When Is a Tiny House Too Small to Be a Home?

For two years, James Valdez lived in his S.U.V., so it was a relief when he moved into Branford Village, a community of tiny homes, in Los Angeles.

And then the flood came. And then another. During the first flood in August 2023, the water rose to the steering wheel of his S.U.V. Six months later in February, when water rushed through the complex again, residents were evacuated out of knee-high water to emergency shelters.

“You learn to live with it,”said Mr. Valdez, 58, whose 2016 GMC Arcadia somehow survived ruin. “At least you have a bed.”

Roughly 150 recently homeless people live in the complex of tiny homes, part of Los Angeles’s effort to combat homelessness.

Mr. Valdez standing at the entrance of the tiny home he shares with a man he does not know. Credit…Stella Kalinina for The New York Times

At a time when the Supreme Court is weighing whether cities can criminalize sleeping outdoors or in tents, tiny homes offer a cheap and efficient way to erect shelters, delivering a stop gap fix to a national housing crisis. The country is short a staggering 7.3 million homes for extremely low-income renters, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. A record 12.1 million Americans pay more than half their income in rent, according to census data, and a record 653,100 Americans were homeless on a given night in January 2023.