And how is this different to a converted shipping container.
Modular living solutions have been around for years, naysayers say nay, while fan bois cheer... One day A solution will achieve real acceptance, untill then it is merely a typical Architectural honours project/

I want to go on record as predicting that this will never work. After years of following tiny houses on this and other tech sites it is obvious that they all share one important aspect. They are all priced much higher per square foot than standard housing. Housing the homeless needs to be affordable. This is an absurd idea which plays the poverty card in an attempt to sell an overpriced product.

12 flights without an elevator? That's blatantly illegal per almost every city code in every city in the nation.

Yeah, just what we need, more overpriced encouragement for people to assume little to no responsibility for their condition and become homeless. How about we do this instead? We get rid of the fiat paper currency financial system that uses bookkeeping entries that are created out of thin air and even less than that, we teach our children sound and actually workable economic FACTS, not drug induced hallucinations, we jail all of the banksters that have been ruining economies all over the world, we throw ALL politics into a trash can, and we do nothing but encourage free market enterprise?? Then there wouldn't be any need for these stupid wastes of time and other resources.

with housing so expensive in the big cities, especially near downtown workplaces, it won't be long till a developer sees this as a way to maximize profit. I can imagine a developer turning the top floor of his parking garage into very profitable apartment complex of tiny spaces. at $1000 per unit, in each parking space, times 12 (stacked to the max height) that's $144000 a year for each parking space. If its downtown which is a high rent district then the price could even go higher, and stay at max occupancy.

SF has very strict building code for earthquakes. The is a reason the city has endured some pretty strong quakes and remained standing while buildings in places like Hati were annihilated. It makes more sense to have a single cohesive design than the build these things to be stacked 12 high and as others have said the cost per square foot of larger housing structures is significantly cheaper than these tiny houses so these would be the exact opposite of what you would want in order to solve an affordable housing problem.
I'll go one further and say there are efficiencies to be had allowing multiple people to share spaces like kitchens and bathrooms rather than have multiple separate kitchens and bathrooms per occupant.
Actual affordable housing for homeless would look suspiciously like Army barracks with rows and rows of bunkbeds with a wall locker for personal stuff and large bathrooms shared by dozens of people.
This is most likely an attempt to make a pile of money selling expensive tiny homes to government in the name of helping the poor. I give it poor marks and 1 bedroom 700 square foot apartments in San Francisco go for $750,000
Maybe what homeless in SF need more than anything is a bus ticket. I'm selling a 3 bedroom 1200 square foot rental property with a view and a yard in rural NY for $40k. The public schools are good and crime rates are almost nonexistant to boot.
Maybe we should start building more homeless shelters in places that aren't SF.

The negativity in early comments is interesting. Since there are two sides to every problem, I would like to hear from the city what the costs per year per homeless person related to homelessness look like on the city books. How much for police, fire, healthcare and all other social services? What about petty theft and vandalism by homeless people?
Is it an absolute certainty that every person selected to live in a unit is simply looking to game the system and have a free ride for life? Is every homeless person hopeless too?
Where does it say that the units will be stacked 12 stories at every infill site? What do the projected costs look like? Could some homeless people be trained to build the units and create jobs for homeless in this process?
So many possibilities for tiny homes. Housing affordability in SF is near an all time low once again. There are many young people who would live small in the city in an in-fill project just to live small and save for the future.
Would every project for this type of unit have to be for street homeless? There are working people who would buy these units to have affordable housing in the city.
Come on folks, give the concept a chance and look at it from all sides before you incinerate the concept.

I think that is really neat.

Optimized for the purpose, these would be useful for the one-way container traffic to places like the arctic, where families have a year's supply of consumables barged in, and dropped in their yard. The empty containers, when I worked in a number of villages, often were crudely adapted for housing.

My lord, I'm pretty flabbergasted by the level of naysaying going on here. I am quite familiar with this project and believe in it. A few responses to some of the comments: 1. It's not a shipping container, but rather a purpose built housing module that conforms to intermodal shipping container size, making it very easy and cheap to ship. It has innumerable benefits over shipping containers that are too many to go into here. 2. Yes, they cost more per square foot, but these things need to be seen in context of a city where ANYTHING costs $1000/square foot (minimum) to build. In that context, these cost 40% less than conventional construction. Yes, stick building in a place with low property values is cheaper, but that has little to do with this project. 3. Who said they don't have elevators? 4. The average "chronically homeless" San Franciscan costs the city $80K/year in psychiatric, emergency and police services. The MicroPAD, as proposed, is designed to house them and provide effective therapeutic care, costing the city a lot less than they'd otherwise spend and possibly making longterm progress toward ameliorating the city's homeless crisis. 5. These are fully compliant to the city's seismic requirements. The developer has built hundreds of units in the area. This is not some flash in the pan idea.