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The HGTV show "Tiny House, Big Living" shows the growing popularity of downsized living among middle-class and wealthy Americans.1 The typical American home is approximately 2,600 square feet,2 while market-rate tiny homes typically range from 100-400 square feet. Tiny house living has become an increasing trend, offering more affordable and sustainable housing alternatives for millennials, environmentalists, and others seeking unconventional living.
Homeless individuals, housing advocates, and cities are also creating tiny house villages to address chronic homelessness.3 There are currently at least ten sanctioned and partially developed tiny homes for the homeless villages in places such as Eugene and Portland, Oregon; Ithaca, New York; Dallas and Austin, Texas; Olympia and Seattle, Washington; and Madison, Wisconsin.4 These projects are primarily developed and led by the homeless through "sweat-equity," or by committed non-profit organizations, with the support of some local governments. Additionally, approximately twenty-five other projects are under development.5
In this discussion paper, I contend that the tiny homes for the homeless movement represents a return to a "politically engaged" approach to housing and community economic development practice. Politically engaged Community Economic Development law (CED), "deploy[s] transactional lawyering in a way that builds organized low-income constituencies that can challenge the distribution of political power."6 The tiny homes for the homeless movement is a rejection of the traditional marketbased and professionalized approach to CED that has come to dominate housing and CED practice since the late 1980s.7 The advent of the LowIncome Housing Tax Credit, the New Market Tax Credit, and the growing trends of urbanization in the United States has led traditional housing and CED practice to ignore the lowest-income individuals, to gentrify many formerly disinvested inner-city communities,8 and render the homeless as recipients, rather than stewards, of complex housing and social services.
The tiny homes for the homeless movement emerged organically as a set of self-help, local interventions to ameliorate an emerging homelessness crisis that local governments failed to solve in the wake of the 2008 housing crisis.9 Some of these villages began as tent camps of homeless individuals and activists...