As much as we love gorgeous small-scale architecture, not all micro-housing is created equal. Over at City Lab, Kriston Capps argues that tiny houses plopped onto huge lots in the middle of nowhere miss the entire point of micro-housing: to provide more options for affordable housing, especially in crowded, expensive cities.

He takes issue with the 650-square-foot prefabricated zeroHouse, the self-sufficient modular home seen above:

The zeroHouse is so modular and low maintenance, in fact, that all you need to own a zeroHouse is–after $350,000–a plot of land. Any kind of land. Which is, of course, the problem with zeroHouse: Nobody needs micro-housing in places where plots of prairie, mountain, and sea (!) are available in plenty.

The Delta Shelter by Olson Kundig in Mazama, Washington. Image: Courtesy Olson Sunderberg Kundig Allen Architects/Taschen

If you’re determined to live on a sprawling piece of rural land, it’s probably more environmentally friendly to do so in a prefab house that’s designed to function off the grid. “Basically, a tiny house is sort of the suburban or maybe even rural version of a small apartment,” as Ryan Mitchell, author of the book Tiny House Living, told Salon.

But trendy tiny dwellings more often come in this form than the variety people more desperately need: the kind that makes urban living affordable for those of us who aren’t oligarchs. “Lovely granny flats, Voltron head-cubes, and stories that tug at the heart-strings are nice, but support for these doesn’t amount to support for real micro-housing–or congregate housing developments, perhaps a better term for urbanist housing solutions,” Capps writes.

What cities need in micro-housing, he argues, is “at least the option to build for a range of buyers and renters, at a range of densities. When tiny-house enthusiasts go on about what are essentially single-family homes, they are confirming the status quo, if shrinking it a little.”