Can Tiny Homes Really Solve Homelessness?
I love the tiny home concept. I feel I need to state that up front. You’ll understand by the time you finish this article. I love the concept, but desperately want us to think through their implementation because there are strong critiques that this movement could prove more detrimental than beneficial for low-income citizens.
I first became interested in the tiny home concept in college. I immediately liked the minimalist ideal, as well as the drastic life change that many people were choosing by pursuing building a tiny home: spending less on housing and more on saving, traveling, and pursuing passion projects. As a creative who loves jumping from passion project to passion project, I was immediately intrigued.
A lot of the intrigue by the tiny home concept recently is born out of creativity, but also necessity. My first thought when I read about the concept was “oh, I can save so much on home buying and potentially pay down my student loan debt quicker.” (Spoiler, I didn’t build a tiny home and I’m still not able to pay down my student loan debt, but that’s life.) I think many people fall in this category. There’s an important question that a lot of people are asking: what am I working towards if the “American Dream” is unattainable?
That’s where a tiny home comes in. The idea is to minimize your living costs so that you can “get ahead” in life. I fell in love with the YouTube channel Living Big In A Tiny House for sharing some amazing designs and builds, as well as finding people on Instagram and YouTube showing their work.
However, this new tiny home movement, which I’m going to label the luxury tiny home movement, builds upon tiny home designs that are a lot less luxurious and have some serious social justice implications. I’m referring to shantytowns, which is an encampment of makeshift housing structures oftentimes made out of plywood, sheets of metal or plastic, and cardboard. While also used in other areas of the world, in the U.S. shantytowns rose to prominence during the Great Depression, springing up across the country to house impoverished American families.
While most promotion around tiny homes are promoting the more luxurious homes that people are choosing to live in, even more minimal versions of this are popping up around the country as a solution for homelessness, leading to many worrying that this will promote unsafe and unsanitary living conditions. Tiny homes have been promoted for their inexpensive design and build, which can be scaled to replace worse living conditions many homeless people are currently using, but many have lacked some basic necessities.
Barbara Poppe, a homelessness policy advisor under President Barack Obama, has issued warnings about advocating for this approach. After being hired by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray to review the city’s homelessness policies, Poppe advised the city against using tax dollars to fund tiny home development and instead advocated for permanent affordable housing. The city funded the tiny homes anyway. As Poppe states in an article from The Guardian,
“I always challenge the folks on the west coast about this. I say, I don’t understand why you find it acceptable for children and infants to live like this.”
Their response? “We have to do something. This is better than doing nothing.”
And here lies the problem. It’s a pragmatic approach to a large problem that does nothing to address the root issue. The root issue being that for a growing portion of the country, housing is unaffordable and unattainable. The reason for this is that wages have not kept up with inflation, all while U.S. companies have continually made record profits (pre-Covid, of course).
This article isn’t trying to make the statement that tiny homes can’t be used as a solution, but they need to be given the same amount of thought as all the other tiny homes being built by people choosing to do so. They need to have proper sanitation. They need to have proper space and dimensions. They need to have dignity. Replacing a cardboard box with a wooden box is a step in the right direction (as advocates are stating), but that doesn’t make it a good, equitable solution.
If we’re truly looking for a way of integrating the tiny home movement into an equitable framework for addressing homelessness, a good model can be found with Cass Community Social Services. CCSS is a Detroit-based nonprofit focused on providing food, health, housing, and jobs programs for areas of the city with concentrated poverty. They are also operating one of the more innovative housing solutions I’ve seen.
The organization is currently in the process of building 25 tiny homes in the city, each on its own lot (around 30 x 100 feet). Each home is built on a foundation and most have a front porch or rear deck to increase the living space available. Once moved in, residents (all of which qualify as low-income) are on a rent-to-own contract. This means that after seven years of paying a modest rent, they will own the home and property. The idea behind the program is to provide housing, but also to provide some financial equity for residents.
Good solutions are not simple. They take some tweaking and reworking to ensure they are truly addressing the needs of people relying on them. While the tiny home movement has a lot to offer, we need to do a better job of promoting equitable frameworks for using these homes for social solutions. Let this be a call to action.
