When Robert Hernandez unpacked his meager belongings into one of San Jose’s celebrated tiny homes, finally getting a bed and access to a shower after more than a decade on the street, he had reason to be elated.
After all, tiny homes have become the hot new thing in the fight to end homelessness. The simple dwellings have multiplied across the Bay Area in the last few years and have been touted in splashy news conferences by everyone from the region’s big city mayors to Gov. Gavin Newsom as a salve to one of California’s thorniest problems.
But even after 55-year-old Hernandez moved into his tiny home on Mabury Road near Coyote Creek, it turned out he still had a long road ahead. For the more than 2,000 people like Hernandez who have tried out the Bay Area’s tiny home experiment, the single biggest measure of the model’s success is what happens next: Can a temporary stay in a tiny home be a final step on the path to permanent housing?
To explore that question, the Bay Area News Group spent four months following several tiny home residents and analyzed three years of data from Santa Clara and Alameda — the counties with the Bay Area’s largest homeless populations, and the two that have most fully embraced tiny homes — with the goal of determining how well the model works to get people into stable housing. The results could have implications throughout California and beyond as the tiny home movement continues to pick up steam across the West Coast.