TUCKED BENEATH FREEWAY FLYOVERS and around the fringes of residential zones are California’s transitional tiny home developments.

Clusters of one-room cabins, with doors that lock, are arranged around common spaces. Plumbed facilities — kitchen, laundry and bathrooms — are shared. A fenced curtain wraps around the whole place, shielding it from the street. A security guard staffs the gate around the clock. To an unhoused person, who has learned to rest with one eye open, a tiny home village can bring the first good night’s sleep in years.

For cities struggling to resolve sprawling encampments, these experimental microcosms can bring some order to chaos, if they prioritize social services. They are temporary and built quickly, but they can still cost millions. Philanthropic support and state grants can ease the financial burden. As cities try to build permanent affordable housing, tiny home villages can help them to bridge a crisis.

But how should these little worlds be designed? How can they be made to not feel like waiting rooms but ports for transitioning from one reality to another. What type of space does a person need to disrupt the patterns of a life in limbo and begin to imagine a better future?

A man walks his bicycle through the sanctioned camping area along Mahon Creek Path in San Rafael on Nov. 18, 2025. The temporary encampment provides tents, security and access to services while residents work toward permanent housing. Residents of the camp are expected to move to a 65-unit interim tiny home village at 350 Merrydale Road, where individual cabins will provide greater privacy and security. (George Alfaro/Bay City News)

“I have trouble sleeping, and then on top of that rats come in at night and they chew through your tent because it’s just easy to chew through it and, you know, it’s hard for me to sleep,” said Amanda Durbin, an unhoused resident in San Rafael.

For six years, Amanda moved from place to place while struggling with addiction, from a boat in Sausalito to a creek bed in San Rafael. For the past two years, along with 64 others, she has been living in a temporary encampment built by the city. The temporary encampment looks a little like a tent city, but it is organized. It has tables and chairs where people can meet with caseworkers, receive social services, call family and get mail.

Amanda Durbin has lived for the past two years at San Rafael’s temporary Mahon Creek Path encampment after experiencing homelessness for six years. Durbin and other residents are expected to move into the city’s new 65-unit tiny home village, where residents will have individual rooms with electricity, heat and locking doors. (Courtesy of Amanda Durbin)

Soon, all the people in the temporary camp, plus some that are still on the street, will move into the new 65-unit tiny home village a few miles away. It will have heating and electricity, a shared kitchen and laundry space, privacy and security. The total price tag for both the temporary camp and the tiny home village is nearly $17 million, funded so far with public dollars.

Meanwhile, Amanda and her community are waiting in the temporary camp, which was not built to last. Each unit is composed of a pop-up tent, just 10-foot square, placed over wood platforms with cots. The walls are vinyl tarp tethered with zip ties. It was constructed in three weeks.

Now sober and neatly dressed, Amanda walks outside the security fence and talks about the people she sees still living outside along Andersen. Some of those campers will also make it into the tiny home village if they can endure their current conditions

“If we need water, we have water. They don’t have that option,” she said. “They’re on the ground, and they don’t get the plastic over it. Yes, we might have mold growing on ours from the plastic, and we could spray bleach to kill that, but they don’t even have that. You know, they get tarps, and sometimes the tarps blow away.”

An unsanctioned encampment near San Rafael Creek at Andersen Drive and Lindaro Street in San Rafael on Nov. 18, 2025. The encampment is separate from the city-sanctioned camping area along Mahon Creek Path, where Amanda Durbin lives. Durbin said people living outside the sanctioned camp lack even some of the basic protections and services available to its residents. (George Alfaro/Bay City News)

Environment is everything

Tim Annin and Melissa Mizell are architects with the firm Gensler. They have designed and built nine of these transitional tiny home villages, three in the Bay Area. They are not involved in San Rafael’s tiny home project, but they are advocates for trauma-informed design.

Gensler architects Melissa Mizell, left, and Tim Annin have worked on the design of transitional tiny home communities that emphasize residents’ privacy, control over their surroundings and opportunities for social connection. The architects say trauma-informed design can help such communities provide more than shelter by creating a sense of safety and belonging. (Gensler)

“Seeing people suffering on our streets, it feeds the belief that this is unsolvable, and having to turn away and just keep going about our lives as if that’s not happening is really not natural, and I think we can all say that it’s not good for any of us,” said Annin in a phone conversation from their offices.

“If you are living on the street, you fear for your safety, right? You have to be hypervigilant to make sure that no one’s going to hurt you. And so that also contributes to their not getting a good night’s sleep,” Mizell said, adding that street noises are always constant. “Even in a shelter your face might be a few feet away from somebody who is snoring.”

People experiencing homelessness are totally dependent on outreach services or donations, she said, and a tiny home should be all about giving people control over their environment.

➤ Listen as Amanda Durbin describes life without secure housing and Gensler architects Melissa Mizell and Tim Annin discuss how trauma-informed design can create safer, more welcoming communities.

“Having that door that locks so that they have a place to store their belongings without fear of people stealing them, makes a huge difference,” said Mizell. “They control the temperature. They control the light. They control the acoustics. You can open that door. You can close that door.”

The space outside the units should not feel too institutional, Mizell said.

“We want to make sure that the residents don’t feel like they’re being watched all the time,” she said. “There’s a balance between creating a straight shot, which could feel really horrible, to having something that feels slightly more meandering. Going back to that idea of choice. Do I want to socialize with this group of people, or do I just want to sit quietly, still have my eye on them, but just be by myself?”

An aerial view of the DignityMoves Cherry Avenue community in San Jose shows how individual housing units are arranged around shared spaces and amenities. Gensler, which collaborated on the project, points to the community as an example of how thoughtful site design can balance residents’ privacy with opportunities for connection and help temporary housing feel less institutional. (Jason O’Rear via Gensler)

Annin and Mizell said the public spaces inside the village can instill a welcoming sense of place, even on a shoestring budget.

The entrance to the DignityMoves interim housing community in Santa Barbara incorporates architectural touches inspired by the surrounding city. Gensler architects say features such as the arched entryway and orange-roofed housing units, which echo Santa Barbara’s Spanish-style architecture and terracotta roofs, can help temporary housing feel rooted in the community around it. (Courtesy of DignityMoves)

“We bring in volunteers to paint murals,” said Annin. “We select planters and furniture that bring some warmth and brightness and soften the harder edges of some of these communities. We want folks to feel a sense of joy, like they’re cared for.”

Murals that pull from the surrounding landscape and architectural character of the city can help people feel rooted in the place where they live. In a village they built for Santa Barbara, for example, they painted the cabin roofs orange to match the terracotta roofs of the surrounding homes, which helped the neighbors adapt to the presence of the community.

“We bring in volunteers to paint murals. We select planters and furniture that bring some warmth and brightness and soften the harder edges of some of these communities. We want folks to feel a sense of joy, like they’re cared for.”
Tim Annin, Gensler architect

The size of the villages built by Gensler varies from 30 units to 130 units, said Annin. About 50 to 75 units are preferred by service providers, but more beds mean the common infrastructure is shared more broadly, reducing costs. Existing parking lots are the most affordable, while greenfield sites require more infrastructure.

“For permanent supportive housing, the cost is between $750,000 to $1million per unit and generally takes about five years to build,” Annin said. For tiny home villages, they shoot for six months and are currently around $100,000 per unit.

A temporary path to permanence

San Rafael’s tiny home village will be located on a former adult school in the Terra Linda neighborhood. According to Daniel Cooperman, the director of the city’s Community Services Division, it was purchased with $7 million and preparing the site will cost another $1.1 million. The 65 tiny homes, which are converted cargo containers, will cost $700,000 and operating costs will be $2 million a year.

Marin County provided $8 million for the city to purchase the land from a private owner and help set up the program to operate for two years. The remainder came from city funds and Encampment Resolution Funds issued by the California Department of Housing and Community Development. Those resolution funds have been expanded since the grant first opened in 2021.

A site plan shows the proposed layout of San Rafael’s 65-unit temporary tiny home community at 350 Merrydale Road, including resident restrooms and showers, a community center, staff offices and secured entrances. The city purchased the former adult school property as the site for the interim housing project, which is expected to operate until the property is redeveloped for permanent affordable housing. (LCA Architects for San Rafael via Bay City News)
An architectural rendering, left, shows the layout of converted cargo containers that will become 65 individual tiny homes at San Rafael’s Merrydale Road project. At right, a completed unit includes electricity, climate control, a window and a locking door — features intended to give residents greater privacy and control over their surroundings than they have while living outdoors or in temporary tents. (City of San Rafael via Bay City News)

There are about two dozen interim tiny home villages in California. In 2024, the Legislature passed laws that streamlined approvals for temporary and emergency housing developments.

The San Rafael village will be dismantled by 2029 to make way for an affordable housing development with at least 80 units for people earning less than 80% of area median income. By then, Amanda Durbin and her community will have moved on to permanent housing.

While the end goal is permanent housing, these villages are an important way to get people indoors and into a support community with mental health services, said Mizell.

“It’s not just about building a village and making it cute and expecting that there’s going to be success,” she said.

Annin said people sometimes don’t want to leave when it’s time for them to live independently, where they can grow lonely.

“They really have a sense of belonging and being a part of something,” said Annin. “When folks are placed into permanent supportive housing units in apartments, it’s a much more atomized individual sort of life.”

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.