Tiny houses help address nation's homeless problem

Are tiny houses becoming too "cookie-cutter"?

That's the fear of Phoenix Vo-Dinh, a tiny-house renter who fears the rise of "miniature McMansions." And she knows from McMansions: Before her current home, she lived in a Maryland house 10 times its size. The Maryland house had four bedrooms and four bathrooms in its 3,500 square feet, with seven entry doors.

Vo-Dinh now lives with her 24-year-old son, artist Christopher Lollar, in what she calls a "witch's cottage" in Portland, Oregon. Its interior walls are papered over with Trader Joe's grocery bags and pinto bean and flour sacks (coated in linseed oil); the exterior makes use of a local pizzeria's tomato-sauce cans; and flowerboxes are made from discarded stove hoods turned upside down and poked with drainage holes.