Shelter villages of tiny homes have popped up across the U.S. in recent years, as the small structures have started to be seen by many advocates as a promising solution to solve homelessness .
Perhaps unsurprisingly at a time when mortgage rates are still hovering around the 7-percent mark and home prices remain historically high, tiny homes are also becoming an attractive option for many Americans who are not experiencing homelessness, but would like to buy a property that won’t break the bank and dissolve their savings.
According to Gregg Colburn, an associate professor at the University of Washington, the recent “acceleration of the housing affordability crisis is clearly related and associated with the rising levels of homelessness that we’ve seen” in the past few years.
“And so, if we want to reduce levels of homelessness and create more housing options for people who are precariously housed, we need to prioritize housing production and particularly production of housing that’s affordable for people with lower incomes,” he told Newsweek.
“I fear in the absence of that, we will continue to wrestle with this pretty significant challenge of homelessness. Which I would argue is unnecessary if we had adequate housing stock and affordable housing supply in the United States.”
The median sale price of a U.S. home was $442,479 in June, according to the latest Redfin data, up 4 percent compared to a year earlier and above the peaks reached in 2022.
The number of Americans facing homelessness has also grown massively in the past few years, with an estimated 653,104 homeless people living in the U.S. in 2023, according to estimates from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
The problem has become even more evident following the pandemic, a time when many shelters were required to implement social distancing and many homeless people were forced onto the streets.
Ivy Goyco of Tampa, Florida, is currently experiencing homelessness with her 5-year-old son. She recently had “the worst experience of her life” when the house she was living in was engulfed in a fire, she told Newsweek, “even worse than the domestic violence I was a victim of when I was pregnant with my son.”
Before she was accepted in the shelter where she’s currently staying, she spent five days sleeping “where we could, out of sight from the public eye or on someone’s floor if they could allow us into their home,” she said.
After reading a Newsweek article about a tiny, foldable home produced by CMAX, a company which focused on temporary accommodation for emergencies and humanitarian aid, Goyco told us that she “would have given just about anything to have been given a CMAX or had the ability to purchase a CMAX,” adding that if she had, she wouldn’t have been homeless.
“I would absolutely live in a CMAX or a tiny home on a temporary or even a permanent basis as I am a single mother with no support system, and if you think there are government agencies including nonprofits supporting us, you are sadly mistaken,” she told Newsweek.
“I called daily to three different counties and approximately 10 different shelters trying to get a place for us to safely sleep and bear the heat, yet we were turned away for seven days with no relief in sight,” she explained.
“Tiny housing would do wonders for people who are in similar situations as my son and I, especially in Florida. It sometimes is beyond your control when it comes to living expenses. I can only hope sometime in the near future more agencies will invest in tiny homes and better resolutions to help families and individuals experiencing homelessness,” she added.
Jamie Chang, an associate professor at the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, told Newsweek that homelessness is a widespread and growing issue in the U.S. “Although there’s a lot of focus on mental health or drug addiction, the real root cause of homelessness is the lack of affordable housing, so it is the housing crisis that is driving homelessness,” she said.
“We simply do not have enough affordable homes and housing is not a human right. In the U.S., the population has been growing, but homes have not been built to scale. The high cost of housing, combined with historically low wages means a lot of people cannot afford to put a roof over their heads,” she added.
As the country is currently facing “crisis numbers” of unsheltered people, “tiny homes are a promising temporary solution—as one tool in an arsenal of solutions—because they are private, non-shared, provided with services,” Chang said.
‘A Tiny Solution To a Massive Problem’
For Juha Kaakinen, a professor at Tampere University, Finland, and senior adviser to the Housing First Europe Hub, “tiny homes are a tiny solution to a massive problem,” but they are still a valid option considering their primary goal is to put a roof over the head of someone who currently doesn’t have one.
“Providing housing is the cornerstone of any effort to end homelessness, and this is of course valuable,” he told Newsweek. “But building a separate tiny home village is quite controversial and, to my understanding, it goes against the basic principles of the U.S. Housing First Pathways model and the model that would be accepted in Finland,” he added.
Kaakinen, who used to be the CEO in a nonprofit that provided homes for 6,500 then homeless people in the Scandinavian country before retiring in 2022, is known in Finland for his effort to eradicate homelessness on the principle of “housing first”—an approach which believes that permanent and stable housing should be provided to anyone facing homelessness, without judgment or preconditions.
For the Finnish expert, “all mainstream solutions to end homelessness should focus on housing solutions that integrate people exiting homelessness in the community and the society,” he said, “which means that housing should be normal housing in normal surroundings.”
“Tiny homes have been popping up as a way to sort of give an alternative to congregate shelter, which is really disliked by people who are homeless,” Dennis Culhane, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a social science researcher focused on homelessness and assisted housing policy, told Newsweek.
“They do not like to be in these large facilities with very limited privacy, concerns about safety, and not very hygienic. So people oftentimes would prefer anything to a congregate shelter,” he continued. “Some people might even prefer to be on the streets than being in a congregate shelter. So the tiny homes have sort of represented an alternative.”
For Kaakinen, creating tiny home villages in place of shelters “can have a role in exceptional cases when all the other housing solutions have not worked,” he said.
“However there have been some innovative tiny homes projects in the U.S., like the Block project in Seattle, where tiny homes designed by architects were built in the backyards of private homeowners. This has been a brilliant and beautiful way to tackle Nimbyism [Not In My Backyard],” Kaakinen said.
“Sadly this innovative project has run out of financing this spring. According to their website the home’s owners have however decided to continue housing the tiny homes tenants.”
“Tiny homes are in many ways safer than being on the streets unsheltered. However, they are not a long-term solution,” Chang said, mentioning the same criticism that Kaakinen and many advocates for homeless people have raised in recent years.
“It is essential to view tiny homes as a temporary option that should be a stepping stone to more stable housing in a larger, permanent unit,” Chang said.
Not a Silver Bullet
While tiny homes can fill an important gap in the process of housing homeless people, they have their own issues.
“They’re not standard housing. In many cases they might even be tool sheds that you can get at Home Depot,” Culhane said.
“They don’t have utilities in most cases, so there’s no access to water or to hygiene. And oftentimes not even electric or air conditioning. So they’re really quite substandard in terms of housing, even if they might to some people be preferable to a congregate shelter,” he added. “I think we have to be really clear that the tiny homes are just another form of shelter, and they have their own limitations in terms of quality.”
Colburn thinks that, despite being far from perfect, there is a role for tiny homes in our current housing market and the way we approach homelessness.
“I would say that in many cases I would agree with the people who argue that this is better than someone being on the street; it might be a preferred short-term option for many people,” he said.
“On the other hand, I would agree with the argument of those who criticize tiny homes as an insufficient response; this can’t be a long-term solution,” he added.
The questions we need to ask ourselves, Colburn said, is what happens to someone who has been living in a tiny home for a number of years. “At some point we want to find housing that has plumbing and proper amenities for permanent housing,” he said.
“I think one of the problems we have with tiny homes is because we don’t have other housing options we fall back on and say that this is kind of a silver bullet for homelessness,” Colburn added. “And I would argue that it’s probably not that, it’s part of the tool kit that we could use to deal with this crisis, but it is not a complete solution in and of itself.”
One Step Forward Towards a Radical Solution
Since 2008, Finland has embarked on a massive effort to combat long-term homelessness on the principle of “housing first,” reducing and gradually abandoning shelters and hostels in favor of permanent, affordable accommodation for homeless people. The current government has the goal of ending homelessness completely by 2027.
“Based on the recent years’ development, this is starting to look possible,” Kaakinen said. “In Finland, permanent housing means a rental flat in scattered housing [which can be affordable social housing or a rental apartment acquired from the private housing market and used as a rental apartment for special groups provided by NGOs or local authorities] or in supported housing units where everybody has their own small apartment, but there’s also on-site staff to provide support,” he explained.
“Housing is provided unconditionally, but the tenants have the responsibility to pay the rent themselves and if they can’t afford they can get general housing benefit [the same] as everybody else who doesn’t have enough income to pay the rent,” he continued.
Finland’s experiment has proved beneficial to the entire Finnish society, with the disappearance of shelters and hostels being linked to increased public safety, Kaakinen said.
But would a similar approach work in the U.S.? Chang thinks so, “but the problem is that these can take many years to develop,” she said. Meanwhile, tiny homes might just be a viable solution.
“There are hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. who are in a homeless crisis at this very moment—and for those folks, I believe we need a wide range of temporary solutions, including drop-in shelters without onerous restrictions, non-congregate shelters, tiny homes, safe parking sites, and hotel vouchers,” Chang said.
“These temporary solutions enable safer environments, and critically, they keep unhoused people in touch with service providers who can support them.”
If you’ve ever experienced homelessness and have spent time in a shelter with a tiny home, please reach out to [email protected]. We’d love to hear your story and your opinion on the issue.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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