I noticed the focus by micro-housing developers/investors seems to be missing an element of creativity. For instance, each of the microhousing units seems to be built with the idea that they will be 100% autonomous. That seems to me to be ignoring one of the biggest opportunities of the whole idea - time-of-use pricing. 

Instead of the units being separated entirely, why not allow people to have direct access to larger, fancier facilities like kitchens, restrooms, bathing areas by only paying for them when using them?

 

For example, say someone lives in a building in a micro-unit. They could pay for a space to enjoy as their own to exist most of the time for relaxation, sleep, entertaining guests, working. But they could have a bigger, fancier kitchen/dining area or bathroom area on site available when desired. The basic units could be built without a big kitchen (like hotel rooms) but offer the option of using a connected or close-by kitchen/dining area billed as time-of-usage. 

In the above scenario, the resident has perhaps a single centralized or several full-sized kitchens available where one can prepare/serve food, entertain guests in a dining area, then either clean it themselves after use or pay for someone else to clean up - all charged separately on their weekly/monthly bill! 

Why pay for a large kitchen all the time when you only need to use it a few hours every week !?!

It sounds strange, but when comparing the annual cost for a large house with everything built into it available all the time, it might be more-affordable for people to simply pay for using a nice large kitchen/dining or luxurious bathroom area only when they want/need it. 

 If the person wants to use the bigger areas, all they would have to do is reserve it with a deposit/advance payment. Since most working people entertain a lot only on weekends, maybe they could only pay to have a large kitchen dining area available two or three days a week. 

The owner would be able to use the facilities as if they owned them, but stop paying for them as soon as they are done actually using them. 

This is along the same lines of time-of-use transportation services such as Uber/Lyft etc. Why buy a car if it's cheaper for you to rent one by the hour? Why not apply the same concept to housing?

This is something that I think might fill in the market demand for higher-income housing that is still lower in cost than actually owning an entire house, 24/7. 

Whether something like that could work or not remains to be seen, but it might become an investment opportunity for developers and those who fund them as a solution to the high and increasing cost of owning a large, fully-equipped home, until larger homes can be made more-affordable for everyone the way cars have over time. 

Improvements in manufacturing may eventually (as Bucky Fuller imagined) make the cost of building a nice, large home exponentially lower. Fuller believed that pre-manufactured homes (which do exist but not as a mass market product) could make the larger percentage of the cost of owning a home the real-estate it's built on. Instead of paying hundreds of thousands to build homes, the cost might be cut in half or more, making the cost of owning one much more-affordable! 

Instead of paying $100 per-day to own your home (which is what my own home costs roughly to own) it might be possible to lower that dramatically simply by installing pre-manufactured structures instead of one built with conventional construction methods/materials. The greater percentage of the cost of building most homes is not the materials, but the labor. 

If you eliminate thousands of man-hours of labor cost in the home-building process the cost-per-build would be reduced dramatically.   

But until that happens (and it probably will in our lifetimes) creative, innovative strategeries (sic) might make decent, civilized housing more-available to every working person who simply wants to have a place to live that allows them to have enough extra cash to either invest or spend on other things.