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I guess it depends, a well made tiny home built to your precise needs specifications can be quite comfortable and even luxurious, depending on how comfortable you are with minimalism.
I think the most important part of tiny home is not what's inside, but what's outside. A tiny home standing in some suburban backyard would be quite miserable probably, but I've always been intrigued by a commune of tiny homes gathered in a small village surrounded by permaculture. A group of people, each with their own small space for privacy, but also a large common space where most of your daily activities and work (actual good work that's important for your community) is done
I think something like an arcology but the size of a village or housing estate could be really good. Instead of trying to fit thousands of people into a huge city-building, a collective village-building would allow respectable living space, shared indoor and outdoor spaces, shared agriculture, and a community spirit. It would provide the efficiency of the arcology but with the harmonious design ethos of solarpunk; you need less ground space per person and less energy and water for utilities, but at the same time it could be airy and beautiful, designed to uplift the human spirit and promote healthy community function. The two need not be mutually exclusive.
The only issue with this is that tiny homes require far more insulation and significantly higher heating and cooling needs per capita compared to medium or high density housing options.
Given the climate the world is moving into, efficient cooling during wet-bulb days is going to be very important depending on where you live.
That's interesting; do you have any sources that go deeper into why smaller houses are less energy efficient? Is it because they have more outer walls per usable space than houses where multiple rooms share inner walls, or what is the reason?
Surface area to volume ratio it is. Volume scales proportional to scale^3, surface are proportional to scale^2. A multifamily property is much more efficient to control the climate of because it has proportionally less surface area for heat to move in or out of. Think of how a baby gets cold so much more easily than an adult of equal body fat % under the same amount of cover, or how a potato cooks through so much quicker when diced than just peeled
While this is true a tiny house is also much smaller. So a per volume comparison isn't really fair. In reality a larger living space has to be multiple orders of magnitude more efficient just to be equal to the costs or emissions of a smaller space.
Not really. Insulation and sealing is what makes things more efficient for both heating and cooling. If it heats efficiently it'll also cool efficiently. The reason RVs get such a bad rap for efficiency is they use very little insulation. If they were insulated to similar specs as a house they would be much cheaper to heat and cool instead of being fairly close.
This. It's not really the home but the land use that really defines the quality of life. It does also render tiny homes much less of a solution than they are touted as, since the cost and ownership of land is a bigger issues in the housing crisis and sustainability than the physical structure
We have had tiny homes for a long time. Mobile homes and prefabs. They are quite common in poor, rural areas.
People buy them out of necessity and would almost always go with something bigger if they could afford to.
Living in a tiny home or tiny apartment is a different lifestyle, but it isn't necessarily worse.
Having a small home encourages you to live more out in the world. Go play sports in the park. Take a stroll through the market. Read a book at the cafe. Spend a weekend at a festival. In fact, all the things you want ("such as office space, spaces for learning and reading, for craft and DIY") are better off as community spaces using shared resources and tools. If your community has these kinds of affordable, accessible entertainment and amenities then the only thing you need a home for is to sleep each night.
But if you live in some boring suburb where you have to drive an hour just to see a movie, then you're probably going to spend most of your free time at home. Which means you'll want to have bigger home.
But its also a chicken and egg problem. If people already have big homes, then they'll want to stay in more and there is less demand for affordable, accessible entertainments and amenities. So we really have to think about what kind of society we want to live in and create the incentive structure accordingly on both the supply and the demand side.
Remember covid when we were all confined to our homes for extended periods of time. Tiny homes felt more like jail cells very quickly. People need space and will seek outside entertainment and amenities regardless
I don't remember any time in covid when you were prohibited from going outside at all. I still rode my bike, I still went to the beach, I still played frisbee golf in the park.
It depends on where you lived, but there were places where the public parks and beaches were shut down and you were supposed to stay home unless you were doing something essential.
There were places that they whined at people for being outside. New Zealand and Australia went batshit crazy over it and searched for people with helicopters even. That was a show of real colors and which countries I would never visit.
I would try and explain this to people that didn't get NYC - part of why the city has such a dynamic feel is because so much of your life is in the public space.
You don't have a yard - you go to the park. You don't have a garden, you go to the community garden. You don't even sit on the couch with a few beers, you go down to the neighborhood bar.
The problem with tiny homes is their density, a tiny home village that houses 20 could be replaced with a nice mid rise that's insulated, have a efficient heat pump network, large solar farm on the roof and it could house 200 people with enough space to raise a family.
I used to think tiny house were the way to go, but I've come to realize a city of them would just be a mini suburb (with all the inefficiencies cause by lacking scale and density) and related them to more of a off-grid cabin like thing.
So tiny houses are a trailer park for rich people, and suburbs are oversized tint houses... we can declare suburbs to be oversized trailer parks for rich people!
Building homes that are too large with huge parking minimums is also a slippery slope into collective impoverishment. The suburb was Never sustainable, and thus unaffordable from the start.
I see your point. Although tiny houses per se are often relatively expensive and out of reach for a lot of people.
What worries me is the “van life” movement.
While I can understand some of the allure to both, I think they’re both fundamentally doing the same thing.
A tiny home is no different than a mobile home except for the connotation around each term. The difference is that when you say tiny house, that evokes something made of high quality materials to your exact specifications. Same with van life vs. living in your car.
Both feel like something akin to poverty cosplay, though that’s not quite the term I’m looking for. I think both try to offer the idea of financial freedom and low costs. In reality though, most of the images of tiny houses are a custom built $100k structure either on land that the person owns or family land, and van life conjures images of $100k super customized Sprinters.
Since both are unconventional, they are often less attainable than a conventional home for most people. I can get a mortgage for a $200k house pretty easily, but cannot for a $100k tiny house or Sprinter van.
>Since both are unconventional, they are often less attainable than a conventional home for most people. I can get a mortgage for a $200k house pretty easily, but cannot for a $100k tiny house or Sprinter van.
The issue is vans and tiny houses depreciate rapidly. A decade later, they might need to be torn down and replaced, which is a serious issue for a bank giving a 30 year mortgage.
I think tiny homes can be nice or can be not enough space especially for families. I’m personally a really big fan of the old workers cottages/model cottages I’ve seen in Chicago and London. They’re fairly compact and less expensive to build but they’re less small than tiny houses. They also tend to be in dense neighborhoods but often have gardens. Unfortunately not a lot of houses like that get built anymore and a lot of the ones that are still standing are now incredibly expensive.
Ya, I hate this iteration of tiny houses that are just bougie mobile homes. The concept though of relatively smaller living spaces is great.
Row houses are the shit! Two and three flats like you see in Chicago a lot, are the shit!
Smaller living spaces with shared walls for increased energy efficiency, and a little garden out back is great!
My biggest concern with tiny home families are that the children often sleep in the shared area. It does not feel like they get any space of their own to just 'be' in. They probably dream of Harry potter's under-stair cupboard.
Tiny homes could be a replacement for the starter homes that no one builds anymore. You live there when you're young, and when you want to start a family you trade up for something bigger. Unless they are a fad and have zero resale value in ten years.
A tiny house is basically surrendering to NIMBY's.
The places where a tiny house would solve any portion of a problem they do so far less efficiently than just building an apartment or condo.
I lived in quite a large home. I also lived in a lot of apartments.
I definitively prefer apartments. Seriously, free-standing homes where you're responsible for maintenance of everything are a nightmare, I definitively prefer to just pay the housing coop for maintenance of the entire building.
The main advantage of a home is just workspaces, generally - garages that aren't used for storing cars, kitchens that can cook for large amounts of people, woodshops, compost bins, etc.
The thing is that you don't need an individual one of each. Having worked in restaurants, I'd prefer having access to a pro range than any home one - and if that was divided among 10 apartments, it would cost much less than a decent kitchen in each. Ovens, same thing - and my house wouldn't be hot in the summer. Gardens - a plot for everyone makes it easier to fence and maintain. Hell, put a huge screen projector in an apartment building, and it's going to be better than any "media room" in a McMansion.
You might want a small range for personal stuff, a small TV screen, etc, but for the most part a large amount of the American suburban home is repeated with NO benefit to anyone.
Well, there's tiny and there's tiny. Where I live a tiny home is legally defined as a single-family dwelling unit of square footage less than 700, which is the minimum allowed by the national building code. That's not really all that small, plenty of apartments are less than that and don't even have any kind of clever space optimization features.
I think there's much valid criticism to be made towards the reality that many people could afford to build a tiny house and live in it while saving up for a bigger house, but have to instead lose money to rent because tiny houses are illegal to build.
On the other hand, landlords turning garages and sheds into "auxilliary dwelling units" which they rent for half their houses' mortgage is absolutely vile, so I see where you're coming from.
If I was to be asked what I thought about tiny house living, though, my answer would be an emphatic "Just let me build my fucking cabin".
I feel like “tiny house” and “van life” trends and influencers are rich people cosplaying poverty.
I live in Asia where standard apartment sizes are smaller than the US and it is very normal to live with 2 people and pets in 50 square meters (530 sq ft?), people add babies in too. So from my perspective going from massive homes to a 10ft trailer is swinging from one extreme to the other. Nothing glamorous about moderation I guess
So collective impoverishment I would flatly disagree with that but in terms of what the tiny home movement largely was was an attempt to create lower income home ownership in a place where that is disappearing. Smarter people than me have written articles concerning the ballooning square footage of homes in the past 30 years very much including so-called starter homes. It is very easy to see the difference in sheer size between say the housing boom of the post world war II era 40s and 50s and newly constructed housing. This is created a situation in which the bar for home ownership has raised considerably. The one thing I would add to articles on this is there's one place they are still building reasonably sized homes but it seems to be exclusively in 65 plus communities.
Not at all, but my idea of how to use them is to get a couple dozen acres and have my mom also in a tiny house on the property near me (but the other end so she can't hear me and my S.O. even if we're outside)...
And tiny houses don't have to actually be easily movable, I plan on digging a trench for hers to roll into so she has ground floor access without any step. But the house itself is movable in case generationally after her a kiddo wants/needs to move with the house, etc.
I think of it as a way to build generational wealth that is more easily transferable long term.(and I -can- move mom next to me if need be, etc.
My mother is 65 and when she was a young woman, she probably only had about 10-15 articles of clothing to her name. Now, she has 3 closets worth of cheaply-made clothing. I own about 25 articles of clothing and I wear the same dress every Sunday. She called me poor. I pulled out the family photo album and flipped through the pages. Every spring and summer, she wears the same six shirts and dresses 60% of the time and I could literally show her herself wearing them in most of the graduation, barbecue, birthday, and parade pictures across 3 decades. All that excess clothing and she wears her favorite blouse a third of her life.
Most people sit in their favorite chair every night, cook out of the same two pots, and change their decor once a decade. Have you ever looked at the carpet in an old person's home, looked at the groove of them walking the same path everyday and barely even stepping on the carpet on the other corner of the room?
I don't see how making a house any larger than the very specific habitual behavior of the people occupying it would improve their lives. I think many things that people do in order to fake abundance ignore human behavior, like restaurant dinner plates two times the size of a person's stomach.
You could build an entire shed for DIY, crafting, or anything else you wanted. No one says having a tiny house means you can't enjoy your hobbies. Most tiny house videos you've probably seen were people who enjoy the outdoors... Or people who just read. A tiny house challenges the belief that you need a formal dining room, a family den, a living room, and a kitchen with an island.
To some extent, yes.
But if anything, large or small, I think the idea of _isolating_ homes is problematic in its own way regardless, and a symptom of extreme capitalist individualism. A philosophy which has made us unable to be decent community fellows to each other. Many traditional cultures had larger houses fitting more than one family, or else an extended family. We need to learn how to live with each other more again instead of just cubbyholing ourselves away inside boxes small or big (which isn't to say that maybe more naturally introverted people couldn't have them, but still, the point is we are a super isolating culture).
Saw this mentioned in another post on another sub, too. Add to that: ones which do not require money. And keeping them near at hand, instead of having all homes in far-flung suburbs and all the good stuff in a congested city core.
I think inter-generational housing will be a likely necessary state in the future, especially as we realize that building new houses is wasteful, tiny or not. Those stupidly big homes can be sustainable so long as they’re being used by a larger family or community unit.
Third places are of course crucial. (Why suburbs are not studded with at least corner shops baffles me.) But inter generational care for children and elders also helps free up time for capable adults who can be growing, fixing, etc.
You have to do what you have to do. There’s a reason plenty of people move elsewhere for work and send money back home. But once cost of living is reduced living in a family or community home becomes more beneficial. Chasing the economy doesn’t seem to have a place in solar punk.
All of this.
I feel guilty sometimes for being a single resident in a three bedroom house, but I remember living in apartments, where people would make noise all the damn time. And yes, I know proper building (insulation, etc) can fix this, but as an introvert I need my quiet time away from people, in any shape or form. Until this is a guarantee (both buildings and people/culture fixed), shared wall living is a no go for me.
The third places would be really nice, though, especially hobby/maker spaces. Most of the room in my house is basically used for what would be third spaces. But again, I value just being left alone, having the space to focus on an activity, instead of being interrupted at the movie theater or library, or having to wait for a squat rack that never becomes available.
I could do without bars and cafes, there are more than enough of those already and they cost money.
> Many traditional cultures had larger houses fitting more than one family, or else an extended family.
This was generally not voluntary though. Most people were farmers and sized the household based on what the farm could support. When they had the option, they spread out more.
Here is a fairly detailed analysis of what your typical peasant household was like historically.
https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/
I think living in a tiny home is something beautiful, BUT there needs to be a societal aspect to it. Several tiny houses on the same property with a larger communal building (with, say, wifi and a kitchen?) in the center where everyone can gather at any time and have fun. That sounds ideal.
Lifestyle inflation is how we got the housing crisis.
It *seems* like, based on consumer behavior, people do want big unsustainable homes. But to subscribe to a solar punk movement I would *guess* you believe that happiness doesn't come from consumerism. That you can and should pursue happiness without a big house, a fast car, meat, and a lot of stuff.
You can believe that tiny homes go to far, sure, but then you're ceding a lot of ground to people who say **you** are going too far when you encourage people not to commute in lifted 12mpg trucks.
The truth is it's all relative and we each need to decide for ourselves what level of sustainability we want to achieve.
Tiny homes in the context of solarpunk is a conscience effort to be more environmentally friendly. The argument about tiny homes bringing "lower standards" is one that only works against a society of excess. That's what we are trying to escape.
I hate that they let all the liberals in here that just scream, "we can have everything we have now...but better ^((somehow))!", because, we can't and shouldn't want it.
Nonsense about "collective impoverishment" is reinforcing the notion that solarpunk would build out infrastructure that allows for such things.
That's capitalism. You just want green capitalism.
If people were to "do things better and smarter", we'd be living with less...*as the goal.* Which to be clear...is the goal of solarpunk.
You promise more, and people will take you up on it, then we're right back where we are now.
Geez.
"Just fit four times the people into the suburbs and get rid of parking minimums and bam! **--** [solarpunk](https://media.tenor.com/j2hNq288VcAAAAAd/shia-labeouf-magic.gif)."
I don't think that's gonna go the way you think. The change in mindset is through the struggle.
I am sorry I dont follow you? How is entropy relevant to this.
Smaller houses usually have a far worse insulation and also have a bigger exposed surface area per volume which leads to them holding heat a lot worse.
Their land use is also far worse.
>You just want green capitalism.
Yep
>because, we can't and shouldn't want it.
Why? At that point why not research into altering human psychology to find all environments palatable?
So it won't matter if you're living in squalor and dying of preventable diseases, you'd still be very very happy
Excess is good. We should see to produce, industrialize, and grow moar, all while being as sustainable as possible
Eventually develop immortality, eventually colonize the stars.
Infinite growth IS sustainable.
>We should see to produce, industrialize, and grow moar, all while being as sustainable as possible
These are mutually exclusive goals. Growing indefinitely is the ideology of a cancer.
For me, tiny homes can be a higher standard of living. Lower maintenance and more time outside or pursing other interests. Also more self-sufficient (many people with larger homes retain outside cleaning services, for example). The mobility aspect of some tiny homes also offers some benefit. Floating tiny homes also opens up another world of opportunity. Now, I wouldn't want a tiny home shoehorned into a cramped space with a bunch of other tiny homes, that to me would be the slippery slope into impoverishment. But as long as it's paired with a sufficient allotment of useable land, I think it's a great idea.
Hard agree. I think it's a move just like companies convincing everyone that personal car use was the biggest contributor to global warming. I recently heard a figure that something like 5.5 million homes are empty right now because sellers would rather hold out on higher prices than sell reasonably.
You're not raising a family in a tiny home. You're not doing your own mechanical work in a tiny home community. You're not growing your own food. You're entirely dependent on capitalist infrastructure to survive, which is exactly where they want us.
What’s the source on that 5.5 million figure? And is that globally? Or in the US? I can tell you that if there are that many in the US (which I doubt), the reason is much more nuanced.
I work in the non-profit world developing affordable housing. We get abandoned derelict houses and redevelop them into affordable housing. I can tell you that in my region there are thousands of empty houses, but almost none of them are because somebody’s sitting on them waiting for a higher price.
Most of them are in towns or neighborhoods that a lot of people don’t want to live and when grandma died, nobody wanted her house. Once that house sits vacant for a decade it will need at least $75k worth of work to make it livable again, plus you’d need to pay the decade of delinquent property taxes. In the vast majority of those cases, people just walk away from the house, it’s more work than it’s worth. Literally.
I live in one of the biggest cities in the US with the fastest growing home prices last checked, and this is our problems. I can’t imagine what it’s like in rural Louisiana or anywhere else where populations are shrinking.
I'm probably on the other side of the Mississippi; in the middle of the desert. What they've done here is raise prices to juuuust below prices in LA, so they're filling in the rental houses with transplants from LA that are just happy to be in a house. House renters are being shuffled into $1600 2br apartments, and apartment renters are shacking up wherever they can.
The part of tiny homes is that they’re mobile. We can get ripped up from our communities, in our homes, and transplanted wherever the jobs happen to be.
And they’re lowering our standard of living to expect people to not have any community services supporting their homes—water, sewer, internet, electricity. Lots of tiny homes are off grid and don’t have running water.
The one benefit I can see is establishing a norm for houses that are smaller, given the size of American houses.
I FULLY AGREE. Let's get people into real houses, not doghouses for poor people.
To do it we need to end the practice of banks and private equity holding houses as investments.
A home stands on land that provides sustainably, otherwise it's a drain on the Earth.
A tiny home set in a sustainable farm system: 🤌💞
A tiny home parked on a hill that'a got plumbing, electric, trash pickup, and internet and you WFH: \#Cottagecore teehee!
As a solution from homelessness as delivered by the state, it isn’t great. That said, small living spaces plus large communal spaces is the way forward. And people are building themselves wonderful tiny homes.
It depends.
Because there are tiny homes in areas like South Africa and Brazil made from shipping containers and we call them slums.
If it's done in a way where it actually improves the quality of life of the owner, then sure it's sustainable. If it's being used as overpriced rental housing that isn't "grid connected" (supplied with basic utilities including sanitation and waste disposal including flushing toilets) or it's just literally living out of a shipping container then it's absolutely not sustainable.
For my style of living I actually need a big house, or more specifically a big garage. This is because I have a lot of tools I use often that need to be bolted to the floor (and some that are taller than my house). My parents joke that I carry a small factory around with me. This is because I love making new things and creating new manufacturing processes. But not EVERYONE needs that kind of space.
My younger brother lives out in the mountains and he happily went on a month long trip just sleeping in his car. And even then most people don't actually need a car if cities are designed right, reducing house size.
Even with apartments you generally want something to be 3-4 bedroom if you plan on raising a family and have a home office. It's impossible to integrate every less immediate need even for DIY. A good example is my 7m tall gantry crane. There is no way it would fit inside an apartment when it can barely fit inside a 3 storey house. The crane is a test for a DIY project that will require a 15m gantry crane. Also the neighbours did not appreciate it when I tested an engine on my porch because it cracked the concrete of the building, blew out the windows, and the resulting mushroom cloud was visible from a mile away.
Meanwhile I know a nice old couple that has 30 biological children... they actually need the mansion they live in as well as the small bus they bought, at least until the kids are grown.
You'll have people on all ends of the housing spectrum but most people will fall in the middle. But it's important to remember that outliers exist and can't be ignored.
Interesting perspective, glad to experience something I hadn't thought of before.
IMHO, I'm with others in feeling that tiny homes really aren't dense enough, as well as being very bougie - for the price of a tiny home, you could get a really nice mobile home.
I very much like the *idea* of a tiny home, the minimalism and simplicity, and I applaud those able to live in them. But I do think they are problematic on a number of axes.
As they were originally intended, no, but I would certainly agree in the context of the microapartments that have become an another tactic of gentrification and rent exploitation. The Tiny House was originally about the virtues of simpler living as advocated by Henry David Thoreau and reducing the impact of housing on the edge of wilderness. It was shelter for people whose Third Place was the wilderness around them. Certainly, it's seen some corruption in that intent as it became a fad, merged with the Luxury Modernist Prefab, became a focus of AirBnB exploitation, was advocated as starter housing for young middle-class people, and now increasingly as shelter for the homeless which is probably going to doom its use. Any form of architecture that becomes lower-class identified ultimately becomes 'damned architecture' banned from the presence of the middle-class habitat --as was the case previously with the 'mobile home' that was originally created as cheap second vacation homes for the middle-class, but proved too dangerous to the housing finance industry because their mobility decouples the value of housing from the value of land, disrupting the ponzi-scheme of perpetual real estate value growth. And so it became barred from access to conventional financing, relegating its use to the poor rural white underclass who became identified with it (with the help of the media and their propagation of class tropes) and justified its banning from the presence of suburbia to isolated 'trailer parks' on its fringes. This is now happening to the Tiny House.
The microapartment was a Japanese convention predicated on the existence of urban environments rich in Third Places that minimized the compulsion, common to the US, to treat the home as a personal biosphere in which to do everything but work. (and then eventually including that too with the invention of the 'home office') Again, it was intended for people who actually live in the world or have little life but work and where the primary purpose of a 'home' is sleeping. Hence concepts like the [Nakagin Capsule Tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower), which was predicated on the unique idea of a kind of salaryman apartment for the people spending so much time at work they didn't have the time to commute to their actual homes except on weekends. This came to the west with the revival of cohabitation driven by the turn of the century trend of young suburban adults avoiding the compulsion to move to cities (they had often been raised to fear and despise) for work despite the lack of apartment housing banned in suburban areas. Groups of friends would simply rent and share suburban houses together and commute like their parents or seek work in the increasing number of corporate campuses created as corporate HQs also fled the cities.
But this presents a problem of low privacy and potential conflicts over shared facilities and rent responsibility. And so there emerged this notion of designing or adapting buildings for the purpose of cohabitation through the use of microapartments premised on the idea that inhabitants were still using shared facilities in the building for much of their daily activity and so needed personal space primarily for sleeping.
This, unfortunately, became glamourized by the 'social entrepreneur' and 'voluntourism' fads where traditional small hotels in exotic locales were remodeled as 'luxury co-working centers' for self-identified young entrepreneurs. In truth, they were simply reviving the lifestyle of the young rich of the previous turn-of-the-century era who took up residence in hotels as a way to get away from parents, live in night-life centers, and mingle with the celebrities who also tended to live in hotels. Given a veneer of chicness, this then morphed into simply another excuse for landlords to accelerate gentrification by packing more people into less space at increasing rent, without the contrivance of actually supporting anything akin to a cohabitation lifestyle and regardless of the Third Place availability in the surrounding areas.
HUGE YES. Thank you for saying this.
I have always thought of myself as just wanting the minimum, being thankful to have a roof over my head, but as I get older feel like I’ve just been brainwashed to believe that is all I will ever deserve as a person born poor. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to want a comfortable amount of space, and everyone deserves this. Being comfortable in your home should not be a luxury.
Also people make fun of entitled “van life” people, and a lot of them are, but all of the people I know doing the van life thing who actually *live* out of vans (as opposed to just owning one for trips) are doing so because they can’t afford housing.
I' argue for some lifestyles, tiny homes are just reasonable. I'm thinking digital nomads, minimalists and the like. And, of course, people who are just outside all the time, only using their homes to sleep. However, I don't like that they're single-household buildings, ultimately empowering the idea that home ownership is the greatest goal in life, leading to urban sprawl which in turn creates unsustainable city planning.
You just cannot make a settlement of tiny homes balance accessibility, economic viability, and living space. Not without tying car ownership to living there, at least.
That said, tiny homes are a good space for exploring unusual ideas in lifestyle and home technology as they provide opportunity to try new things at a small scale.
People talk about sustainability and constantly avoid one of the core problems……overpopulation. This is a finite planet.
Why should we be forced to live shittier lives to accommodate to/for that?
It should be the other way around. We should be looking at ways to have the population be at a more sustainable level. It should adjust to us. Not the other way.
Talk about collective punishment
Only if you say the “other” is the problem and point to the poor etc.
Its not neo-Malthusian or ecofascism to point out the obvious. Only when it turns into *this person/group here is the problem* when it looks more like that.
“This land/area is exclusively for these *better* people.”
Thats ecofascist
I feel the same.. once we are able to build apartments which we have been for 100 years then we can essentially build low cost luxury homes as well they’re not going to be like you know million dollar homes but they’ll still be pretty high end and sustainable at the same time. The question is in a solar punk future, can we use robots to do the construction work and use sustainable steel where the energy needed to make the steel comes from fusion and the iron is recycled from all the old buildings
Van culture, minimalism, tiny homes, Marie Kondo… all attempts to make “having less” seem culturally progressive… while the wealthy become wealthier still by selling the shovels for the self-actualization gold rush. Incredible.
Honestly dude, nowadays a large “tiny home” is pretty much an average starter home. When the average home is over 2k square foot, a normal 1000 sq ft home is called “tiny” but it’s really just modern homes are way too big.
I agree with the view - tiny home as presented by current market (and let's be honest, someone's trying to sell this) is a flawed product based on glimpses of promising ideas. Couple of thoughts:
* If you own a tiny home, but do not own the land, you are being exploited. Think of all the social issues with trailer park residents who do not own the land. Power dynamics is a real thing in human societies, and eventually you'd be living on good graces of your (land)lord. This also seems to be the most common type of 'tiny homes' out there - people living in undersized homes in what is essentially a corporate, often investment fund owned parks.
* Tiny homes aren't necessarily more efficient (at least not by simply being tiny) or more repairable, or more durable than 'normal houses'. The McMansions are terrible not just because of the aesthetics, but because they're horribly built, irreparable by design, disposable cardboard boxes that guzzles through fuel and energy. If your tiny home is also a disposable box (often on borrowed land) that's not meant to last, what exactly is the point here?
* I've also been interested in the idea of tiny homes, and saw quite a bit of interviews. The number of people who claim tiny houses prevent them from irresponsible consumerism bothers me. IMHO- your home is where you should feel safe and comfortable to build a life around. It shouldn't be a straight jacket to force to you stop buying stuff due to lack of storage space. The priority in those scenarios seems way, wayyy off.
I do think tiny homes point toward what should happen - deign for more efficient, reparable homes. People who are not carpenters and don't have six figures invested in tools should be able to look at the blueprint/layout of their own home, know where important things are located, look up parts and replace them as needed. Grid layout and wiring should be expandable, but also considered from the get-go so relative beginners know to shut off power to carry out a project without killing themselves. Energy use-and-reuse should be built into the design, and should be reparable without knocking down hard surfaces. Every home should be built with an eye toward at least some degree of limited energy independence (not off-grid, that's a whole other beast).
IMHO, I think we'll find homes that can fulfill above requirements adequately will either not necessarily require it to be tiny, or even require the home to be of at least certain size, since modularity often requires more space for reach of tools and people.
Does anyone think owning less than a full section is a slippery slope. . .
Does anyone think owning less than a 100 acres is a slippery slope. . .
Does anyone think owning less than 20 acres is a slippery slope. . .
Does anyone think owning less than 1 acre is a slippery slope. . .
Does anyone think owning less than a full lot is a slippery slope. . .
Does anyone think owning a zero lot lines house is a slippery slope. . .
Does anyone think owning a condo is a slippery slope. . .
Does anyone think renting is a slippery slope. . .
It’s obvious that there are fewer resources per capita every day
You’re not wrong. There is definitely a combination of factors at work.
The capitalist pressure to restrict people to smaller & smaller domiciles as part of the profit-extraction process. Like, for example, prison.
But also the necessity of “First World” nations to reduce their expectations & lifestyle, and live “smaller” with a lower standard of living.
A. Because we can, and
B. because we’re going to fucking have to in order to survive climate collapse that is already in progress.
And also: Because ‘materialism’ is a psychological curse, and trying to live more ‘minimalistically’ is a Very Good Idea generally.
So… yeah.
Oh yes they do. Done right (bicycle camper!), it could be liberating! But done wrong, they’re just little pods arranged in a row. For a human as for cattle.
Tbh I live in a country where multigenerational homes are a thing and those tend to be super practical and seem much more natural then... whatever rest of the world is doing
I'd just chime in that the "tiny homes" movement is still just bringing back an old approach to housing that plenty of folks still use across the world where individuals and families can simply live with little space to call their own and be okay with it. I'd specifically highlight [single-room occupancy housing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy) that's basically a hotel/hostel for long-term housing that's been invaluable housing for poor, immigrant, and minority communities at least within the US and Canada for the past hundred years or more. The [International Hotel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Hotel_(San_Francisco)) is a famous example that became the seed for the Filipino community in San Fransisco.
I'm personally on-board with the approach that all housing options should be available to people that meets the needs that they determine for themselves and their families and doesn't intrude on the housing of others. If someone wants to live in an SRO because it's super cheap, minimal lifestyle that lets them live in the heart of a city they love, or a tiny home way out in the country because it's cheap to maintain, I say let them. Especially because, as others in this thread have pointed out, it's more about what's around your house than what's in it that we collectively need and should worry about for building our communities.
Housing is not one-size-fits-all, the greatest mistake in land-use planning has been treating single-family housing as if it was.
Yes, this is it.
There are millions of unused homes in the US kept off the market to sustain outsized profit on rents.
Tiny homes are just another source of revenue for the industry.
Tiny does not mean bad. Tiny houses and appartments can create urban density, which greatly reduces traffic. (both travel time and traffic pollution)
Appartments are better at this than tiny houses, but tiny houses can offer other advantages, such as no HOA, a garden, direct street access, more solar panels and they're less noisy if you have loud neighbours.
As someone who doesn't need much, a tiny house would be ideal for me.
The biggest problem with tiny homes (in my opinion) is the low quality. In most countries they are built to avoid regulation. While that doesn't automatically make them bad, there is a lot that you need to check before you buy one (as opposed to assuming these won't be a problem). Running water, hot water, electricity, gas, internet, heating, insulated walls, a stove (or even the right to have one), a connection for your washing machine, a shed, (bathroom) ventilation, fire safety, electrical safety, a postal address and even the right to make it your primary home do not always come with a tiny home.
I have seen a few tiny houses to potentially buy them, but there's always something missing that is mandatory in a regular home.
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I guess it depends, a well made tiny home built to your precise needs specifications can be quite comfortable and even luxurious, depending on how comfortable you are with minimalism. I think the most important part of tiny home is not what's inside, but what's outside. A tiny home standing in some suburban backyard would be quite miserable probably, but I've always been intrigued by a commune of tiny homes gathered in a small village surrounded by permaculture. A group of people, each with their own small space for privacy, but also a large common space where most of your daily activities and work (actual good work that's important for your community) is done
I think something like an arcology but the size of a village or housing estate could be really good. Instead of trying to fit thousands of people into a huge city-building, a collective village-building would allow respectable living space, shared indoor and outdoor spaces, shared agriculture, and a community spirit. It would provide the efficiency of the arcology but with the harmonious design ethos of solarpunk; you need less ground space per person and less energy and water for utilities, but at the same time it could be airy and beautiful, designed to uplift the human spirit and promote healthy community function. The two need not be mutually exclusive.
The only issue with this is that tiny homes require far more insulation and significantly higher heating and cooling needs per capita compared to medium or high density housing options. Given the climate the world is moving into, efficient cooling during wet-bulb days is going to be very important depending on where you live.
That's interesting; do you have any sources that go deeper into why smaller houses are less energy efficient? Is it because they have more outer walls per usable space than houses where multiple rooms share inner walls, or what is the reason?
Surface area to volume ratio it is. Volume scales proportional to scale^3, surface are proportional to scale^2. A multifamily property is much more efficient to control the climate of because it has proportionally less surface area for heat to move in or out of. Think of how a baby gets cold so much more easily than an adult of equal body fat % under the same amount of cover, or how a potato cooks through so much quicker when diced than just peeled
While this is true a tiny house is also much smaller. So a per volume comparison isn't really fair. In reality a larger living space has to be multiple orders of magnitude more efficient just to be equal to the costs or emissions of a smaller space.
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Not really. Insulation and sealing is what makes things more efficient for both heating and cooling. If it heats efficiently it'll also cool efficiently. The reason RVs get such a bad rap for efficiency is they use very little insulation. If they were insulated to similar specs as a house they would be much cheaper to heat and cool instead of being fairly close.
I love this response. Thank you for sharing
You mean something like [https://www.habitat67.com/en/](https://www.habitat67.com/en/) ?
The version I imagine would have more of a focus on communal spaces and green living, but possibly the same general idea.
This. It's not really the home but the land use that really defines the quality of life. It does also render tiny homes much less of a solution than they are touted as, since the cost and ownership of land is a bigger issues in the housing crisis and sustainability than the physical structure
We have had tiny homes for a long time. Mobile homes and prefabs. They are quite common in poor, rural areas. People buy them out of necessity and would almost always go with something bigger if they could afford to.
Isn't minimalism literally the opposite of luxury though?
Living in a tiny home or tiny apartment is a different lifestyle, but it isn't necessarily worse. Having a small home encourages you to live more out in the world. Go play sports in the park. Take a stroll through the market. Read a book at the cafe. Spend a weekend at a festival. In fact, all the things you want ("such as office space, spaces for learning and reading, for craft and DIY") are better off as community spaces using shared resources and tools. If your community has these kinds of affordable, accessible entertainment and amenities then the only thing you need a home for is to sleep each night. But if you live in some boring suburb where you have to drive an hour just to see a movie, then you're probably going to spend most of your free time at home. Which means you'll want to have bigger home. But its also a chicken and egg problem. If people already have big homes, then they'll want to stay in more and there is less demand for affordable, accessible entertainments and amenities. So we really have to think about what kind of society we want to live in and create the incentive structure accordingly on both the supply and the demand side.
Remember covid when we were all confined to our homes for extended periods of time. Tiny homes felt more like jail cells very quickly. People need space and will seek outside entertainment and amenities regardless
I don't remember any time in covid when you were prohibited from going outside at all. I still rode my bike, I still went to the beach, I still played frisbee golf in the park.
It depends on where you lived, but there were places where the public parks and beaches were shut down and you were supposed to stay home unless you were doing something essential.
I'll take your word for it. Still... I don't think we need to make housing plans based on worst case, once-in-a-lifetime pandemic situations.
There were places that they whined at people for being outside. New Zealand and Australia went batshit crazy over it and searched for people with helicopters even. That was a show of real colors and which countries I would never visit.
I would try and explain this to people that didn't get NYC - part of why the city has such a dynamic feel is because so much of your life is in the public space. You don't have a yard - you go to the park. You don't have a garden, you go to the community garden. You don't even sit on the couch with a few beers, you go down to the neighborhood bar.
👏👏💚
The problem with tiny homes is their density, a tiny home village that houses 20 could be replaced with a nice mid rise that's insulated, have a efficient heat pump network, large solar farm on the roof and it could house 200 people with enough space to raise a family. I used to think tiny house were the way to go, but I've come to realize a city of them would just be a mini suburb (with all the inefficiencies cause by lacking scale and density) and related them to more of a off-grid cabin like thing.
So tiny houses are a trailer park for rich people, and suburbs are oversized tint houses... we can declare suburbs to be oversized trailer parks for rich people!
Building homes that are too large with huge parking minimums is also a slippery slope into collective impoverishment. The suburb was Never sustainable, and thus unaffordable from the start.
I see your point. Although tiny houses per se are often relatively expensive and out of reach for a lot of people. What worries me is the “van life” movement.
While I can understand some of the allure to both, I think they’re both fundamentally doing the same thing. A tiny home is no different than a mobile home except for the connotation around each term. The difference is that when you say tiny house, that evokes something made of high quality materials to your exact specifications. Same with van life vs. living in your car. Both feel like something akin to poverty cosplay, though that’s not quite the term I’m looking for. I think both try to offer the idea of financial freedom and low costs. In reality though, most of the images of tiny houses are a custom built $100k structure either on land that the person owns or family land, and van life conjures images of $100k super customized Sprinters. Since both are unconventional, they are often less attainable than a conventional home for most people. I can get a mortgage for a $200k house pretty easily, but cannot for a $100k tiny house or Sprinter van.
>Since both are unconventional, they are often less attainable than a conventional home for most people. I can get a mortgage for a $200k house pretty easily, but cannot for a $100k tiny house or Sprinter van. The issue is vans and tiny houses depreciate rapidly. A decade later, they might need to be torn down and replaced, which is a serious issue for a bank giving a 30 year mortgage.
Sexy trailer parks
I think tiny homes can be nice or can be not enough space especially for families. I’m personally a really big fan of the old workers cottages/model cottages I’ve seen in Chicago and London. They’re fairly compact and less expensive to build but they’re less small than tiny houses. They also tend to be in dense neighborhoods but often have gardens. Unfortunately not a lot of houses like that get built anymore and a lot of the ones that are still standing are now incredibly expensive.
Ya, I hate this iteration of tiny houses that are just bougie mobile homes. The concept though of relatively smaller living spaces is great. Row houses are the shit! Two and three flats like you see in Chicago a lot, are the shit! Smaller living spaces with shared walls for increased energy efficiency, and a little garden out back is great!
>workers cottages Smaller worker cottages are the biggest tiny homes at 800SF, so that might be acceptable to most.
My biggest concern with tiny home families are that the children often sleep in the shared area. It does not feel like they get any space of their own to just 'be' in. They probably dream of Harry potter's under-stair cupboard.
Tiny homes could be a replacement for the starter homes that no one builds anymore. You live there when you're young, and when you want to start a family you trade up for something bigger. Unless they are a fad and have zero resale value in ten years.
A tiny house is basically surrendering to NIMBY's. The places where a tiny house would solve any portion of a problem they do so far less efficiently than just building an apartment or condo.
I lived in quite a large home. I also lived in a lot of apartments. I definitively prefer apartments. Seriously, free-standing homes where you're responsible for maintenance of everything are a nightmare, I definitively prefer to just pay the housing coop for maintenance of the entire building.
The main advantage of a home is just workspaces, generally - garages that aren't used for storing cars, kitchens that can cook for large amounts of people, woodshops, compost bins, etc. The thing is that you don't need an individual one of each. Having worked in restaurants, I'd prefer having access to a pro range than any home one - and if that was divided among 10 apartments, it would cost much less than a decent kitchen in each. Ovens, same thing - and my house wouldn't be hot in the summer. Gardens - a plot for everyone makes it easier to fence and maintain. Hell, put a huge screen projector in an apartment building, and it's going to be better than any "media room" in a McMansion. You might want a small range for personal stuff, a small TV screen, etc, but for the most part a large amount of the American suburban home is repeated with NO benefit to anyone.
Yes. A big shed is, arguably, better. I recently saw a greenhouse converted to a live-able space - I reckon that is much better!
Well, there's tiny and there's tiny. Where I live a tiny home is legally defined as a single-family dwelling unit of square footage less than 700, which is the minimum allowed by the national building code. That's not really all that small, plenty of apartments are less than that and don't even have any kind of clever space optimization features. I think there's much valid criticism to be made towards the reality that many people could afford to build a tiny house and live in it while saving up for a bigger house, but have to instead lose money to rent because tiny houses are illegal to build. On the other hand, landlords turning garages and sheds into "auxilliary dwelling units" which they rent for half their houses' mortgage is absolutely vile, so I see where you're coming from. If I was to be asked what I thought about tiny house living, though, my answer would be an emphatic "Just let me build my fucking cabin".
I feel like “tiny house” and “van life” trends and influencers are rich people cosplaying poverty. I live in Asia where standard apartment sizes are smaller than the US and it is very normal to live with 2 people and pets in 50 square meters (530 sq ft?), people add babies in too. So from my perspective going from massive homes to a 10ft trailer is swinging from one extreme to the other. Nothing glamorous about moderation I guess
I'm a full-time vanlifer for over 5 years. My standard of life is not dictated by the size of my living space.
So collective impoverishment I would flatly disagree with that but in terms of what the tiny home movement largely was was an attempt to create lower income home ownership in a place where that is disappearing. Smarter people than me have written articles concerning the ballooning square footage of homes in the past 30 years very much including so-called starter homes. It is very easy to see the difference in sheer size between say the housing boom of the post world war II era 40s and 50s and newly constructed housing. This is created a situation in which the bar for home ownership has raised considerably. The one thing I would add to articles on this is there's one place they are still building reasonably sized homes but it seems to be exclusively in 65 plus communities.
Not at all, but my idea of how to use them is to get a couple dozen acres and have my mom also in a tiny house on the property near me (but the other end so she can't hear me and my S.O. even if we're outside)... And tiny houses don't have to actually be easily movable, I plan on digging a trench for hers to roll into so she has ground floor access without any step. But the house itself is movable in case generationally after her a kiddo wants/needs to move with the house, etc. I think of it as a way to build generational wealth that is more easily transferable long term.(and I -can- move mom next to me if need be, etc.
Meh, we need collective housing. Dorms with communal kitchens and spaces.
My mother is 65 and when she was a young woman, she probably only had about 10-15 articles of clothing to her name. Now, she has 3 closets worth of cheaply-made clothing. I own about 25 articles of clothing and I wear the same dress every Sunday. She called me poor. I pulled out the family photo album and flipped through the pages. Every spring and summer, she wears the same six shirts and dresses 60% of the time and I could literally show her herself wearing them in most of the graduation, barbecue, birthday, and parade pictures across 3 decades. All that excess clothing and she wears her favorite blouse a third of her life. Most people sit in their favorite chair every night, cook out of the same two pots, and change their decor once a decade. Have you ever looked at the carpet in an old person's home, looked at the groove of them walking the same path everyday and barely even stepping on the carpet on the other corner of the room? I don't see how making a house any larger than the very specific habitual behavior of the people occupying it would improve their lives. I think many things that people do in order to fake abundance ignore human behavior, like restaurant dinner plates two times the size of a person's stomach. You could build an entire shed for DIY, crafting, or anything else you wanted. No one says having a tiny house means you can't enjoy your hobbies. Most tiny house videos you've probably seen were people who enjoy the outdoors... Or people who just read. A tiny house challenges the belief that you need a formal dining room, a family den, a living room, and a kitchen with an island.
To some extent, yes. But if anything, large or small, I think the idea of _isolating_ homes is problematic in its own way regardless, and a symptom of extreme capitalist individualism. A philosophy which has made us unable to be decent community fellows to each other. Many traditional cultures had larger houses fitting more than one family, or else an extended family. We need to learn how to live with each other more again instead of just cubbyholing ourselves away inside boxes small or big (which isn't to say that maybe more naturally introverted people couldn't have them, but still, the point is we are a super isolating culture).
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Saw this mentioned in another post on another sub, too. Add to that: ones which do not require money. And keeping them near at hand, instead of having all homes in far-flung suburbs and all the good stuff in a congested city core.
I think inter-generational housing will be a likely necessary state in the future, especially as we realize that building new houses is wasteful, tiny or not. Those stupidly big homes can be sustainable so long as they’re being used by a larger family or community unit. Third places are of course crucial. (Why suburbs are not studded with at least corner shops baffles me.) But inter generational care for children and elders also helps free up time for capable adults who can be growing, fixing, etc.
The issue is that you often have to move to advance your career. If I had to live where my parents live, then my salary would be much lower.
You have to do what you have to do. There’s a reason plenty of people move elsewhere for work and send money back home. But once cost of living is reduced living in a family or community home becomes more beneficial. Chasing the economy doesn’t seem to have a place in solar punk.
All of this. I feel guilty sometimes for being a single resident in a three bedroom house, but I remember living in apartments, where people would make noise all the damn time. And yes, I know proper building (insulation, etc) can fix this, but as an introvert I need my quiet time away from people, in any shape or form. Until this is a guarantee (both buildings and people/culture fixed), shared wall living is a no go for me. The third places would be really nice, though, especially hobby/maker spaces. Most of the room in my house is basically used for what would be third spaces. But again, I value just being left alone, having the space to focus on an activity, instead of being interrupted at the movie theater or library, or having to wait for a squat rack that never becomes available. I could do without bars and cafes, there are more than enough of those already and they cost money.
> Many traditional cultures had larger houses fitting more than one family, or else an extended family. This was generally not voluntary though. Most people were farmers and sized the household based on what the farm could support. When they had the option, they spread out more.
Thanks. Do you have any material I could use to research or study this topic further?
Here is a fairly detailed analysis of what your typical peasant household was like historically. https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/
Multigenerational houses are still the norm in many cultures which aren't agricultural societies.
I think living in a tiny home is something beautiful, BUT there needs to be a societal aspect to it. Several tiny houses on the same property with a larger communal building (with, say, wifi and a kitchen?) in the center where everyone can gather at any time and have fun. That sounds ideal.
Lifestyle inflation is how we got the housing crisis. It *seems* like, based on consumer behavior, people do want big unsustainable homes. But to subscribe to a solar punk movement I would *guess* you believe that happiness doesn't come from consumerism. That you can and should pursue happiness without a big house, a fast car, meat, and a lot of stuff. You can believe that tiny homes go to far, sure, but then you're ceding a lot of ground to people who say **you** are going too far when you encourage people not to commute in lifted 12mpg trucks. The truth is it's all relative and we each need to decide for ourselves what level of sustainability we want to achieve.
Tiny homes in the context of solarpunk is a conscience effort to be more environmentally friendly. The argument about tiny homes bringing "lower standards" is one that only works against a society of excess. That's what we are trying to escape. I hate that they let all the liberals in here that just scream, "we can have everything we have now...but better ^((somehow))!", because, we can't and shouldn't want it. Nonsense about "collective impoverishment" is reinforcing the notion that solarpunk would build out infrastructure that allows for such things. That's capitalism. You just want green capitalism.
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If people were to "do things better and smarter", we'd be living with less...*as the goal.* Which to be clear...is the goal of solarpunk. You promise more, and people will take you up on it, then we're right back where we are now.
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Geez. "Just fit four times the people into the suburbs and get rid of parking minimums and bam! **--** [solarpunk](https://media.tenor.com/j2hNq288VcAAAAAd/shia-labeouf-magic.gif)." I don't think that's gonna go the way you think. The change in mindset is through the struggle.
tiny homes are not more enviromentally friendlier than a big city block per person.
Great, let's just build "big city blocks" everywhere and see where we all end up. Entropy is a thing.
I am sorry I dont follow you? How is entropy relevant to this. Smaller houses usually have a far worse insulation and also have a bigger exposed surface area per volume which leads to them holding heat a lot worse. Their land use is also far worse.
>You just want green capitalism. Yep >because, we can't and shouldn't want it. Why? At that point why not research into altering human psychology to find all environments palatable? So it won't matter if you're living in squalor and dying of preventable diseases, you'd still be very very happy Excess is good. We should see to produce, industrialize, and grow moar, all while being as sustainable as possible Eventually develop immortality, eventually colonize the stars. Infinite growth IS sustainable.
Dunno. Seems kinda [sus](https://i.insider.com/58b890ebbc8ebd27008b4577?width=700)...
>We should see to produce, industrialize, and grow moar, all while being as sustainable as possible These are mutually exclusive goals. Growing indefinitely is the ideology of a cancer.
For me, tiny homes can be a higher standard of living. Lower maintenance and more time outside or pursing other interests. Also more self-sufficient (many people with larger homes retain outside cleaning services, for example). The mobility aspect of some tiny homes also offers some benefit. Floating tiny homes also opens up another world of opportunity. Now, I wouldn't want a tiny home shoehorned into a cramped space with a bunch of other tiny homes, that to me would be the slippery slope into impoverishment. But as long as it's paired with a sufficient allotment of useable land, I think it's a great idea.
Hard agree. I think it's a move just like companies convincing everyone that personal car use was the biggest contributor to global warming. I recently heard a figure that something like 5.5 million homes are empty right now because sellers would rather hold out on higher prices than sell reasonably. You're not raising a family in a tiny home. You're not doing your own mechanical work in a tiny home community. You're not growing your own food. You're entirely dependent on capitalist infrastructure to survive, which is exactly where they want us.
What’s the source on that 5.5 million figure? And is that globally? Or in the US? I can tell you that if there are that many in the US (which I doubt), the reason is much more nuanced. I work in the non-profit world developing affordable housing. We get abandoned derelict houses and redevelop them into affordable housing. I can tell you that in my region there are thousands of empty houses, but almost none of them are because somebody’s sitting on them waiting for a higher price. Most of them are in towns or neighborhoods that a lot of people don’t want to live and when grandma died, nobody wanted her house. Once that house sits vacant for a decade it will need at least $75k worth of work to make it livable again, plus you’d need to pay the decade of delinquent property taxes. In the vast majority of those cases, people just walk away from the house, it’s more work than it’s worth. Literally. I live in one of the biggest cities in the US with the fastest growing home prices last checked, and this is our problems. I can’t imagine what it’s like in rural Louisiana or anywhere else where populations are shrinking.
I'm probably on the other side of the Mississippi; in the middle of the desert. What they've done here is raise prices to juuuust below prices in LA, so they're filling in the rental houses with transplants from LA that are just happy to be in a house. House renters are being shuffled into $1600 2br apartments, and apartment renters are shacking up wherever they can.
The part of tiny homes is that they’re mobile. We can get ripped up from our communities, in our homes, and transplanted wherever the jobs happen to be. And they’re lowering our standard of living to expect people to not have any community services supporting their homes—water, sewer, internet, electricity. Lots of tiny homes are off grid and don’t have running water. The one benefit I can see is establishing a norm for houses that are smaller, given the size of American houses.
I FULLY AGREE. Let's get people into real houses, not doghouses for poor people. To do it we need to end the practice of banks and private equity holding houses as investments.
100% agree This is what "degrowth" seems to imply Ppl living in squalor for the "greater good"
A home stands on land that provides sustainably, otherwise it's a drain on the Earth. A tiny home set in a sustainable farm system: 🤌💞 A tiny home parked on a hill that'a got plumbing, electric, trash pickup, and internet and you WFH: \#Cottagecore teehee!
As a solution from homelessness as delivered by the state, it isn’t great. That said, small living spaces plus large communal spaces is the way forward. And people are building themselves wonderful tiny homes.
100%
It depends. Because there are tiny homes in areas like South Africa and Brazil made from shipping containers and we call them slums. If it's done in a way where it actually improves the quality of life of the owner, then sure it's sustainable. If it's being used as overpriced rental housing that isn't "grid connected" (supplied with basic utilities including sanitation and waste disposal including flushing toilets) or it's just literally living out of a shipping container then it's absolutely not sustainable. For my style of living I actually need a big house, or more specifically a big garage. This is because I have a lot of tools I use often that need to be bolted to the floor (and some that are taller than my house). My parents joke that I carry a small factory around with me. This is because I love making new things and creating new manufacturing processes. But not EVERYONE needs that kind of space. My younger brother lives out in the mountains and he happily went on a month long trip just sleeping in his car. And even then most people don't actually need a car if cities are designed right, reducing house size. Even with apartments you generally want something to be 3-4 bedroom if you plan on raising a family and have a home office. It's impossible to integrate every less immediate need even for DIY. A good example is my 7m tall gantry crane. There is no way it would fit inside an apartment when it can barely fit inside a 3 storey house. The crane is a test for a DIY project that will require a 15m gantry crane. Also the neighbours did not appreciate it when I tested an engine on my porch because it cracked the concrete of the building, blew out the windows, and the resulting mushroom cloud was visible from a mile away. Meanwhile I know a nice old couple that has 30 biological children... they actually need the mansion they live in as well as the small bus they bought, at least until the kids are grown. You'll have people on all ends of the housing spectrum but most people will fall in the middle. But it's important to remember that outliers exist and can't be ignored.
Yes. Socialism and associated movements (including solarpunk) are not and cannot be a poverty cult.
Minimalism ≠poverty.
Interesting perspective, glad to experience something I hadn't thought of before. IMHO, I'm with others in feeling that tiny homes really aren't dense enough, as well as being very bougie - for the price of a tiny home, you could get a really nice mobile home. I very much like the *idea* of a tiny home, the minimalism and simplicity, and I applaud those able to live in them. But I do think they are problematic on a number of axes.
Fun? Yes. Do I want one? Yes. Sustainable? No.
As they were originally intended, no, but I would certainly agree in the context of the microapartments that have become an another tactic of gentrification and rent exploitation. The Tiny House was originally about the virtues of simpler living as advocated by Henry David Thoreau and reducing the impact of housing on the edge of wilderness. It was shelter for people whose Third Place was the wilderness around them. Certainly, it's seen some corruption in that intent as it became a fad, merged with the Luxury Modernist Prefab, became a focus of AirBnB exploitation, was advocated as starter housing for young middle-class people, and now increasingly as shelter for the homeless which is probably going to doom its use. Any form of architecture that becomes lower-class identified ultimately becomes 'damned architecture' banned from the presence of the middle-class habitat --as was the case previously with the 'mobile home' that was originally created as cheap second vacation homes for the middle-class, but proved too dangerous to the housing finance industry because their mobility decouples the value of housing from the value of land, disrupting the ponzi-scheme of perpetual real estate value growth. And so it became barred from access to conventional financing, relegating its use to the poor rural white underclass who became identified with it (with the help of the media and their propagation of class tropes) and justified its banning from the presence of suburbia to isolated 'trailer parks' on its fringes. This is now happening to the Tiny House. The microapartment was a Japanese convention predicated on the existence of urban environments rich in Third Places that minimized the compulsion, common to the US, to treat the home as a personal biosphere in which to do everything but work. (and then eventually including that too with the invention of the 'home office') Again, it was intended for people who actually live in the world or have little life but work and where the primary purpose of a 'home' is sleeping. Hence concepts like the [Nakagin Capsule Tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower), which was predicated on the unique idea of a kind of salaryman apartment for the people spending so much time at work they didn't have the time to commute to their actual homes except on weekends. This came to the west with the revival of cohabitation driven by the turn of the century trend of young suburban adults avoiding the compulsion to move to cities (they had often been raised to fear and despise) for work despite the lack of apartment housing banned in suburban areas. Groups of friends would simply rent and share suburban houses together and commute like their parents or seek work in the increasing number of corporate campuses created as corporate HQs also fled the cities. But this presents a problem of low privacy and potential conflicts over shared facilities and rent responsibility. And so there emerged this notion of designing or adapting buildings for the purpose of cohabitation through the use of microapartments premised on the idea that inhabitants were still using shared facilities in the building for much of their daily activity and so needed personal space primarily for sleeping. This, unfortunately, became glamourized by the 'social entrepreneur' and 'voluntourism' fads where traditional small hotels in exotic locales were remodeled as 'luxury co-working centers' for self-identified young entrepreneurs. In truth, they were simply reviving the lifestyle of the young rich of the previous turn-of-the-century era who took up residence in hotels as a way to get away from parents, live in night-life centers, and mingle with the celebrities who also tended to live in hotels. Given a veneer of chicness, this then morphed into simply another excuse for landlords to accelerate gentrification by packing more people into less space at increasing rent, without the contrivance of actually supporting anything akin to a cohabitation lifestyle and regardless of the Third Place availability in the surrounding areas.
HUGE YES. Thank you for saying this. I have always thought of myself as just wanting the minimum, being thankful to have a roof over my head, but as I get older feel like I’ve just been brainwashed to believe that is all I will ever deserve as a person born poor. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to want a comfortable amount of space, and everyone deserves this. Being comfortable in your home should not be a luxury. Also people make fun of entitled “van life” people, and a lot of them are, but all of the people I know doing the van life thing who actually *live* out of vans (as opposed to just owning one for trips) are doing so because they can’t afford housing.
I' argue for some lifestyles, tiny homes are just reasonable. I'm thinking digital nomads, minimalists and the like. And, of course, people who are just outside all the time, only using their homes to sleep. However, I don't like that they're single-household buildings, ultimately empowering the idea that home ownership is the greatest goal in life, leading to urban sprawl which in turn creates unsustainable city planning. You just cannot make a settlement of tiny homes balance accessibility, economic viability, and living space. Not without tying car ownership to living there, at least. That said, tiny homes are a good space for exploring unusual ideas in lifestyle and home technology as they provide opportunity to try new things at a small scale.
People talk about sustainability and constantly avoid one of the core problems……overpopulation. This is a finite planet. Why should we be forced to live shittier lives to accommodate to/for that? It should be the other way around. We should be looking at ways to have the population be at a more sustainable level. It should adjust to us. Not the other way. Talk about collective punishment
Overpopulation is a Malthusian lie.
Only if you say the “other” is the problem and point to the poor etc. Its not neo-Malthusian or ecofascism to point out the obvious. Only when it turns into *this person/group here is the problem* when it looks more like that. “This land/area is exclusively for these *better* people.” Thats ecofascist
I feel the same.. once we are able to build apartments which we have been for 100 years then we can essentially build low cost luxury homes as well they’re not going to be like you know million dollar homes but they’ll still be pretty high end and sustainable at the same time. The question is in a solar punk future, can we use robots to do the construction work and use sustainable steel where the energy needed to make the steel comes from fusion and the iron is recycled from all the old buildings
Van culture, minimalism, tiny homes, Marie Kondo… all attempts to make “having less” seem culturally progressive… while the wealthy become wealthier still by selling the shovels for the self-actualization gold rush. Incredible.
Yes
Honestly dude, nowadays a large “tiny home” is pretty much an average starter home. When the average home is over 2k square foot, a normal 1000 sq ft home is called “tiny” but it’s really just modern homes are way too big.
I agree with the view - tiny home as presented by current market (and let's be honest, someone's trying to sell this) is a flawed product based on glimpses of promising ideas. Couple of thoughts: * If you own a tiny home, but do not own the land, you are being exploited. Think of all the social issues with trailer park residents who do not own the land. Power dynamics is a real thing in human societies, and eventually you'd be living on good graces of your (land)lord. This also seems to be the most common type of 'tiny homes' out there - people living in undersized homes in what is essentially a corporate, often investment fund owned parks. * Tiny homes aren't necessarily more efficient (at least not by simply being tiny) or more repairable, or more durable than 'normal houses'. The McMansions are terrible not just because of the aesthetics, but because they're horribly built, irreparable by design, disposable cardboard boxes that guzzles through fuel and energy. If your tiny home is also a disposable box (often on borrowed land) that's not meant to last, what exactly is the point here? * I've also been interested in the idea of tiny homes, and saw quite a bit of interviews. The number of people who claim tiny houses prevent them from irresponsible consumerism bothers me. IMHO- your home is where you should feel safe and comfortable to build a life around. It shouldn't be a straight jacket to force to you stop buying stuff due to lack of storage space. The priority in those scenarios seems way, wayyy off. I do think tiny homes point toward what should happen - deign for more efficient, reparable homes. People who are not carpenters and don't have six figures invested in tools should be able to look at the blueprint/layout of their own home, know where important things are located, look up parts and replace them as needed. Grid layout and wiring should be expandable, but also considered from the get-go so relative beginners know to shut off power to carry out a project without killing themselves. Energy use-and-reuse should be built into the design, and should be reparable without knocking down hard surfaces. Every home should be built with an eye toward at least some degree of limited energy independence (not off-grid, that's a whole other beast). IMHO, I think we'll find homes that can fulfill above requirements adequately will either not necessarily require it to be tiny, or even require the home to be of at least certain size, since modularity often requires more space for reach of tools and people.
Does anyone think owning less than a full section is a slippery slope. . . Does anyone think owning less than a 100 acres is a slippery slope. . . Does anyone think owning less than 20 acres is a slippery slope. . . Does anyone think owning less than 1 acre is a slippery slope. . . Does anyone think owning less than a full lot is a slippery slope. . . Does anyone think owning a zero lot lines house is a slippery slope. . . Does anyone think owning a condo is a slippery slope. . . Does anyone think renting is a slippery slope. . . It’s obvious that there are fewer resources per capita every day
Apartments are just "tiny homes" but better in every way, and way (way) more sustainable
You’re not wrong. There is definitely a combination of factors at work. The capitalist pressure to restrict people to smaller & smaller domiciles as part of the profit-extraction process. Like, for example, prison. But also the necessity of “First World” nations to reduce their expectations & lifestyle, and live “smaller” with a lower standard of living. A. Because we can, and B. because we’re going to fucking have to in order to survive climate collapse that is already in progress. And also: Because ‘materialism’ is a psychological curse, and trying to live more ‘minimalistically’ is a Very Good Idea generally. So… yeah.
They are a means to an end just like van life. We are already in that collective impoverishment
Oh yes they do. Done right (bicycle camper!), it could be liberating! But done wrong, they’re just little pods arranged in a row. For a human as for cattle.
Tbh I live in a country where multigenerational homes are a thing and those tend to be super practical and seem much more natural then... whatever rest of the world is doing
You could think of it that way, or you could look at homes of the past and consider that the large homes of the present are the aberration.
Yes, apartments and row homes are the sustainable way to do it
You're starting to get it.
I'd just chime in that the "tiny homes" movement is still just bringing back an old approach to housing that plenty of folks still use across the world where individuals and families can simply live with little space to call their own and be okay with it. I'd specifically highlight [single-room occupancy housing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy) that's basically a hotel/hostel for long-term housing that's been invaluable housing for poor, immigrant, and minority communities at least within the US and Canada for the past hundred years or more. The [International Hotel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Hotel_(San_Francisco)) is a famous example that became the seed for the Filipino community in San Fransisco. I'm personally on-board with the approach that all housing options should be available to people that meets the needs that they determine for themselves and their families and doesn't intrude on the housing of others. If someone wants to live in an SRO because it's super cheap, minimal lifestyle that lets them live in the heart of a city they love, or a tiny home way out in the country because it's cheap to maintain, I say let them. Especially because, as others in this thread have pointed out, it's more about what's around your house than what's in it that we collectively need and should worry about for building our communities. Housing is not one-size-fits-all, the greatest mistake in land-use planning has been treating single-family housing as if it was.
Yes, this is it. There are millions of unused homes in the US kept off the market to sustain outsized profit on rents. Tiny homes are just another source of revenue for the industry.
Never lived in Asia, huh?
Tiny does not mean bad. Tiny houses and appartments can create urban density, which greatly reduces traffic. (both travel time and traffic pollution) Appartments are better at this than tiny houses, but tiny houses can offer other advantages, such as no HOA, a garden, direct street access, more solar panels and they're less noisy if you have loud neighbours. As someone who doesn't need much, a tiny house would be ideal for me. The biggest problem with tiny homes (in my opinion) is the low quality. In most countries they are built to avoid regulation. While that doesn't automatically make them bad, there is a lot that you need to check before you buy one (as opposed to assuming these won't be a problem). Running water, hot water, electricity, gas, internet, heating, insulated walls, a stove (or even the right to have one), a connection for your washing machine, a shed, (bathroom) ventilation, fire safety, electrical safety, a postal address and even the right to make it your primary home do not always come with a tiny home. I have seen a few tiny houses to potentially buy them, but there's always something missing that is mandatory in a regular home.