Tiny Houses Are Not A Solution To Homelessness
Yeah, I said it. Tiny houses suck. I don’t mean if you want a cute little cabin you have bad taste, I’m talking about as a solution to homelessness. The whole idea sucks. It’s horrible, rotten, terrible. It’s an idea that needs to die, and quickly, at least in terms of being an applied solution to American homelessness. It’s quite literally worse than useless, and by orders of magnitude.
Now that I have your attention: I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings who might be among that growing group of folks who are advocating for tiny houses and building and engineering them to be ever more tiny.
I understand that once you get below a very high ceiling within the entire housing-construction-real estate complex, most of you engaged here are earnest and well-meaning, hard-working, diligent, and really truly trying your best to do a good thing in the world, and I don’t want to discourage you from doing that.
But I’d like you to give me a few minutes to explain, from the perspective of a person who has frequently been homeless and is currently housing insecure, why you may find, after consideration, that your talents and energy to do good things might be better spent on other angles for addressing homelessness.
I’m going to break this up into a couple of sections. In the original context I’d planned to go through the whole establishing of credibility thing by pointing to all the various work I’ve done out there over the years related to the topic, but then I realized the only reason I feel the need to do that is that this started out with some schmoe responding to a social media comment, and basically telling me I have no idea what homeless people think, want, or need, and screw that guy. My work is out there and easy to find and my arguments are well-formulated and not in need of further validation by character reference anyway.
This article started as a social media comment – as they often do – on a post about a local tiny house initiative and their latest step forward and maybe there’s a shipping issue and so forth. That post was a local news report updating the current status of a tiny house project here, mentioning that 14 acres had been purchased to place these new tiny houses on. My comment was thus:
I wonder how many full-sized real-human-being apartments could be built on 14 acres for what they’re paying for glorified boxes.
in https://www.facebook.com/wwmtnews/posts/10158698570231452?comment_id=10158698689221452
And naturally, here comes the schmoe brigade to tell me what I got wrong:
With that introductory flourish out of the way, let’s talk about the meat of the matter. In part 2 we’ll discuss why the social, political, and psychological implications and impacts of the entire “tiny house narrative” are extraordinarily problematic. Then we’ll talk about why the very suggestion of “tiny houses” as a solution to homelessness in this country is, ultimately, an arrogant insult built on an entire group of industries trapped in a loop of aspirational delusion that’s going to collapse like a house of cards, and their absolute refusal to accept that you only need so many housing units for so many people before building more is a gigantic waste of resources benefiting no one. Before we wrap it up I’ll show you the numbers I think support that prediction.
First up: the personal perspective. Then the data, numbers, analysis, and conclusions that we will hopefully all agree support my core thesis, as difficult and maybe even painful as it may be for those of us who have really gone all-in on this in the hopes that it would be an effective solution to homelessness.
Between The Cracks, Between The Lines
From a standpoint of communication, messaging, and cultural expression of how we respect the humanity of the poor (and even that phrase is problematic, like “we” are doing “them” a favor), there is critical subtext in the entire notion of applying tiny house/alternative housing solutions to housing instability problems, and that subtext is being ignored to our great detriment and expense.
As someone who has struggled with poverty and housing insecurity all my life, here’s what the “on the streets” ear in my head hears every time I hear someone going on about how wonderful it is to create “tiny house communities” where the homeless can be:
“We’d love to help you out, but we can’t find a way to do it that both treats you as an equal among dignified free people and allows the gigantic kajillionaire conglomerates and the handful of people who own them to profit from you, so we’re going to train you instead to be so incredibly desperate that you’ll take ANYTHING, even a palette in an empty warehouse, and be glad to have it.
Then we’ll come up with something that we can sell to the kind-hearted as a philanthropic initiative to ‘address homelessness,’ sequester you in boxes that none of us would want to live in outside of a few minimalists and a whole lot of people making specious hypothetical arguments they don’t actually believe in on the internet because they don’t want to ‘lose’ The Battle Of The Comment Section. You still get to be separate, less than, beneath dignity, and lacking in basic resources but we can tell ourselves we ‘did something.’ Sorry. I mean, we feel bad and all but if there’s no money to be made on putting you in a dignified living situation, you’re not going to be in one. But here’s a token attempt exploiting the good will and sincere earnest positive intent of a whole bunch of folks in between you and us, to make sure if you are paying attention enough to say any of this out loud it will hurt feelings and people won’t want to hear it.
So, sorry Poors, you can have a tiny little imitation of a home and tell yourself how brave and strong you are for making the best of it to help distract you from the fact that your country doesn’t think you deserve a real place to live, and you’d probably better appreciate it and not complain or you won’t even have that.
Suddenly when you’re hearing that message, the whole “isn’t this a good and noble thing we’re doing” narrative doesn’t play so well to your good intentions and kind heart.
I’m sorry for that – genuinely, I’m not writing this to hurt anyone or make them feel like they’ve wasted their time or even hurt people by accident – but we’re not going to get moving on real solutions until we stop allowing ourselves to be sold on the idea that “good enough for them” constitutes human decency and the fulfillment of our immutable obligation to the ultimate morality of human life, i.e. the survival and propagation of the species.
There is another reason why the whole “tiny house” thing infuriates me to a degree that, at first glance, most reasonable people would think unwarranted by the situation. We’ll have to get into some hard data and stuff to fully understand that, so let’s do that now.
The Data
Oftentimes folks who do this sort of thing get attached to this notion that if they can just provide enough numbers, charts, and graphs to make their point, then their point will be taken as well-made and that’s the end. Then you end up getting lost in the weeds looking at excruciatingly fine details of abstruse statistics, and the whole point of the discourse is lost.
Fortunately in this case we have two very basic and easy to understand data sets to review: the number of “homeless people” – i.e. residents without a dwelling – in the US, and the number of “peopleless homes” – i.e. dwellings without a residence.
There’s this great little tool called FRED at the St. Louis Federal Reserve website, and it’s chock full of all this great information about various aspects of the economy including employment, housing, economic status of individuals, and so forth. Among this information: housing inventories, that is to day how many housing units there are in this country and their status as owned, rented, occupied, unoccupied, etc.
Here’s what FRED has to say about the number of currently vacant housing units in the US:
If you want to see the whole dataset with pretty charts over time and everything, it’s at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EVACANTUSQ176N, but what you need to know is in that screenshot: there were, on any given day between July 1 and September 30 2021, about 15.2 million empty residential units in the US.
Coming up with homelessness data is a little more difficult, but when taking in all of the assertions put forth by reasonably trustworthy sources and trying to assemble a big picture, on the average day in the US there are about half a million people who are homeless. This number has remained remarkably steady for decades, and basically has stayed within that 500-600K range since the late 80s. I can’t find the link now because I’m an undisciplined writer and forgot to bookmark it while I was reading it, but while researching this I found some government report from 1970 saying there were then 300,000 homeless people.
…and 600,000 empty housing units.
I want you to think about that for a minute.
In this country, right this minute, there are half a million or so people who will sleep on the streets tonight…and we have enough empty housing units for every homeless person in this country to have thirty places to live.
There is absolutely no condition by which that is not an unforgivable outrage against our people. Germany recently took over something like 30K housing units from landlords who had a surplus of empty property under their eminent domain processes, and there’s exactly zero reason why we can’t do that here.
That’s where the angry attitude comes from. It’s one thing to be like “hey sorry, we’re short on housing and doing the best we can, here’s a temporary fix.” It’s something else entirely to say “hey we could give you THIRTY places to live if we really wanted you to have one or cared in the least that you’re homeless, but we just don’t want to because our money is more important to us than you having a home.”
And that’s not just how it is. That’s how it has been for my entire life. We have had at least twice as many empty housing units as homeless people for over half a century. That’s not just a bit of bad thinking, that’s a deliberately implemented system of oppression and waste for profit.
Just this matter of the outrageous oversupply of empty houses we have on one hand and the outrageous lack of housing for the poor on the other is plenty of argument supporting our core thesis and I could leave the article here, but there are some very important secondary implications that I feel are critical to understanding the entire argument I’m making, so let’s take a look at those and then wrap it up.
Economic Insanity
We’ve discussed the sort of socio-personal implications of this approach and the difficult and (for most folks below the top who are pushing this, I believe) unintentionally damaging messages that it carries, and the stark reality that it just isn’t necessary.
Now let’s set aside the social justice concerns and outrage and just talk plain old numbers, resources, and economics.
It should not require an economist to tell you that if you have fifteen million empty housing units and half a million homeless people, you have a rather startling surplus of housing units, and that’s not a good thing. Those are completely wasted resources, doing no good for anyone outside of a small group of folks we’ll talk about in a minute.
It should not require an economist to tell you that if you have fifteen million empty housing units and half a million homeless people, we darned well ought to be paying folks to take those wasted units off the hands of those who are wasting them.
As it happens, I’m privileged to include some economists – and I’m not gonna namedrop about it, but if I did you’d recognize them if you follow the field, unquestionably – in my circle of acquaintance, so I asked them. Now these are busy folks so I wasn’t expecting a dissertation, but I wanted to make sure I’d given people who know what the heck they’re talking about a chance to say hey no, JH, you’ve got it wrong. None of them did.
What we have here is economic insanity. If we gave a housing unit to every single homeless person in this country, there would still be 14.5 million empty housing units. Who’s gonna buy those when we only have half a million people un-housed? What could we have been doing with fourteen and a half million homes’ worth of building materials, infrastructure, and labor? Why are we overbuilding like this?
The truth is, the entire US housing and construction industry is a shell game played on a house of cards. Naturally there’s a small percentage of folks out there who can afford multiple homes, but they don’t cover 14.5 million.
Most of those empty units are owned by big landlords who have no intention of profiting from them or renting them out to begin with. One big property management company pays a few big construction companies to spend some millions at a few big supply houses to keep their economic ecosystem churning and generating profits. The big property management company mismanages and underutilizes the new properties at a loss for a while (nice tax break here, you can get it all the way to zero if you lose enough, or even get the government to pay YOU) until it becomes implausible to keep claiming it because why would a business keep losing money on purpose. They sell it at a loss, write the loss off their income, the next company does the same thing for a few years, later rinse repeat until the property has decayed to undesirability and then eventually it’s seized for property taxes or condemned for being in irrecoverable ill repair, it’s destroyed, and the cycle starts all over.
By and large those 14.5 million empty homes are a couple of dozen super-rich bankers, property managers, construction companies, etc. shuffling money back and forth so it looks like something’s happening.
Eventually the reality that we don’t actually need much in the way of new housing construction, haven’t in a while, and won’t for a while is going to catch up to this economic sector, and when it does things are going to be very, very chaotic and confusing across the economy for a while. Hopefully the folks who get paid to manage this stuff are working on a way to deflate this horrid balloon slowly before it explodes and takes a third of the economy with it. One good way would be to sieze several hundred thousand or even a couple of million newer, decent units under eminent domain (with reasonable and fair compensation to keep the fascists from whining too much about it) and start getting homeless people into them, but that’s getting back into the social aspects of things and I wanted to stick strictly to capitalist-economic argumentation, in this section.
In the end, the “tiny house” movement helps perpetuate this broken system by continuing to prop up the systems by which landlords justify refusing to rent their empty properties to people who need them. Don’t tell us we have to rent to those filthy poors, they’ve got tiny houses right there.
With that said, I did want to give a little positive energy to tiny houses in general, so let’s talk about that and get out of here.
Tiny Houses Aren’t Evil
I really do want to put some positive framing on tiny houses in general because they are, utilized properly, a wonderful idea that can save lives.
The problem isn’t the idea of a tiny house. The idea is that a tiny house should be anything but temporary emergency shelter. I’d have loved to see a few thousand tiny houses in New Orleans after Katrina. They’d be a great solution for migrant-border crises such as the one at the southern US border, or currently blowing up at the Poland-Belorus border. Refugees, the displaced, situations when you need dignified shelter on the ground for a lot of people fast, and many of them may be transient, and many of the shelters may be used by many people, and so forth.
That is a wonderful use of the tiny house concept and I don’t wish to discourage research and development in that area in the least.
It’s just not a serious or effective solution to homelessness.
We have the homes, and the only reason we’re keeping them away from those who need them is someone wants to make a buck.
It is my carefully considered, and hopefully now well-defended, opinion that this is just not the way to run a decent society, and in spite of the earnest good will and compassionate intent of so many of those working on them, applying the technology of tiny houses to the problem of homelessness only serves in every way to perpetuate and reinforce the social structures that create it in the first place.
It may well be that this approach can be useful in parts of the world where there aren’t enough homes to go around, but that just isn’t the case here. We have 15 million real people homes where we can put people who don’t have them if we want to, we just have to want to.
We don’t want to.
Maybe we should work as hard on changing that as we are on building tiny house Hoovervilles.
Thanks for reading, please don’t forget to do all the social media stuff to help get this information and conversation out into the world!