many major metro areas, especially in downtown areas. Why living pods like these instead of conventional apartments, which could be made just as small? As a practical matter, is this just a quirky design concept that, while feasible on paper, could never compete with conventional housing on the market?
I still wouldn't want to raise four kids in one though.
“People live on small boats. People live in RVs. Microhousing comes in many forms. “
The log cabins and sod houses of the early settlers were micro houses. Billions of people on the planet today live in one or two room huts or shacks.
By the standards of most of the world a public housing apartment or single family house in a American urban slum, that most progressives and government bureaucrats would call “sub standard”, is a mansion. About 40% of the planet’s population does not have running water in their homes. Over 2.6 billion people do not have access to modern sanitation. American’s who complain about affordable and substandard housing need to get a reality check.
Unwittingly you highlighted the chief problem with this latest socialist-utopian scheme.
Small boats and RVs both rely on external sanitary disposal services and potable water supply as well as temporary power hook ups. The bright young lights and their several dozen mentors in these design schools didn't consider that anymore than the Occupy Wall Street mob. Moms or the Great Surrogate MOM, the State will wipe their butts and clean up the messes left behind.
But the whole scheme hinges on the supply of parking structures built,owned, and maintained by others. Pure and simple theft cloaked in Good Intentions.
The whole "Design Problem" has its roots in the grand utopian schemes most popularly embodied in Le Corbusier's Ville Radieusse (sp?) which envisioned mammoth mid rise worker housing undulating like snakes through a green zone. High density housing concepts that brought us such places as Cabrini Green and others in the sixties, the breeding grounds of feral youth and crime brought to us courtesy of the Great Society architect, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
In the discovery of the Great Homeless Problem in the late 70's one design school, ever sensitive to the plight of the poor psychotics released from institutions noted the stolen grocery carts used by such were terribly inefficient for the storage and movement of these unfortunates worldly goods. Their solution? Design a better grocery cart!
Much the same here. Little socialist totalitarian gods in training knowing the best for the rest.