My questions:
-many look great; do people really like living in them?
-is it hard to get building permits for them? They look so radically different that I imagine many neighborhood associations would not want them built
-Are they difficult to sell?
The idea of having a new house for $60,000 appeals to me…but are the people who buy them all that satisfied after 5 years?
Though not a tiny house, I lived for about a year in an 8’ pickup camper, so my thoughts might be relevant.
The floor plans and photos I have seen cover the basics of daily life: Sleeping, preparing and eating meals, hygiene. Most have some sort of setting/video area. Some, but not all, cover laundry needs. All have very limited storage. If you do laundry once a week, then you need storage for a week’s worth of clothes. You need storage for shoe and outerwear options.
Putting humans in a small building requires decent ventilation. Breathing creates humidity that has to be dealt with. It has been a big issue with FEMA trailers. Tiny houses do tend to deal with this, but it has to be considered.
Lastly, there is seldom any consideration beyond watching television of what people might do with their free time. Where do you make quilts, or build model airplanes? Where do you keep the 3-4 guitars many of the guitar players I know have? No pianos, obviously. Where do you keep the tools to fix the tiny house?
Next, a lot of them use convertible spaces to get multiple uses out of the same space. This works for a single occupant, who will only do one thing at a time. It works less well for a couple, and probably not at all if they have one or more offspring.
I really do understand the minimalist aesthetic, but there are real reasons people want space and stuff.
Umm… link? Flats and houses in the UK are very small anyway - about half the size of American equivalents, if memory serves - so could you please elaborate? For example I’m currently sitting in a 2 bed flat and the whole flat is approx 20’ x 30’.
My closet is 6’ x 9’. That’s about 1/3 of what a small house offers in total. Good luck staying sane in one of those.
So you have roughly 600 square feet.
Well, US home sizes are highly dependent on location.
That’s small here (Orlando), which is not heavily populated and where land values are accordingly low. My wife and I lived in a one-bedroom flat/apartment that was 640 square feet when we first moved in together and it was the smallest permanent dwelling (as opposed to a mobile home) I’d seen here.
In Manhattan, there are people that would kill for 600 square feet, of course.
One definition of “tiny house” is less than 400 sq. ft. Some adherents are living in 150 sq. ft. So very small, even by international standards.
400 to 600 square feet isn’t so cramped, at least not for a single person. That may be very small for a house but is very standard for a typical studio (or even 1-bedroom) apartment.
I have lived in apartments of 400 to 600 square feet for much of my adult life, and that seems reasonably spacious – more-or-less adequate storage space included.
I could live in a 400 sq. ft. apartment alone very easily. It was a lot harder to do with my wife, who owns 40 sq. ft. of Christmas decorations.
Many apts have some type of a storage closet available. While I’m big on reducing excess, I’ve thought the tiny houses I’ve seen take it beyond where I’d be comfortable.
Just a winter coat or 2 can eat up A LOT of closet space. It would help to have a lifestyle that did not require much variety - for example, work clothes different from your casual wear, a variety of jackets/footwear, the desire to cook or bake. Where do you put a set of golf clubs, camping gear, or other recreational equipment? Maybe you could have some kind of “shed” or storage container, or rent one someplace.
If you lived someone else, you’d have to REALLY like being close, because you would always be on top of each other. I guess you could have company over if you did your entertaining outside.
Sure you could figure out ways around these things, but when you add them all up, they would really require a commitment.
Heck, I’m out of it right off the bat - my #1 recreation is playing upright bass, which would take up most of the living space. 
But I could imagine one as a 2d home getaway.
Tiny houses impress me a quite extreme, appealing to only a VERY restricted range of folk. I find much more sensible Susan Susanka’s “Not So Big House” ideas.
If you do a search for “tiny house forum” you will find exactly the people you’re looking for.
The small houses look awesome as a vacation home (especially the mobile ones), for people who do most of their socializing at bars/restaurants or people who have friends that don’t mind always hosting get togethers, and don’t have any hobbies beyond watching TV or using a laptop or ereader. The concept doesn’t really work if you want to have more than maybe 2 people over at a time, have kids, want to do non-computer art, want to do any kind of camping or sports that needs equipment, have a significant wardrobe, have more than one winter coat, have the tools to do work on your house, or anything else that uses space.
There are definitely people that they would fit, especially ‘just out of college, starting first job, so I have money, like to go to clubs to party, and pretty much crash or veg at the house’ but I think that most people trying to live in one would either find it too cramped, or would end up using a storage locker, extra car, or friend’s house for their stuff.
Well, they’re certainly smaller, and I suppose that if you torture the definition of “simpler” to mean “less luxurious”, that fits, too. But they’re about the furthest thing you can get from “efficient”, and it’s a sign of just how decadent our society is that people “simplify” so wastefully. If you really want “efficient”, then put a thousand of these 300-square-foot living spaces together in one high-rise building, with a shared kitchen, bathroom, and laundry room for every ten units. A single-unit tiny house still needs facilities of some sort for those things, but when the lone occupant isn’t using them, nobody is. It’s also got a terrible surface-to-volume ratio, making heating and cooling a pain, and still needs the same electrical, water, and possibly gas hookups as any other building, again for only a single occupant.
Great post.
You are describing a form of Co-housing, big in Europe, rare in the US. The co-housing essential idea is to own the land in a trust, own each home individually (like a condo) and have some communally owned and managed functions – often a central building with a commercial kitchen for weekly community meals (units also have kitchens), laundry, rec room, art space, music space, sometimes some community owned vehicles & machinery, etc. Suburban, urban, elder and other variations exist.
I just went to visit a “farm” one in northern Mass. It was very white, professional and educated and not much actual farming, but they were having fun anyway.
The whole tiny house movement has irritated me since its inception. My little family lives very comfortably in 1100’, but we also have a lot of outbuildings – a studio, shop, animal barn, etc. To me tiny houses are like your own personalized upscale motel room, little more.
I’m not sure how relevant this is to the OP, but I will just note that the last couple years Boston has been seeing a lot of development of ‘micro-apartments’ on the order of 350-450 sq.ft.
I don’t know what the track record is on users-satisfaction, but the perceived ‘target market’ is something like 20’s singles working in the seaport ‘innovation district.’
I’ve been involved with the tiny house movement for about 4 years now. Currently I have a minor position with the ATHA. Here are a few of my thoughts on what has been said and asked:
To answer the OP, the biggest issue we are seeing in regards to tiny houses is hinted at in your second question - codes. From our most recent meetings and also according the results from a recent survey among our members it has become apparent to us that zoning restrictions are by far the biggest obstacle to living in tiny homes for a large number of people.
Indeed, many municipalities are against the idea of allowing tiny homes - and often for very good reason; but you could have several threads on all the issues involved with this so I won’t elaborate.
Anything under 1000 feet could be considered a tiny home, in the broadest sense of the definition. One thousand square feet is the minimum legally allowed house size in many areas, so anything under that is “tiny”. As the movement has evolved, tiny has generally come to mean 100-400 square feet, as has been mentioned.
There are two basic kinds of tiny homes - foundation and on wheels (often you will see “thow” when going to the forums). One of the things that is appealing to some people is the complete off grid features of some tiny homes. I have been in one model where all the power came from solar panels and all the water was collected in a cistern and, IIRC, it also had a composting toilet.
Currently a lot of people living in tiny homes are in areas where there are no zoning restrictions, but there has been progress in a few areas where people have persuaded zoning boards to allow tiny homes.
I think what most people in the movement are after is economic freedom; whether this can be achieved through living in a tiny home or not is very debatable. There is a whole ethos surrounding the movement that is hard to define, but in general it stems from this idea.
As far as being efficient for a large number of people - it is not efficient at all as Chronos mentioned.
My current house is 1000sqft. I bet I could get down to half that without too much adjustment. But I don’t think my husband could stand it. I love those tiny houses, that are all the rage.
It would have worked for me when I was in grad school. I used my home for typing papers and ocassionally for sleep. I didn’t have a lot of stuff, having moved to town with no more than a suitcase.
That said, I achieved the same effect by renting the cheapest room on Craig’s List.
There’s a pretty good Netflix documentary about a couple who build their own tiny house. IIRC it’s called “Tiny”. As I recall, it ended up being exorbitantly expensive, per square foot anyway.
As we approach retirement, the missus and I are wanting a vacation condo/house on the Texas coast, either Galveston or Corpus. Due to the high prices (cost of waterfront is insane), we’ve been looking at alternatives. We’re considering “tiny houses” like these. It’s cheaper, roomier, easier to move, and I can fish off the back deck.
Regulations can also go the other way. I heard about one woman who built a 12 x 12 foot structure - due to the tax code in the (rural) area there were no property taxes on it (or there it didn’t need to meet codes, I forget the exact reason). Unfortunately I can’t remember where I read / heard about it.
IIRC she had a sleeping loft, so the actual living space was 288 ft^2
Brian