I hate living in my tiny house (2019)
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/15/what-happens-w...
Their existence in the market doesn't stop you from existing.
Meanwhile we let the Qataris &co buy flats in Europe capitals and keep them empty as investments vessels, I find that much more disgusting that "think of the investors =("
You'll find that it doesn't. That any such restrictions are political decisions not investor decisions.
“Other than that, how did you enjoy the show Mrs. Lincoln?”
I'm of the the opinion that the market which is making me so much money right now is fundamentally broken, and that the only fix is for local governments to be at least half as much in the business of building and letting out housing as they already are in the business of building infrastructure such as roads and utilities — lots, but not necessarily all.
Moving your mobile home can cost between $3K and $15k and even that presupposes that your mobile home is in some type of shape to move without repairs (https://www.moving.com/tips/moving-mobile-home-expect-pay/)
[1] my wife son and I stayed in an extended stay for 6 months when we decided at the last minute to have a house built instead of buying one. We didn’t want to pay the month to month rates.
This is absolute insanity. In the midwest or quieter parts of Europe, this would already net you half to two thirds of a nice home.
> Node, which builds tiny homes in factories to reduce construction cost
These cost >=$150k (source: https://www.fastcompany.com/90381454/these-flatpack-homes-ca...).
> Node’s smallest unit, at 400 square feet, is $150,000
This seems expensive to me given that in Kenya a 40x8 foot container home costs between 950,000 and 1,400,000 Ksh (c. $8000-$11500, so less that a tenth Node's price). (source: https://premiumcontainers.co.ke/current-cost-of-shipping-con...)
There's absolutely no reason technologically that housing has to be expensive. If it is, it's because of social/regulatory reasons.
True.
Not every market is like market of shoes, that allows infinite competition and substitution.
/s
I also agree. This article is one of the few examples of a tiny house situated in what seems like a dense urban environment. In contrast, many tiny homes are placed among open space. The tiny homes don't feel cramped because they're surrounded by nature, with beautiful long uninterrupted views out of the windows. No noisy neighbours or traffic nearby either.
But take away the countryside location of these tiny homes and could the tiny house work in an urban environment? I doubt it. The future for housing for most people on the planet (including the US) is in cities and urban environments. Can you live in a tiny home where you don't have long, uninterrupted views out of your windows? Or where you only have windows along one side of your dwelling (e.g. single-aspect apartments). Do you feel you have enough privacy when your apartment or house is joined with your neighbour's home?
Millions of people already live in homes like this and have to contend with these issues. Can we have small or modest-sized homes that give us light, space, privacy, quiet and comfort in a noisy urban setting? It's one of the most pressing and important issues in housing design - and one that architects and home builders have failed to address.
Also, space can be 'modest' in size rather than 'tiny' and still be sustainable or amenable to high density. For example, London has it's own housing design guide that recommends new one bedroom apartments for two people to be a minimum of 50 square metres (538 square feet). That's still less than space standards in continental Europe but it's enough space to live comfortably even if it doesn't count as tiny by Western standards.
Urban settings generally lack that option.
Personally (controversially?) I've always questioned the idea of a tiny house in the countryside. In dense urban (and otherwise restrictive) environments focusing on size makes some sense. But in a rural setting? Emphasizing 'tiny' over e.g the UN-Habitat's mantra of "fast, affordable and absolutely green" feels like a misinterpretation and unnecessary burden ('fast' might be switched out in this context too). I'm not advocating for sprawling mansions by any means, but certainly a more holistic consideration of space and its effects on mental health.
According to the article, that's almost "tiny".
I lived alone in a 47 square meter apartment until recently, and it definitely felt larger than it needed to be.
> This article is one of the few examples of a tiny house situated in what seems like a dense urban environment. In contrast, many tiny homes are placed among open space. The tiny homes don't feel cramped because they're surrounded by nature, with beautiful long uninterrupted views out of the windows. No noisy neighbours or traffic nearby either.
> But take away the countryside location of these tiny homes and could the tiny house work in an urban environment? I doubt it. The future for housing for most people on the planet (including the US) is in cities and urban environments. Can you live in a tiny home where you don't have long, uninterrupted views out of your windows? Or where you only have windows along one side of your dwelling (e.g. single-aspect apartments). Do you feel you have enough privacy when your apartment or house is joined with your neighbour's home?
Apartment living is fine (although limiting cars in cities is a must since they're so noisy). I'm pretty sure this guy's big problem is that he's living alone and working from home. That's a recipe for going stir-crazy however big your house is. (And I have to wonder: why pay city-centre prices if you're working remotely anyway?)
And in most of the US, we can increase density massively without reducing size to “tiny” or even “small” sizes. The norm in the US is a single-family home (~70%, including townhomes). We could build a lot more large apartment/condo buildings. A lot more duplexes. Both are rare in most of the US. Apartments are almost exclusively targeted at younger, childless people and rarely more than 2 bedrooms.
The reason why everybody wants a detached home is so you don't share a wall or floor with a neighbor.
Dense housing could be built so that you are well isolated--unfortunately, it never is. Consequently, you have to deal with stomping upstairs, dogs that bark all day, etc.
If people are truly interested in dense housing, we'll need some building codes that make building it a bit more expensive.
Also laws and planning for apartments and leaseholds are absolutely atrocious in UK and most contries that do not have a socialist past - people in charge just do not understand how to deal with them.
Before the remodel, we had 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom. We made it work but it felt a bit small.
By American standards, 2.1k sqft for a family of 6 is not large by any means.
When remodeling, we spent a lot of time on the final layout, drawing inspiration from homes we felt good being in. My wife is an interior designer which played the largest role in our decisions. Interior designers have very technical backgrounds and a lot of knowledge in space planning.
Our remodeled house feels the right size. Not because of the sqft, but because of the layout. We looked at 3k sqft houses prior to remodeling and they felt smaller than our 2.1k sqft one despite an extra 50% of floor space.
All that is a way of saying that “space” matters. It’s not “bigger is better” and you can’t Marie Kondo your way out of tiny spaces. There’s an optimal space + layout that can reduce stress in your life.
I do get amused about how everyone hates cube farms but loves open concept.
I thought open floors only became a thing because companies realized they can save money and workers would put up with it, which doesn't seem to be wrong.
Cube farms at least you can customize and claim “your space”.
I can put on noise cancelling headphones but I can't visually block out physical shenanigans, my monkey brain is tracking for threats.
I'll echo this. We (family of 4) remodeled our 1500sqft 3BD/2BA to a 1600sqft 4BD/3BA, but the house feels larger than some 2k sqft houses because of the clever space design, because of a double height atrium and a large open kitchen.
As someone outside the landed gentry, I see having an appropriately sized (small) home as my entry point. Most of my extended family have these monstrosity homes that serve mostly as storage space for dusty boxes and extra rooms that are utilised poorly, and took on significant debt to have it. Seems insane to me. This, however, is the polar opposite and just as insane.
the problem is when some extreme style of living becomes a well known trend, then you get lots of people that would otherwise be incompatible with an idea that try to cope with it anyway...
... then you get articles like "I hate Living in My Tiny House"
side : these types of articles rarely hit the real point of "Maybe I shouldn't blindly follow every trend.". Rather than that bit of truth they just list the reasons why the idea is stupid from their perspective and conclude it with why no one should ever try it.
Remember the locals like the way things are, and they got that way because of, not in spite of, the local political views. Better to live there a bit and absorb and, ideally, integrate with the political climate.
Not saying they're perfect, but they are unique and deserve a fair shake.
Trend followers doing it for the image and pouring money in ruin every hobby and niche sport.
Seeing a trend bite back at them is kind of nice.
I would say car dependent suburbs are the more extreme lifestyle. Sprawl drives the kind of consumption that is destroying the planet. Are humans even theoretically capable of anything more extreme than that? I don't think so.
Japan metros like Tokyo are a modern example of this lifestyle. People go to their 600 sqft apartments/homes primarily to sleep and bathe, and that's about it. The rest of the time they're out working, playing, eating... living.
The wheels/trailers are "dumb" because almost nobody wants to move them once they get them in place. So as far as we can tell the only reason to build on a trailer is to avoid regulations in many locations throughout the US (an example: where we are in New Mexico if you build a house on a foundation you need to hire licensed plumbers and electricians whereas if you build on a trailer you can DIY; needless to say licensed professionals are far more expensive that doing it yourself so there are significant savings when you DIY).
The people interested in tiny houses seem to fall into three buckets (maybe 4): 1. people who want an Airbnb on their existing property (these are usually well-to-do folks who don't bat an eye at the pricing) 2. older folks who don't have the means to retire in a normal-sized house 3. younger folks who don't have the means to live in a normal house 4. if there's a 4th, it's younger folks who want a vacation house that they can Airbnb when they're not using it.
These 4 markets seem quite large based on the number of people who have reached out to us when we do pretty minimal marketing. And the reason we started doing this in the first place was to build below-market-rate housing (i.e., targeting groups 2 and 3 above), but there's a bit of a paradox going on here that we're trying to solve: groups 2 and 3 do not have the means to buy houses (tiny or not) outright so the only way we're going to crack this nut is if you can finance the purchase. We think we've found a way to do that, at least in our local market of Northern New Mexico, and we're just going through the proper channels with our local county to test this concept because lenders of course require that what you're building is legitimate. We're still hopeful that this will be a good solution locally, if not more broadly. Btw, we have never given a thought to trying to do this in an urban area. Doesn't seem sensible given land values where cheaper housing is almost by definition multifamily (i.e., >=2 units on a lot).
Edit: Oh, duh, here's a link to the house we build: https://santafe.craigslist.org/reo/d/el-prado-brand-new-full...
Also, almost everyone we’ve spoken with about tiny houses actually wants their city/county/state to recognize tiny houses as legitimate, including the taxes, because then they could legally live in the house full time. The problem is only a tiny fraction of locations in the US allow people to live in them full time.
I wish you luck in your endeavors and hope that if I ever get a place where I can actually afford one I am able to get a unit like this one.
It sounds great until YOU ARE LIVING IN A VAN, DOWN NEAR THE RIVER.
Great skit. I miss him.
In any case, it's a pretty honest breakdown of the challenges of van life, from someone who seemed to be making bank on the whole trend. Interestingly, going back and looking at the titles of subsequent videos, it sounds like it's becoming more of a struggle for her.
Separately, Americans don’t know how to make space efficient homes, I loved my tiny 23m2 apartment in Tokyo and found it quite livable. I’ve never seen American apartments that use space in a remotely efficient way like those ones do.
Because you need to get into a car, go on a +10m drive, etc, everything is designed for the 'costco lifestyle', buying 20 packs of everything and recreating many of the services of the city within your own house, because otherwise it is too expensive and inconvenient to have them. If you want quality baking and meals too, you need to make it in your own house, because you probably surrounded by boring american chain stores otherwise.
I also find that cleaning large apartments doesn't take much more effort than cleaning smaller ones - amount of cleaning that's needed is more related to the number of people living there than to the size.
I don’t see the two being opposed. I have ingrained NIMBY tendencies but have recently come around to “more housing / dense housing” idea
Some cities have taken a path towards sprawl that can be corrected by state / federal intervention.
A mega city planned redevelopment would be interesting to see
To each their own
243sqft is a room 15.5ft per side. 23m^2 is 5,694sqft, nearly 23 times more floorspace than 250sqft.
Everyone with an IQ that isn't also an acceptable temperature for refrigerating meat knows that a square with 23m on a side is not relevant to a discussion of tiny houses or apartments and he was talking about a space of 23 square meters.
And since I apparently can't get away with not spelling it out. A room that's 15ft on a side (or in the ballpark of 250 square feet) is roughly equivalent in interior space to a trailer that has external dimensions of 8.5ft by 20-something feet long which is not an odd size for a tiny house.
23^2 = 529
23m = 75.459ft
75.459^2 = 5,694.1059sqft
5694/250 = ~23
Because 23m^2 is nearly 23 times bigger than 250sqft.
Here's 12000 apartments the same size or smaller within a 40 minute commute of Shibuya Tokyo
https://www.chintai.net/list/?cf=0&ct=0&m=0&m=1&m=2&m=3&jk=0...
People live in them just fine because their expectations are different. It's like most students don't complain when living in dorms. Yes it's not the same, but the point is the expectation is different so it's fine. Similarly, I lived in hotels for 1~3 months at a time several times, often one after another (no larger place in between). Not a problem because my expectations matched.
I suspect most people connected to the internet and social media can be subject to overstimulation. An easily accessible mini retreat has really been helpful.
I've also lived in a duplex that occupied the same lot footprint as the bungalow + ADU, yet had much more space for both parties to enjoy because simply building up and adding a second floor was a more efficient use of the lot.
I think ADUs are at best a stopgap but are so far from an optimal solution that they shouldn't be taken seriously by policymakers.
I simply do not understand the aversion to multi-story construction in some places.
Like looks at this MRI comparing a 40 year old triathlete, a 74 year old and a 74 year sedentary man. Sarcopenia is a choice in many ways!
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Figure-Typical-quadricep...
What I really wanted was the ability to experiment with so many things I would not be allowed to do in a traditional home, without worrying about blowing a bunch of money or hurting a $200k+ home I don't own/have a mortgage on. There's a lot I inherited from the previous owner, but it'll have custom automation and control software for the climate (dehumifier, heat exchanger, monitoring of power usage, etc), my dream programming space (converting the previous owner's "balcony" into a sort of indoor/outdoor deck with a massive transparent rollup door), and integrating more screens into my life (controlled by me, not loaded with any proprietary stuff that will inevitably hurt me).
But it's also just me and my cat. I've told partners already that I don't think I could live in this with anything more than that.
I've lived in a small space before with my cat and as long as you clean the box frequently (at least daily), it's not an issue.
I’d really like it outside of the city, have a simple kitchen and living room inside and more elaborate outdoor kitchen and living space outside. Build a barn big enough to house my truck, piddle in, storage for lawn and garden, and an office to work from home.
Theoretically this means it doesn't need to meet building code and go through the approval process in whatever rural location you put one on land as its only dwelling, or as an ADU. It's an attempt at a legal workaround saying to the local government "this is totally NOT A HOUSE it's my RV trailer!".
But by the time you hook it up to water supply, electricity and sewage disposal it effectively becomes fixed in place.
A mobile home is different from an RV in that an RV is not generally intended for full-time living. It also isn’t meant to be permanently/semi-permanently placed in one location, as mobile homes are. It’s pretty common to have a mobile home placed such that it’s externally indistinguishable from a permanent home of similar size. The interior layout is the tell. Or the fact that it’s located in a trailer park.
The “problem” is most local zoning (different from the building code) in urban/suburban bans mobile homes and also bans permanent homes smaller than some arbitrary size. So, without a carve-out for ADUs or some other change in zoning, you can’t actually live in a tiny home, small permanent home, or anything in between. Apart for the rare urban mobile home park, it’s not until you get well outside most metro areas that you can drop a mobile home on your own land without a zoning problem.
Not entirely true - mobile homes are supposed to meet a federal code published by HUD. The typical “tiny home” should be built to this standard.
Actual RVs are indeed a bit of a free-for-all. Some of them are really cheap and definitely not built to last.
You also have minimum home size laws in residential single family zoning areas, which either limit to one dwelling per lot (meaning no legal addition of an ADU when an existing home exists on the lot, no matter how it's built), or would not allow a stick built on concrete slab 300-350 square foot separate unit because the square footage is too small.
Or because the local municipal laws do not allow for installation of a separate water supply, sewer service and electrical grid connection for a 2nd home on one lot. They only permit things like a detached garage which has a sub-panel attached to a home's primary 200A panel.
So even if you solve the problem of it being not a "manufactured home" but legally a trailer you still can't drop it on a concrete slab or pilings and it has to legally remain a "RV trailer" with yearly vehicle registration/plate/tabs.
The hub would function Air BB style in that aside from shared hours, each TH unit can schedule X hours per month.
Something like that.
1. attach the units and TH's together so that you don't have to go outside (more relevant in non-temperate climates I suppose)
2. Put a high-quality kitchen in the common area (they don't work well in THs anyways -- not enough space for eg prepping and cooking and storing a meal for the week)
3. Move bathrooms and showers to the main area (they don't work well in THs anyways -- wet rooms are gross)
Aka, a shared house with room mates. I lived in these for years and would much prefer a shared house to a TH...
Their popularity is kinda waning despite affordable pricing. It does cater to certain type of people, but I think it is rather small subsection of population.
That said, it is a precarious lifestyle and not something people do by choice.
A small apartment is pretty good and workable when it's in a city where you can make use of external facilities. I just don't see the point when you have space for 50 houses on the land but you build this one shipping container sized one right in the middle.
Luckily, there IS a silver bullet: live in areas with low cost of living, which is most areas in the country
Dunno how strong this effect is though ...
I moved here 7 years ago, from a small studio (efficiency) place. The last place had a dorm-size refrigerator, a non-walk-in closet, no tub, etc.
Between there and here, I've accumulated a lot of stuff, and for a while it seemed like I could never downsize again because I needed a separate working space, and this was a dealbreaker for entertaining thoughts of a roommate or going back to a studio at all.
However, I've downsized, got rid of plenty of stuff including some storage furniture and my desktop computer(!) and I feel ready to downsize again. And eventually, I will need to.
I'm 50 and living independently with mental illness. Every year I have a nervous breakdown, because managing my own household is a Herculean effort I can barely sustain. If I prepare all my own meals and clean up after myself, I'm exhausted. If I don't, then I'm broke and fat. It's not a winning situation.
Eventually I'll need to work something out where I give up my independence of living and rely on some sort of caregivers, and I may also need to admit a roommate to the mix. This will not be enjoyable.
It reminds me of our grandmother who, 50 years ago, lived in a 5BR-2BA house with about 6 apartments in back. She was a landlady and head of household. And eventually it was just way, way too much for her to maintain, even with Mom and Dad's help. The space we take up as Americans is unconscionable. Either have a large family and share that space, or give it up, or share it with other adults equitably. We just don't need these McMansions all over the place. We also don't need pedestrian-hostile suburbs!!!
Waiting for the “But Tokyo!” guy.
The answer is actually less housing.
But house prices don't exist in isolation. A denser area will have better, higher paying, more specialized jobs, more options for entertainment/lifestyle, better access to just about everything. So the higher prices are worth it.
Dunno the history (gives a bit more flexibility: a showerer doesn't constrain the toilet), but could also be an aversion to not clean yourself in the same place you poop.
Urbanites became absolute cry babies, bring them to the farm for an hour and they would starve themselves after they learn animals shit and veggies grow in compost.
Life is disgusting, get over it