The land that is next to the jobs is expensive. The construction costs of single homes are going to make it out of reach for those who are in housing precarity, even if you make them "tiny houses."
No. Homes they are unaffordable are not expensive homes, they are expensive land. Building a mini house is a waste of effort and drives costs up, as it will need to be knocked down or mangled later to support expansion.
Tiny houses in and of themselves are fine if that's what you're into.
The problem is that they seem to be used as a way to avoid discussing the fact that land, not buildings, are what is causing all the housing affordability issues.
We desperately need to ramp up taxes on land in order to reduce inequality and speculation, and encourage density.
Nobody made land, so nobody deserves the right to use it to exploit other people.
Unfortunately, hundreds of years of political supremacy by landed gentry is largely still in place and hard to dismantle.
That would be a problem. There seems to be a lack of tiny plots to go with tiny houses. I get the feeling cities are about as happy with any concept of tiny plots as they are of trailer parks.
The difficulty with this thinking (and I say this as someone passionate about building my own tiny home) is that we already have tiny home communities in the US for poorer people. They're called trailer parks, and they're exploitative, unpleasant places to live.
The cost of materials and labor is really high for most people, not to mention land. And then there’s maintenance. It’s out of reach for most people. Populations are so much larger than they were 100 years ago and people want increasingly large dwellings.
I think the tiny home concept makes sense as it’s trailers without the stigma. But yes, we probably need to think of a new type of town built around small properties that are pre-fab and disposable outside the connecting infrastructure.
If you consider the 5% of the poorest people, and consider the environmental cost of concrete, and how dense urban areas are stressful and that there needs to be more space between homes, then this totally makes sense.
What I'm more worried about is insulation, humidity, and other stuff like mold and durability. Also those types of house are not really viable if you can't sit down just outside next to it if there is too much noise or pollution.
So to be honest, it seems to be more a problem of urban planning than anything else, which can be political. A tiny house is interesting if other parameters makes it interesting.
This is exactly what my friend and I have been thinking. People are being priced out of even the cheaper, though still desirable, mountain and other rural communities in the western US. I strongly feel like tiny houses are a good solution for some folks who don't feel like they need 300-400 SF per person in their home. And they can be built to extremely rigorous standards for _relatively_ little cost.
As I've said elsewhere in the thread, we're building one right now (https://imgur.com/gallery/KbPlbPR) and our hope is that this somehow is something we can reproduce, potentially on a cheap parcel of land, where people who can't otherwise afford a conventional house can afford these. We're definitely thinking it's for the not-quite impoverished, though, because when people have zero money/jobs you're relying on government to step in and fund/subsidize.
Of course lots of questions about entitlements for tiny house communities; affordability when financing isn't available; etc., but gotta start somewhere. Seems like there's a path to providing some long-lasting shelter for folks who otherwise would have to opt for single or double-wides or, worse, end up unhoused.
The article doesn't really get into it, but there are some weird pressures in the US that really work against tiny houses, namely: our crumbling infrastructure nationwide and our system of paying for that infrasture and other civic responsibilities with property taxes.
If a municipality is looking at two competing development plans for a couple acres of town:
1. 10 new $500k - 3,000sq ft McMansions = 5 million dollar base and 48 people (estimating 4 people / family)
2. 30 much smaller houses at $100k each = 3 million dollar base and 100ish new people (estimating fewer / house)
In the small house scenario (if they were built on foundations and tied into city water/sewer) you also end up with 3x as many connections to install and support, significantly more kids that need educated at the local overcrowded school system, etc.
While I imagine a stacked parking structure of tiny homes is less efficient than dense condos, tiny homes can probably double units available via urban infilling, like laneway homes in not very dense but desirable cities in Canada.
>land-in-desirable-places crisis
Pretty much. Solution is pretty simple (not easy), sideline NIMBYs and start converting every parking lot and park into homes until supply/demand/desirability resets to something reasonable.
This should generally hold for housing as well. Even though land is finite, we can build upward, so each individual new unit uses a negligible amount of land.
Perhaps the author has forgotten that the land base required to support a given human population cannot be expanded upward? The minimum area of productive farmland required to support a rather subsistence-level diet (95% vegetarian say) is about a hectare - two football fields - per person, according to most studies I've looked at.
Technology can mitigate some of these issues to some extent, and already have - extensive inputs of fossil fuels to agriculture in the form of fertilizer and diesel powered water pumps have doubled per-hectare productivity, but at the cost of fertilizer pollution and eventual exhaustion of groundwater supplies. Hence, we have to conclude that there really are hard ecological limits to human economic activity.
Property developers and their affiliated investors have an unfortunate habit of ignoring these realities, and for their own pockets it might make sense - build some housing, ignore the demands on the surrounding area, sell the housing, take the money and run. Most communities can see through these efforts. Now there is an argument for Tokyo-style tiny apartments (i.e. subdivide existing housing into smaller units) and little houses to lower prices and house the homeless and so on, but these approaches aren't really that profitable in terms of return-on-investment.
P.S. If you want to examine 'artificial scarcity driving market prices' the place to start is the diamond industry.
Part of it could be that 10 tiny homes can be relocated a lot easier than a 10 unit building. These could possibly be "mass produced" in a large warehouse and transported to various places that can handle various numbers of them.
Because there are limited resources surrounding those homes. Like streets, schools, sewage, etc. You can’t just magically scale up the housing without also scaling up infrastructure.
I'm a fan of all these small-living endeavors. I'd personally build a somewhat larger passive-solar-optimized structure out of more appropriate materials.
The gotcha is always land. Try to find an affordable plot near enough to community and services. It's going be way more than the cost of the building.
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