Some RV parks allow tiny homes to ‘camp’ there, with hookups.
IIRC, some mobile home communities do, too.
And there are places like this. My brother has rented in this one a few times:
Are they burgeoning all over the US ? Dunno.
There’s a lot of activity in municipalities, too, to consider whether to allow tiny homes in communities. It’s really quite the patchwork right now:
Entirely in-expert input from a casual observer:
There seem to be two “forks” to the tiny house movement. One fork is modernist minimalists, especially Millennials and Gen-Zers. A tiny house gives you the privacy and control of a detached dwelling without all the “stuff” that comes with a traditional house. Especially for Gen Z, a lot of their life is online, so they don’t really need a big living space. Plus, trendy.
The other “fork” is low-income housing, especially housing for the chronically homeless. The U.S. has tried traditional apartments for low-income housing, and the results have often been disastrous. A tiny house and a small plot of land gives people with low incomes, and especially the chronically homeless, a place that is theirs and theirs alone. No common areas, no out of sight areas which can be inviting to criminals, no maintenance personnel or landlords to interact with, just their own, private space.
Plus, multistory apartment buildings require elevators and stairs, which 1) require maintenance. and for elevators professional maintenance, and 2) can be difficult to navigate for people with disabilities. And, not incidentally, no out of sight interior lobbies, hallways, staircases, and elevators to pass through. In the worst public housing projects, those were dangerous gauntlets that residents had to pass through every day just to get to and from their homes.
Sure, but obviously this only works if you own land, and in lots of places where housing is crazy expensive, so are building lots. And then the cost of drilling a water well, putting in a septic tank and hooking up to the electrical grid is substantial. It might in fact dwarf the cost of building a tiny house.
I never thought it was a good idea. What good is a house that doesn’t have a permanent location? If someone doesn’t decide to put it permanently on their own property sharing existing utilities then it will end up in the legendary Tiny House graveyard, probably next door to the real RV graveyard. The RVs are at least easier to move around to a new soon to be former friend’s property.
As far as I know, this is wrong, but it likely varies from place to place and with age-of-building. As an example, I own (and lived in for many years) a condo in a building built in 1995. All the units have smoke detectors which are wired together (*) and sprinklers. Annually, all units are required to have these be inspected by professionals to make sure they are in working order. The building has emergency stairs, fire doors, backup power systems, and I believe the elevator is rated to keep running under some reasonable fire conditions (required for handicapped folks to evacuate the building.) It’s likely safer than most single-family homes.
(*) I’m somewhat fuzzy on how this works. My fire alarm only went off when I was burning something in my kitchen and during the annual testing. It never went off when a neighbor was burning something in their kitchen, which I’m sure happened from time to time when I was in the building. So there’s some threshold before your alarm triggers others in the building. But I do know that they are designed to do so, and this is one of the things tested for annually.
We need to find a way to make all dense housing avoid this seemingly inevitable decay–or commit to teardown/rebuild every 30 years. Apartments seem to always look sharp when they are built, but they decay so rapidly under least-cost short-sighted management–and once they look like slums, they drive away people concerned with personal safety and the whole thing cycles.
I half-joke that planning committees should require anyone looking to build an apartment provide artist’s drawings of what they will look like in 20 years.
Supposedly the build quality is a lot better than with a mobile home or trailer - though I expect that depends heavily on the builder.
As I said in another thread, I keep confusing condos with apartments. If you own a condo you do tend to keep better care of it. Also, if people are very poor, they tend to take worse care of it. But I don’t think that is a problem with condos/apartments by themselves.
Typical condos/apartments from the 50s in Scandinavia: Google Maps
Apartments seem to be a worse version of a tiny house, considering that you have to put up with sharing walls, floors, and ceilings with neighbors and have no private yard.
As two childless adults, people seem to expect my sister and I would be living in a condo or townhouse rather than the single family detached house we do. But who wants to not have a private yard and have to share a wall with a neighbor, kids or no?
A lot of tiny houses are by people that want something that looks like a real house (as opposed to an RV) that want to skirt zoning regulations by parking it on a cheap, otherwise unbuildable lot. Or have fantasies of moving around from place to place, despite that tiny houses aren’t nearly as easy to move as an RV.
Well, no, he didn’t. You can connect to sewer, or you can use a composting toilet, or some models for housing homeless people have a communal bathroom. You can hook up to a water main, use a hose, or bring in water (since if you are using a communal bathroom, you really don’t need much more water than you can put in a bucket - heck, much of the third world still lives this way). You can run electricity, or you can use solar, or you can limit your use of things that need electricity to “I can operate it off a battery or propane” - and your electrical needs if you are homeless are often “charging a cell phone.”
It really depends on the purpose of the small house. Because someone who wants to live off the grid is building a different home than someone who wants to build their own personalized camper and that is different than someone looking to house their adult kid in the backyard with their own space, and that’s different from someone who is looking to provide housing for the homeless, and that’s different from a housing cooperating which has a big central space, but everyone has their own little house. And that is different than “I want a retreat for myself” - a grownups playhouse.
Many of these needs aren’t met by building apartments. And the biggest problem with apartments for people who are low income is that no one wants to invest the capital. Its easier for a non-profit to raise the cash for 10 tiny homes than a ten unit apartment building.
(Personally, I have too much stuff)
Also, apartments tend to be in areas of high density living. If you want to avoid that and live in a greener space, a tiny home might be your only affordable option.
Another use case for tiny homes is as a second property for vacations. Around here, you can buy lakeside lots for RVs or tiny homes for around $20-30K. A tiny home can be thought of as a modern cabin for people who want to get away from the city for a while.
In northern climates like here, tiny homes can be built with heavy insulation, heated flooring and other comfort amenities. An RV would not be pleasant to live in when it’s -30 outside.
The pandemic caused a lot of people to rethink the wisdom of living in a small apartment in a crowded building in a dense urban core. The spikes in violence in the last year are contributing to urban exodus in large cities. Sales of homes in bedroom communities around large cities are through the roof. For people who want to get out of the city but can’t afford a regular house, a tiny home on a rural lot can be the answer.
To put it another way, what makes tiny homes so cheap, other than being tiny? Compared to a regular detached house.
- Building Is More Expensive. Giffin estimates the price of building a tiny home to be about $300 per square foot. In 2016, the median price per square foot of a contractor built house in the U.S. was $101.72. “The average cost per square foot is more because you’re consolidating everything into a small space,” says Giffin. “In construction so much of the costs are in the details.” And tiny homes require lots of little details to be fully functional. When you have 2,000 or more square feet at your disposal, wasted space isn’t as much of an issue.
So they’re ‘cheaper’ almost exclusively because they’re so much smaller, and you’re not buying the land.
You’re likely buying a depreciating asset (where the land is often the appreciating part of a traditional RE investment).
I think what I am trying to say is that you are trying to make it so small and efficient, but what would make it even more efficient is to make an apartment. Less land usage, less heating costs, shared exterior upkeep costs. And in some cases, a little bit more noise 
Am I the only one assuming the OP was talking about solutions for homelessness? Some cities (Mine is one.) are building tiny houses for the homeless, and with the wording of the OP–the choices are building tiny houses or building, not renting, apartments–I assumed the OP was asking why cities do that instead of constructing apartment buildings for the homeless.
Tiny houses are cheaper and faster to build. You can’t build a large apartment building to code with volunteer labor like you can tiny houses. This article says 125 volunteers built 6 tiny houses in a day at a cost of $10,000 each. A six-apartment building would have cost several times that.
And yes, they give people a greater sense of independence, an important consideration for many of the homeless. The best tiny house communities for the homeless encourage a sense of community, another important consideration.
If the OP really wasn’t talking about the homeless, my apologies. It seemed the most likely explanation.
Actually, I was not thinking about the homeless, but that is also an interesting consideration.
So then let me ask, why is it cheaper and faster to build 6 tiny houses than one single-floor apartment building?
If people could live in tiny apartments, they would but they’ve been categorically forbidden to be built in the US for decades. Old school boarding houses, SRO hotels and tenement housing were the original “tiny apartments” but they became associated with racial minorities, immigrants, the near indigent and undesirables so cities started passing regulations making them impossible to construct. Tiny houses is a movement of moving far away enough from cities that zoning laws become relaxed enough to make spaces people want to live in for a given budget.
In countries where tiny apartments aren’t stigmatized, they’re a common form of new construction for students, laborers, temporary workers and other people who prefer less space to higher rents.
There’s a YouTube series, of which this video is a part, that I found interesting:
I teed up the vid at the spot where we’re introduced to the Japanese concept of a “Doya” (“flophouse”). It’s essentially tiny apartments that are state-funded and serve as homeless shelters housing while Japanese social service agencies help to prepare the person for self-sufficiency.
Japan doesn’t have homelessness beaten, but I found the series worth watching in its entirety.
And I think it does bear on the concept of tiny homes or other tiny dwellings as a potential partial approach to homelessness.
Guns vs. butter. Same as it ever was.
No, that’s exactly why it’s much cheaper than a few tiny houses. If you have one apartment building, you need one building with plumbing, electrical, and so on. When you have ten tiny houses, you need ten buildings with all of those things.
Heating (or cooling) is also a big deal. The cost to maintain the temperature of a building depends on the building’s surface area, not its volume, so a set of tiny homes is much more expensive to maintain temperature in than a building with the same number of apartments.
If your goal is just to avoid stairs and hallways, then build single-story apartment buildings, with access to the individual units from the outside, like a motel. It wouldn’t be quite as economical as a multi-story apartment building, but still far ahead of tiny houses.
You can still find micro apartments in some places - and new ones are starting to be built. I have a friend whose son is in a micro apartment in Seattle. Its still $600+ a month. He shares a kitchen, but has his own small bathroom.
But human density becomes a thing. I couldn’t do it.