Can Micro-Shelters Help Solve California's Homelessness Problem?

California cities are increasingly looking to micro-shelters to get the unsheltered populations off the street, but are they just the latest fad or do they help people get into more permanent housing?

Lehrer Architects via Curbed

Today’s Solution Proposal

California has become notorious for its homelessness problem with just over half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless. Of the more than 161,000 people without a home in California, 70% were living in tents, cars, or on the street as of January 2020. The state has responded by pouring billions of dollars primarily into converting motels and other facilities into permanent housing. 

Cities and counties, however, have increasingly begun building communities of tiny homes. These micro-shelters vary considerably but often stand at 60-100 square feet (compared to 757 square feet of an average 1-bedroom apartment). Some have just a cot and a heater/AC, while others have a small kitchen and bathroom. These shelters are grouped together with anywhere from 3 others to as many as 117 units in one of the largest villages. 

Some of these communities are managed by local or nonprofit agencies, while others are self-governed. Regardless of oversight, most have community norms and rules that outline who can live there, what behaviors are appropriate (e.g., no weapons), and what behaviors can lead to expulsion. For those managed by outside agencies, many also provide regular access to other services, including healthcare. 

While the tiny homes concept has been around for a while, it really began to take off as a source of transitional housing for the homeless in March 2020. The pandemic turned congregate shelters (also known as “group shelters” and the most common form of emergency shelter) into potential COVID spreaders, increasing demand for single-residence housing. In 2020 alone, Pallet, a DC-based company, constructed 1,500 new units for states.

Cities and counties up and down the state have clamored to add tiny home communities as Californians have put more pressure on elected officials to do something about tent encampments. Los Angeles, Sacramento County, Santa Barbara, Oakland, and Silicon Valley have all created tiny home villages. Another 15 projects are in the works in Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, San Joaquin, and Shasta counties.

Argument in Brief:

Given micro-shelters' rising popularity, today’s question is: Should we continue to invest in micro-shelters as a key part of the solution to homelessness?

Case For:

• Micro-shelters are much less expensive than other forms of housing

• Micro-shelters can be constructed and set up much more quickly

• Micro-shelters are generally more appealing to unsheltered people than group shelters

Case Against:

• Micro-shelters do not offer humane living conditions

• Micro-shelters do not solve homelessness for anyone because they only offer temporary housing

• There aren’t good places to locate these shelters

My Assessment:

We should continue to invest in micro-shelters as part of the solution to homelessness - and simultaneously invest in long-term housing options and research that evaluate tiny homes’ success in getting people into long-term housing.

Have something to add to the conversation? Let us know.

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Case For

Micro-shelters are much less expensive than other forms of housing

The most compelling case for micro-shelters is their cost. While tiny homes vary in cost, these micro-shelters typically cost between $5,000 and $15,000 to build or purchase. Los Angeles has priced them as high as $55,000 per shelter, but even that price is far less expensive than most other shelter options. The typical development cost for extremely low-income housing is roughly $200,000 per unit, but an audit recently revealed that Los Angeles is spending $837,000 per unit. 

In San Francisco, congregate shelters typically cost more than $40,000 per bed to build, while one of its new tiny house communities only costs $10,000 per unit. Even tent villages often end up costing more to maintain than tiny homes. 

Micro-shelters can be constructed and set up much more quickly

Speed is another massive benefit to tiny homes.

“The major issue is the speed at which they need to be delivered,” said Kadribegovic, a partner at Lehrer Architect, one of the firms designing these villages. “Given the mandate, they have to be churning housing units fairly regularly. So when the city gives us the go-ahead on a project, we’re tasked with designing and building the entire project in basically 90 days.”

Pallet boasts that its structures can be set up in less than an hour. In the Bay Area where one community constructed the homes themselves, the construction took just 2 months. Like other housing developments, tiny home villages can get caught up in permitting and zoning delays, but increasingly localities are passing ordinances to remove these snags.

Micro-shelters are generally more appealing to unsheltered people than group shelters

Another key factor that determines the viability of a solution in this space is whether those without shelter will deem the proposed solution more compelling than life on the street. Group or congregate shelters have received a lot of criticism on this front. In one survey done in Santa Barbara County, 72% of homeless people said they are not willing to stay in a group shelter.

While some unsheltered individuals have expressed skepticism toward these small structures, the overwhelming sentiment has been positive:

“They [people who moved into the tiny homes] said, ‘Are you kidding me?’” said Everett Butler, co-director of Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit that provides on-site services. “They were beyond appreciative to be able to go inside their own space and lock the door behind them, turn the heaters on and kick back.”

“Within just a few months, we were getting calls from way more people than we expected,” says Taryn Sandulyak, the co-founder of Firm Foundation Community Housing, an all-in-one service provider that does everything involved with creating a tiny home village. 

One of the main reasons for tiny homes’ appeal is the privacy they offer, as Pallet CEO Amy King describes: "What we felt was really missing from the housing spectrum was a dignified shelter option that honored their individuality and allowed them to have autonomy in their rehabilitation process.”

The autonomy afforded by tiny homes also enables families (including pets) to stay together:

“There was a case of an adult mother with an adult son who suffered from mental disability. If they went into the congregate shelter, she’d have to go to the women’s section and he’d have to go to the men’s section. She wouldn’t be able to take care of him, and he wasn’t able to take care of himself. So they stayed on the street until they had the opportunity to move into a tiny house.”

Tiny homes are significantly cheaper than most other options, take much less time to set up, and are much more compelling to those who need them than group shelters. 

Now let’s look at the case against tiny homes as a key part of California’s homelessness solution.

Case Against

Micro-shelters do not offer humane living conditions

Barbara Poppe, who coordinated federal homelessness policy for most of Barack Obama’s presidency, says that micro-shelters are simply not nice enough. In fact, she calls them “completely deplorable,” asking rhetorically:

“Why would we accept that people should be living in huts that don’t have access to water, electricity and sanitation? …I don’t understand why you find it acceptable for children and infants to live like this.” 

Some of the leaders in Seattle - where tiny homes have abounded earlier than most other places - have made similar arguments. Harold Odom, a member of Seattle’s regional authority implementation board, believes tiny home villages have turned into “warehouses for people.” A group of advocates who have experienced homelessness called the Washington State Lived Experience Coalition says that tiny homes are “sheds” that “do not meet federal human habitability standards.” Despite its colorful exterior, other homeless advocates said one tiny home village “looks like a prison.”  

Proponents of tiny homes, such as Lewis, respond to this criticism, saying they are “just responding to consumer demand” and that “people are willing to stay [in tiny houses] long-term as an alternative to a tent while they wait to get placed in housing.” Demand for such housing, as noted in the Case For, seems to favor Lewis’ argument.

Micro-shelters do not solve homelessness for anyone because they only offer temporary housing

Perhaps, the most ardent argument against tiny homes is that they don’t actually solve homelessness:

“The focus that we need to have is on housing, and I simply cannot stress that enough. Shelter is not permanent, and we are locked into a proliferation of shelter options rather than a proliferation of housing options and we must course-correct on that. Tiny homes, as a subset of a broader shelter strategy, make sense, but they’re not an end point and we shouldn’t proliferate them as they are... What I am saying is that I don’t see the evidence, either in community or in the data, to talk about moving to that scale,” says another Seattle/King County official.

Barbara Poppe agrees: “I look at those spaces, and I wonder what would it take for your community to rapidly deploy the resources and construct some permanent apartments there.”

The Washington State Lived Experience Coalition agrees, arguing that tiny homes “do not end anyone’s experience of homelessness.” Part of the argument is that tiny home communities will be no different than the tent encampments already disrupting cities. What is to keep those communities from devolving into drug-filled, crime-ridden villages that scare people from the surrounding area and result in another wasted public investment?

Donald Whitehead Jr., executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, similarly, suggests that tiny homes may be a good emergency option, but they are not a long-term solution. Worse, he thinks tiny homes are a reflection of a prevailing mindset that dehumanizes those on the streets: "There's been this theme since the '70s that there are some people in society that are less deserving. And the tiny home kind of fits within that mindset." This mindset, Whitehead and others argue, will lead us to stop at getting people into tiny homes.

In 2016, Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles agreed with this argument too. A spokesperson for the mayor said:

“Mayor Eric Garcetti does not favor tiny houses for homeless people. The mayor is focused on providing permanent supportive housing that gets people off the streets for good.”

But by 2021, he had changed his mind: “The only way to end this crisis is with more long-term and quality housing options -- and as the largest tiny homes village in the country, the Arroyo Seco Village is the latest milestone in our commitment to deliver healing and hope to our most vulnerable neighbors.”

While tiny homes do not often serve as permanent housing, you could argue that they are still an important part of the solution particularly if they do a good job of positioning people to get into permanent housing. Unfortunately, on this question, the data is frustratingly sparse and mixed. 

For example, in one village in Seattle, 34% of the residents were able to transition into permanent housing, while another Seattle community reported a 22% placement rate, and research in another Seattle community found a 16% placement rate. Oakland, which has been investing in tiny homes since 2017, has reported a placement rate as high as 60% and some places have offered a range as large as 27% to 65%.

For comparison, 20% of those participating in California’s Project Roomkey - which converted 15,000 hotel and motel rooms into transitional housing for the homeless - transitioned into permanent housing. In summary, it appears that tiny homes may be at least as good as other interventions in getting people into permanent housing, but given the lack of compelling data, it’s too early to tell. 

There aren’t good places to locate these shelters

There are also tactical challenges to tiny home villages. The main one is where to put them. As with group shelters, housed individuals are rarely eager to see a tiny home community spring up next to them. 

One developer of tiny homes describes how significant the resistance can be:

“Each and every time we open the shelter, we get death threats, we get protested. So often they want to blame the homeless for the situation they find themselves in.” 

Designers of such villages and structures recognize this challenge too and go out of their way to make these communities more palatable to neighboring residents:

“It’s really important through our work as architects and planners to destigmatize these types of projects so that the neighborhoods are actually more accepting of them.” 

Finding space for these villages is challenging, but un- and under-used religious properties may offer at least a temporary solution to this obstacle. A 2020 Berkeley study found that ~38,800 acres of religious land in California - roughly the size of Stockton - have the potential to be turned into housing.

The conversion isn’t simple. Even if faith-based organizations are interested in repurposing their properties for the homeless, their neighbors are typically not as supportive of their altruism. However, organizations like Firm Foundation Community Housing are springing up to help faith-based organizations set up their own villages and having some success around the state.

My Assessment

Let’s start with what we can say with reasonable confidence. Tiny homes are a cost-effective, time-efficient option for temporarily housing people living on the street which tend to lead to permanent housing at roughly the same rate or better than other interventions. 

But these points are moot if tiny homes do not represent humane living conditions. Are 60-square-foot barebone shelters without bathrooms the most humane housing situation? No. But the better question is: Are they more humane than living in tents on a street or under an overpass? Based on demand and usage to date, the answer unsheltered individuals seem to offer us is yes. 

If we accept that we won’t be able to get everyone into permanent housing at all times (which we should for the foreseeable future since as far back as 2013, there were only 30 affordable apartments available for every 100 renters of extremely low income), then we are left with a choice between leaving people on the streets and inviting them to live in tiny homes or congregate shelters. This is an easy choice in my mind. Tiny homes beat the street and congregate shelters.

However, you could argue that it’s worth leaving people on the streets to accelerate the construction of permanent housing. For this argument to be compelling, your savings from foregoing tiny home construction would have to fund a significant number of permanent housing units - and the time it would take to get to a sufficient supply of permanent housing would have to be reasonably short. Given the cost differential between tiny homes and permanent units and the size of the current shortage in permanent housing, a portfolio approach that makes investments in both seems superior. 

That said, the twin challenges of location (where to put them) and management (how to keep them from ending up like the tent encampments) are not something to dismiss easily. Localities will need to make tough and smart decisions in order for the tiny home villages to be successful - but it appears that this is possible.

We should continue to invest in micro-shelters as part of the solution to homelessness - and simultaneously invest in long-term housing options and research that evaluate tiny homes’ success in getting people into long-term housing.

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Conversation

Have an additional case either for or against micro-shelters? Arrive at a different conclusion? Have a question? Email us to let us know and we’ll update the article if appropriate.

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