Skin in the game - low income housing as a rent-to-own, instead of giant mega project crime concentrators. Seems like a good idea to me, and where successful, the taxpayers don't keep subsidizing rent forever.
The vast majority will not maintain the property, it will fall into disrepair and ruin, and they will encumber the property with as much debt as they possibly can before defaulting and ending up in public housing once more. It’s happened again and again in many parts of the country. Sounds good in theory but in practice it falls apart.
I must have missed the time warp. We are back in my childhood in the South.
We called these “shotgun” shack because you could fire a shotgun through the front door and hit everybody all the way to the back door.
This is history being re-purposed to a generation that forgot it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_house
Habitat for Meth Dealer homes...
Tiny house = mini-pad?
What a ripoff. I designed, built and live in my own 'tiny house'... About 380 square feet. Materials cost about 3,500, took me about a month, working alone, to build it.
It is very comfortable. So well insulated that I use about $240 in propane a year to heat, cook and heat water.
Do you know real estate professionals call “rent to own”?
The “Never Never” plan.
Construction costs come out to about $50,000 per house?? wow. I thought some recent tiny houses that were going for $30K were expensive. $50K is double, maybe triple what it should cost to build. And they’re going to tack seven-years of finance fees on top of that? Do they get the land or will there be a space fee like trailer parks charge?
If I were going to spend more than $30K, I’d be going with one of these, where everything is complete:
and if I were restricted to wood construction, then I’d start with the building plans for one of these, add some two-by-fours, hardware, electric, plumbing, insulation and drywall to bring up to code. It can be built on a car hauler trailer or skids and voila - portable tiny home. I’ve even seen two barn-style units merged and the roof raised four feet by an enterprising couple who lived in that and rented out their front home.
$50K is a rip-off.
Why is it that we now only aspire to tiny homes? What happened to the American Dream?
They could have had a program similar to this one for decades with the new owners first getting low interest financing to pay off the tax lien and then having to regularly pay the property tax in return for living there with the city retaining title for ten years or some period of time so the new owner could prove they'd keep the property up and pay the taxes.
As it stands now, it sounds to me like the companies that the City or State government pays to tear down abandoned houses turned into crack dives and other now collapsing dumps have run out of buildings they can bill taxpayers for tearing down and want to start all over again.
JMHo
From the looks of Detroit the existing shacks do not command much rent and they are ready trashed. Even mini houses will have to be trashed to fit in