$60953 self-sufficient loft-style tiny home on wheels can be towed anywhere | Hacker News Reader

$60953 self-sufficient loft-style tiny home on wheels can be towed anywhere

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21 pointsSirLJ20 comments

Tiny House movement misses the point. The reason housing has become expensive is due to the cost of land, not improvements. Construction costs remain stable. You still need to park this house somewhere, and you always see them parked on huge plots of land with nobody else nearby -- park them close together and you have a "trailer park." So, you end up on the far outskirts or in someone's backyard, where land is cheap already -- so what's the point? Might as well build a normal house, which isn't that expensive to do, once you have land.

Exactly. Tiny homes misses the point. Where tiny homes are parked, land cost is generally not a problem and you don't actually need to have a kitchen-bedroom-toilet combo. IMO it is for the Instagram crowd.

This actually seems like a really bad financial deal when you consider the square footage you are getting. You could buy a house with 10x space in a nice city for 5-6x the price.

The marginal value of space in your house does not remain constant as you get more space.

On the other hand, this 60k doesn't include any land at all....

There's some really great tiny house tours on YouTube. My favourite is Living Big in a Tiny House, presented somewhat ironically by a really tall kiwi. His enthusiasm and the incredible labours of love that most of the houses he visits are makes it great watching.

https://m.youtube.com/user/livingbigtinyhouse

Most of those houses are self-built, and the standards of fittings is an order of magnitude higher than any RV.

However, the show conveniently glosses over the fact that buying in a house in most Western cities isn't really about the house at all, but the land it sits on. Most of the tiny house builders are on a corner of a friend's land, or in their parents garden. They don't have the insecurity of having to move house that you'd have with renting, but they've often traded it for insecurity of location.

As someone living in Japan, that looks awesome.

To put this into perspective, you can get apartments that size here. Obviously designed for bachelor's.

(A company called leo palace rents them out, but there are independent ones as well).

Agree. I live in an apartment similar size and layout to this and it's all i need. In fact it's more space than i need, since i only use my "living room" to dry clothes.

It would be cool to have an option like this if i ever moved to a less dense area. My concern would be finding land to put it on. Presumably any land you could legally park this would be far enough out in the country that you'd need to own a car to go anywhere anyway, at which point i feel might be better off with an RV.

You probably don't want to be commuting anywhere in your rv. Especially if the commute is far.

Try quacking:

"park model mobile home"

Same notion, sans pricey self-sufficient solar.

Hehehe, is that what we call searching on DDG now?

I hope so! That would solve the biggest issue with its adoption IMO.

I wonder how towable it is. I have friends who have RVs that are much more expensive than this portable house, and the RVs are not as nice inside.

I recently bought a travel trailer my family is living in while we build a house. It is not as spacious inside as this thing is, but I can stand up inside it without hitting my head anywhere and I'm not a small guy. It also cost only half what this tiny house is going for. My bathroom(s) are not as nice, but that said, I have been in someone's 120k Airstream conversion that had a 3 person jacuzzi in the master bath. My trailer is prewired for solar and setting it up off-grid was easy.

We talked about getting or building a tiny house on wheels instead but we settled on the travel trailer because it should be easier to resell once we've built our house.

If you want to live in a tiny house and it's not just temporary it seems easier and cheaper to just build it on the dirt. I could see these houses on wheels coming in handy if you don't own your land or have other building restrictions but still plan to be there for awhile. I wouldn't imagine these would be good for frequent moves since none of the interior is designed to "batten down" and the transport could stress the (often) wood frame classical construction.

There is often a minimum square footage requirement for new homes in most U.S localities. Putting the house on wheels generally skirts these restrictions.

Way taller, no furniture. Bet that’s a lot of why it looks so much better. RVs have low ceilings and are packed with cabinets and couches and such. This is empty.

Based on the shape, I expect towing it in any kind of crosswind would be a total shitshow.

Self sufficient as long as the temperature outside is the temperature you want inside.

I like the exterior and general blueprint of the house, but the interior materials and appliance choices don't seem very modern.

Business model: buy cheap land with hookups for these things like millennial trailer parks.

60K? Are they retarded or something? One can get the same thing for 10K from china. Add 2k for shipping. 12k you're done. Check on Alibaba plenty of suppliers and custom builders.

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