Experts have long batted around different ideas for ending, or at least reducing, homelessness in this country. Reporter T.R. Goldman looked at the efforts of a Detroit Methodist pastor who chose to approach the problem in the most no-nonsense fashion of all: What if we just built homes they could afford?
For Rev. Faith Fowler and nonprofit Cass Community Social Services, that has taken the form of currently hip and trending "tiny homes"—what past generations might have called affordable housing, back when such things were not widely disallowed by zoning efforts insisting on larger houses on larger lots. On lots of 3,000 square feet, the nonprofit has constructed 13 "tiny homes" below 400 square feet in size.
And they're nice. No, really, take a look! Architecturally diverse and smartly furnished, the small cottages are homes that would be the envy of any single professional; taken together, the communities give off the feel of a well-kept vacation resort. And at rent-to own prices of $400 or less per month, they are affordable. Cass restricts the properties to the most neediest of residents, with incomes no larger than $7,000 per year—and if they didn't, one can imagine they would quickly be overwhelmed by other bidders.
The program is intended to allow homeless Detroit residents to finally live in, and own, their own homes. But it could just as easily be used as a model for new entire communities. There is overwhelming demand for affordable housing, and a new interest in younger Americans in lifestyles that involve less stuff, in less space, with less to clean, maintain, and pay for. They might not do for families with non-toddler children or multigenerational households, but interspersing smaller and larger dwellings would provide space for both.
There's no trick to this, and it's nothing that cities have not done for centuries. (Houses built with walls abutting their neighbors have been, worldwide, a dominant urban feature; if you are to put great numbers of people all within walking distance of all necessary services, making them small and tightly clustered is the only available choice.) But small houses on small lots fell sharply out of favor in the land-rich United States during the automobile age, when explosively growing cities not only preferred, but insisted on, homogeneous zoning of equally sized “family”-suitable houses as islands rigorously separated from anywhere to purchase bread or a carton of milk. Small lots are still seen, in nearly every non-urban environment, as something to be regulated against rather than encouraged.
But the old plan only works if there is a vast middle class. As our own narrows, it becomes dicier; the much groused-about millennial generation is not universally keen on buying baby boomer houses on stingier and less stable 21st century incomes because, to use the technical term, duh. Suburbian zoning works not at all after you have developed suburbs so far out into the surrounding terrain that it is implausible, car or no car, to still commute to any of the zones where employment is still allowed. And it has been an absolute wreck from an environmental standpoint, and even from a land-use standpoint, imposing larger costs on cities to provide expected services across wider areas with fewer residents. This is one of Detroit's own problems, as flight from entire communities renders them near ghost-towns, but ones still requiring maintenance of streets, sewers, water lines and electrical grids.
Look! Look here! What if we just built houses ... smaller? On smaller lots? What if we just did that? The actual pictures of the results are not frightening in the slightest. There is nothing that requires smaller, more affordable homes to be hovels. These are all houses that would look at home in, and would positively brighten, any bit of suburbia in the nation. They're damn adorable is what they are. (A bit too much lawn, if you ask me, but let's not get picky.) NIMBYism does not have a leg to stand on, if this is the opponent.
There are larger problems to be solved than just this, of course, and they are primarily of scale. You cannot plop a thousand tiny garage-less homes into a suburb devoid of any public transportation capable of getting them anywhere. The chicken-egg problem of providing such services relies on large outlays to support infilled zones before the infill happens—and nobody is eager to foot that bill. But the mere notion of squeezing the suburbs into more human-sized dimensions is not so scary. If we are to solve a housing crisis that is stripping the ability of non-middle-class Americans to afford anything at all, a significant part of the solution might look something like this.