So I did some reading about Papua New Guinea some years ago and at the time, MOST of their land was TRIBAL land. When you have TRIBAL land, it's a barrier to real estate development because you CANNOT take out a mortgage.
A mortgage means the lender can TAKE the property if you default and you can't take real property -- aka LAND -- if it belongs to THE TRIBE and not the individual homeowner or business owner.
So this stuck with me and I don't know what to do about it. But it really struck me that poverty on tribal lands is intractable in part because you CANNOT take out a mortgage.
So historically what happened was tribal peoples were frequently MOBILE peoples with mobile dwellings, like teepees and yurts, and it didn't matter that the land was not owned by the individual homeowner. You could own your teepee or yurt separate from the land and it was fine.
And they were relatively cheap to make, I ASSUME, compared to brick and mortar buildings.
So what I am wondering is if PNG and other places like that could do "tiny homes" on wheels as a housing solution.
I read an article in the 1980s in my teens when tiny homes were fairly new. It was intended to be this solution to one man wanting a particular thing maybe and maybe also kind of a "model home experiment" to see if you could do this as a solution for other people as well.
And he found that you cannot build a house that small. It's illegal. BUT if you put it on wheels and make it a MOBILE home, now you are in the clear legally.
So tiny homes tend to have small kitchens with tiny refrigerators or sometimes no refrigerator. Sometimes they have a cooler.
They may have a two or three burner stove top instead of a four burner stove top and may have no oven or a small countertop oven. The burners may even be propane instead of electric.
Some tiny house owners have solar panels as a partial solution to their electricity needs.
So electricity and heat and cooling and cooking are fairly solvable. The main remaining concern is then plumbing -- water supply for sinks, shower and a toilet and waste removal.
Though IF you were doing latrines for the community and shared public showers, then you just need water for the kitchen sink and you would need to think about laundry and how that gets handled.
BUT tiny homes CAN be mobile, so you can potentially get a LOAN because they can be repossessed by the bank without taking the land they stand on AND they are fairly affordable compared to traditional "full size" family homes.
If you already live fairly communally and do shared meals at long tables or something, you mainly need someplace to secure some belongings and a place to sleep and some modern amenities, like electricity for phones and laptops and SOME plumbing, etc, even if only a kitchen sink.
This is potentially a best of both worlds answer for tribal peoples wanting to keep important parts of their heritage and upgrade some of their development from things like teepees or huts to something more like western-style buildings AND it wouldn't be hard to get with an architect and talk to them about the lifestyle of the tribal peoples and what parts of "modern" housing are desirable -- such as the ability to LOCK it up and electricity and protection from a storm -- and what parts don't really work because you have shared facilities of some sort and shared activites of some sort and don't necessarily need certain things in a private home because of it.
So if you were doing very basic water infrastructure for the group and didn't feel you needed individual bathrooms in your tiny home, that frees up a lot of space (percentage-wise) to add storage or more space for people to sleep or whatever.
Last, you may be able to avoid the need for a commercial loan by pooling funds and labor, a la an old fashioned barn raising. Tiny homes that are built by the owner providing some or most of the labor are even cheaper than ones built commercially.
A mortgage means the lender can TAKE the property if you default and you can't take real property -- aka LAND -- if it belongs to THE TRIBE and not the individual homeowner or business owner.
So this stuck with me and I don't know what to do about it. But it really struck me that poverty on tribal lands is intractable in part because you CANNOT take out a mortgage.
So historically what happened was tribal peoples were frequently MOBILE peoples with mobile dwellings, like teepees and yurts, and it didn't matter that the land was not owned by the individual homeowner. You could own your teepee or yurt separate from the land and it was fine.
And they were relatively cheap to make, I ASSUME, compared to brick and mortar buildings.
So what I am wondering is if PNG and other places like that could do "tiny homes" on wheels as a housing solution.
I read an article in the 1980s in my teens when tiny homes were fairly new. It was intended to be this solution to one man wanting a particular thing maybe and maybe also kind of a "model home experiment" to see if you could do this as a solution for other people as well.
And he found that you cannot build a house that small. It's illegal. BUT if you put it on wheels and make it a MOBILE home, now you are in the clear legally.
So tiny homes tend to have small kitchens with tiny refrigerators or sometimes no refrigerator. Sometimes they have a cooler.
They may have a two or three burner stove top instead of a four burner stove top and may have no oven or a small countertop oven. The burners may even be propane instead of electric.
Some tiny house owners have solar panels as a partial solution to their electricity needs.
So electricity and heat and cooling and cooking are fairly solvable. The main remaining concern is then plumbing -- water supply for sinks, shower and a toilet and waste removal.
Though IF you were doing latrines for the community and shared public showers, then you just need water for the kitchen sink and you would need to think about laundry and how that gets handled.
BUT tiny homes CAN be mobile, so you can potentially get a LOAN because they can be repossessed by the bank without taking the land they stand on AND they are fairly affordable compared to traditional "full size" family homes.
If you already live fairly communally and do shared meals at long tables or something, you mainly need someplace to secure some belongings and a place to sleep and some modern amenities, like electricity for phones and laptops and SOME plumbing, etc, even if only a kitchen sink.
This is potentially a best of both worlds answer for tribal peoples wanting to keep important parts of their heritage and upgrade some of their development from things like teepees or huts to something more like western-style buildings AND it wouldn't be hard to get with an architect and talk to them about the lifestyle of the tribal peoples and what parts of "modern" housing are desirable -- such as the ability to LOCK it up and electricity and protection from a storm -- and what parts don't really work because you have shared facilities of some sort and shared activites of some sort and don't necessarily need certain things in a private home because of it.
So if you were doing very basic water infrastructure for the group and didn't feel you needed individual bathrooms in your tiny home, that frees up a lot of space (percentage-wise) to add storage or more space for people to sleep or whatever.
Last, you may be able to avoid the need for a commercial loan by pooling funds and labor, a la an old fashioned barn raising. Tiny homes that are built by the owner providing some or most of the labor are even cheaper than ones built commercially.