Yeah to me the Tiny Home concept missed the point, on multiple fronts. Like you said, what's preventing younger cohorts from buying isn't the actual scale of existing/conventional homes, its the ability purchase of the land to begin with. Especially in America/Canada, where's there's still plenty of space for a regular-sized home. Whatever rises in material costs there may be, it can't be enough to overwhelm the loss of economics of scale that a Tiny Home construction would suffer from. After all, every facet of a regular is also going to happen in a Tiny Home - meaning much of the same initial overhead in installing, getting specialists, etc.
> Somehow not having a house is believed to be less impoverished than going and building one. Count me out! I don't think forking over half your earnings to a landlord is sophisticated.
I've never heard that belief - unless in the form of "land rich money poor" self-descriptions. I happen to think forking over money to a landlord is about as unsophisticated as its gets - despite it sometimes being the only tenable option. For many indebted that's certainly true.
Exactly. Tiny homes misses the point. Where tiny homes are parked, land cost is generally not a problem and you don't actually need to have a kitchen-bedroom-toilet combo. IMO it is for the Instagram crowd.
I don't see that kind of sentiment in people I know who like tiny houses. If anything it's the opposite: they work a lot harder to save up to buy a tiny house (it's like 200k) vs continuing to rent. It's also harder to go against the grain than it is to flow with what society tells you to do.
There is so much marketing to the effect of "millennials love tiny homes!" I can't help but think if regular homes were even slightly affordable for the average 30-something, there would be no tiny home trend.
I guess I never realized that tiny homes were supposed to fix the housing crisis? I'm not sure this article really said that they were either. Anyways, I think this is the main idea of the article:
"The imagined owners of tiny homes, in other words, are likely childless and able-bodied, and they likely have at least ten grand to spare (plus, perhaps, the time or resources to build a home) and minimal familial responsibilities. If housing justice is truly our goal, then tiny living leaves a large contingent of people behind."
Discussion of tiny houses and pod apartments has become popular (not so much the things themselves) because they offer this tantalizing hope that reducing living space size will decrease rent/mortgage proportionately.
It doesn't for all sort of reasons.
Basic functional blocks like bathrooms and kitchens can only be made so small. And once one graduates from college, shared spaces seem a lot less attractive.
I think the lack of entry level housing is a massive reason the tiny house movement has become so popular. I think people are willing to reevaluate the space they require to live in so as not to spend a life paying off debt.
I would love to live in a tiny house because I don't need much space and it seems like such a waste to pay for a big house to heat and cool. Plus, as someone who bought a house in 2007 right before the recession, I don't really think of a home as an investment. It can be, but the timing can also be risky. So I'd rather have a small house and invest my money elsewhere, and not waste all that energy and money to maintain a big house I don't need.
The problem is I also want to live close to work. So it's all about trying to find that balance of cost, space and proximity that makes it all very difficult.
But the issue just isn't as simple as people "accepting lower standards of living".
I think the tiny house trend is the symptom of growing wealth gaps in many places (especially the US).
People are finding themselves unable to afford traditional housing, and therefore want something that doesn't require a large amount of debt (on top of an already likely student debt).
My grandparents for example, could afford a traditional ranch style house on a single apprentice plumber salary back in the 60s. Good luck finding that today.
I wish I could upvote this twice. At some stage the tradeoffs in a tiny house start becoming overwhelmingly uneconomical. Naturally the barriers in most markets are legal or artificial financial constraints (in Australia, it is hard to get a loan on anything too small) rather than based on physics.
Mobile homes (and all the 'tiny homes' I've seen are smaller and cooler "mobile homes") are great for quickly putting up housing in undeveloped places.
I think they are less good for higher density options. Personally? I really like the idea of condo or apartment towers that are built to modern luxury condo standards... but have smaller units, and are priced accordingly. I'm in Silicon Valley, and all the new construction is luxury grade, which is fine; I like my insulation, climate control and especially my sound insulation, and I'm willing to pay for these things, but... the problem is that all the units are also really big; I'd be really happy to pay 60% of what they are charging for half the space.
What I'm saying here is that I think that the 'tiny home' movement needs to move up. build us 'tiny condos' and I'll buy one!
"I also question how well tiny homes make sense as a solution for long-term housing"
I also agree. This article is one of the few examples of a tiny house situated in what seems like a dense urban environment. In contrast, many tiny homes are placed among open space. The tiny homes don't feel cramped because they're surrounded by nature, with beautiful long uninterrupted views out of the windows. No noisy neighbours or traffic nearby either.
But take away the countryside location of these tiny homes and could the tiny house work in an urban environment? I doubt it. The future for housing for most people on the planet (including the US) is in cities and urban environments. Can you live in a tiny home where you don't have long, uninterrupted views out of your windows? Or where you only have windows along one side of your dwelling (e.g. single-aspect apartments). Do you feel you have enough privacy when your apartment or house is joined with your neighbour's home?
Millions of people already live in homes like this and have to contend with these issues. Can we have small or modest-sized homes that give us light, space, privacy, quiet and comfort in a noisy urban setting? It's one of the most pressing and important issues in housing design - and one that architects and home builders have failed to address.
Also, space can be 'modest' in size rather than 'tiny' and still be sustainable or amenable to high density. For example, London has it's own housing design guide that recommends new one bedroom apartments for two people to be a minimum of 50 square metres (538 square feet). That's still less than space standards in continental Europe but it's enough space to live comfortably even if it doesn't count as tiny by Western standards.
The fact that a country as large and sparse as Canada has to contemplate tiny homes to address housing is ridiculous. Never mind that the speculative construction market has been churning out tiny condo equivalents.
I lived in _much_ denser cities with their own speculative real estate market, but the developers haven't resorted to "optimizing" units as aggressively as the micro-condos I've seen in Toronto. The one bedrooms / studios are about as large as apartments in Beijing / Shanghai. But 2-3 bedrooms new constructions feel dramatically smaller. Being Canada, these units will negatively impact generations.
Another issue in my locale would simply be the availability of land. Pretty much every empty lot was snapped up during the real estate bubble. My house is small by contemporary standards, but not tiny in any credible sense.
But it's worth noting that by "tiny homes," we mean specifically tiny detached homes. Within a few blocks of my house are some four-banger apartment buildings with ~ 1000 square foot units, and I could probably afford to buy one and rent out three of the apartments. That could actually be a realistic option if I ever become an empty-nester.
I have lived, at various times, in a motorhome (240 square feet with the slide out), a travel trailer (190 square feet, and my current home), an apartment (600 square feet), a full sized house, a small house (800 square feet), and a big house with roommates.
I am thoroughly sold on tiny houses. I don't need a McMansion to be happy. Don't want one, in fact.
But, I don't like these and don't find them attractive, at all. They have the negatives of an apartment and none of the benefits of a tiny house, as I see them. The "rack" concept is antithetical to the independence I want from a tiny house...if I hate my landlord (as history indicates I will), or otherwise want to move, I have to relocate my whole house to another compatible rack. That virtually guarantees I can't move to where I want to move (because there's no way this is going to be hugely popular). So, I'm stuck selling the thing. Might as well buy an apartment (also a thing I would never do).
I think they're trying to solve several problems at once, and ending up with a suboptimal solution for all of them. One problem is high rents in downtown Austin (which truly has gotten out of hand, and will only get worse as long as Austin remains the fastest growing city in the US), another problem is home ownership which is out of reach for more people than ever (for a variety of reasons, and it is most pronounced in growing cities), and finally I think the tiny house thing is a backlash against the suburban dream of huge houses. The thing is, though, that this won't be affordable...the small number of available locations to "park" your tiny house will guarantee the landlord is in a position of strength when negotiating rent so this will be more expensive than other tiny homes in general. The issue of wanting to own your own home isn't solved when you don't own the land it sits on, as you're still a renter with the added stress of what to do with the damned thing when you move.
Anyway, I like that tiny houses are becoming more "normal". I don't like that the model for how it's being implemented looks a lot like renting.
As someone who lives in a Tiny House, its cute until its not. Your life grows, but your place doesn't. Its like being planted in too small a pot. By the time you move on, market rates for larger places to live have gone up a lot.
The primary cost in housing is not the size of the house, but the cost of land. I don't understand this tiny house obsession -- frankly condos are 'tiny houses' and they are mostly insanely priced in hot markets.
Tiny house is not a movement about affordability. It's an aesthetic movement. One mostly participated in by people of higher income.
I like the idea of making do with less, but I don't get how tiny houses can be the solution. What if your whole city/ the whole world was living in tiny houses? Would be impractical and use a lot of space. Seems that apartment blocks (with good quality, small/ flexible apartments) would make much more sense.
Canadians have a strong aversion to living in anything but a detached house after 30ish. Most people were would have grown up sharing fences with their neighbors, not walls. So tiny houses allow for more efficient detached housing.
> Somehow not having a house is believed to be less impoverished than going and building one. Count me out! I don't think forking over half your earnings to a landlord is sophisticated.
I've never heard that belief - unless in the form of "land rich money poor" self-descriptions. I happen to think forking over money to a landlord is about as unsophisticated as its gets - despite it sometimes being the only tenable option. For many indebted that's certainly true.
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