I hate the tiny home “movement” or whatever you call it. Homes are not unaffordable because they’re too large, they’re unaffordable because the housing market has been financialized. Building smaller housing units just kicks the affordability can down the road on a per-unit basis while the price per-square-foot of housing (which is the metric that matters to investors) continues to rise. It’s literally shrinkflation.
Financialization of housing is why market housing will never, ever get cheaper. Even if you build a bunch of housing today, to the point of oversupply, it’ll be unaffordable again in a few years as it grows in value to investors. As long as housing is a tradable commodity with essentially zero risk or carrying costs, it will never be affordable. Any solution that doesn’t address the underlying commodification of housing isn’t actually a solution, just a way of creating the temporary illusion of affordability within a greater framework of value extraction.