The Joy of Tiny House Living. Chris Schapdick
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perhaps seen a TV show or pictures of tiny houses online, and this is what piqued your interest. The reality, though, is that tiny homes and small living have been around for a very, very long time. The current tiny house trend is more of a rediscovery of living little rather than a purely new phenomenon.
Human beings have always lived tiny; throughout most of history, people have had rather small dwellings. You can go all the way back to caves and teepees, or consider a time in the United States, when people were traveling across the country for months in covered wagons. If you look at older cities in North America, like Montreal, you’ll see various older neighborhoods all featuring compact houses, and the same is definitely true in Europe, which is packed with neighborhoods like these. Small houses were built because it was difficult and costly to obtain materials. Current notions of disposable income didn’t exist; the average person did not live in a world where it was feasible to build larger and larger houses just for the pleasure of it.
The original tiny house on wheels: a covered wagon. Well-known for their role in transporting settlers along the Oregon Trail in the 1800s, covered wagons were glorified storage trailers and not nearly as comfortable as the tiny house you will build.
Tiny houses like these in Lüneburg, Germany, were built for centuries throughout Europe.
Some houses in Iceland, like these from the 1800s, were integrated into the land precisely because there were minimal building materials available for construction. Due to the island’s harsh climate, there are no trees that are suitable for constructing houses. The only wood that used to be available was the kind that washed up on the shores as driftwood.
In the United States in the mid-20th century, though, disposable incomes were more common and more considerable, and it became feasible for the emerging middle class to live in larger and larger houses. Many people started wanting bigger, more lavish homes to show off their success (and sometimes show up their neighbors). This culminated in the McMansion phase that we saw before the housing bubble burst and the recession of 2008. At that time, people rediscovered the tiny living phenomenon, often because they had a certain amount of insecurity with their finances. People also realized that the trend toward ever-bigger houses was not truly serving them. Ever-larger homes benefit towns because of the higher taxes that towns can charge, and the construction companies that build larger houses also derive greater profit from these more substantial structures. There is also a knock-on effect in furniture: since larger homes need more furniture, furniture companies benefit. Larger houses also require additional heating and cooling, so energy providers see a benefit as well. There is a lot of interest from various outside entities to encourage people to live in bigger houses. But in the end, there is little in the interest of the actual people living in them.
When we talk about the modern tiny house movement, one person stands out: Jay Shafer. In the late 90s, Shafer, for a variety of reasons, decided that he wanted to downsize his life and live in a smaller sort of way. He was able to do that by creating a very nicely designed tiny house. He documented his process and put it out to the world, and it started to resonate. People could clearly see the cost-effectiveness and efficiency in going tiny, and it appealed to a lot of different people for different reasons. Dee Williams is another one of the originators of the tiny house movement. She downsized her life into a minimal amount of space. These are the pioneers of the new tiny house movement.
Now we are in the midst of the modern tiny house movement, and it’s picking up traction. Since it’s such a significant shift away from the prior notions of building ever-larger houses, it has been somewhat difficult for certain aspects of the movement to keep up with the times—or, perhaps more accurately, it has been difficult for the times to keep up with the movement. The most noticeable aspect in this regard is that the legalities of living tiny are not in line with the existing models of government and structures that are in place. For example, many towns and municipalities have minimum size restrictions on living spaces. This means that for you to be able to build a house, it has to have a certain number of square feet for it to be recognized as a house. These kinds of policies were put into place for a variety of reasons, some of which have to do with safety, some of which have to do with taxation, and some of which have to do with towns wanting to have uniformity in the look and feel of their housing.
We’ll go into the current state of tiny house legality later, in chapter 5. For now, though, I hope you can see how the tiny house movement isn’t just a newfangled fad—it’s actually a logical reaction to how housing has been changing over the years, and a callback to different eras with different standards. The modern motivations for going tiny are as varied as the people who do it; read on to learn more.
The originator of the modern tiny house movement: Jay Shafer (right). It was an honor to meet the man who has inspired so many others to downsize their lives.
With the right amount of activism and pressure, the world will make room for tiny houses. Thanks to people within the movement, like Alexis Stephens and Christian Parsons, co-founders of Tiny House Expedition (whose house is pictured at right), progress continues to be made.
WHY ARE PEOPLE GOING TINY?
Tiny represents different things to different people at different points in their life. Here I’ll define what it tends to mean for different age brackets and demographics.
Tiny houses have a specific appeal for younger people, people who are coming out of college or maybe just starting off down a career path. Going tiny represents an affordable accommodation during a period when financial stability might not yet be established or possible. Younger adults coming out of college may be in debt from paying for their education. Taking on additional debt in the form of a 30-year mortgage does not appeal to these young adults. This younger generation is gravitating toward smaller, more affordable housing, given that the large urban centers in the United States and elsewhere are experiencing affordable housing crises.
This small, towable home would appeal to many members of the younger generation, who are often motivated to go tiny because the cost is considerably cheaper than a 30-year mortgage.
Tiny houses (and other alternative structures such as buses, yurts, or vans) therefore become a natural and clear alternative to traditional living for young people. When you combine the affordability with the ability to easily relocate a tiny house—to move it wherever the work is—it is an appealing proposition. More and more professions and jobs can be executed remotely, and this is another reason why living in a tiny house is a good alternative. According to a Gallup survey, more than 43 percent of workers did some of their work remotely in 2018. This trend keeps going up year after year. That tiny house can be situated virtually anywhere, as long as the person has access to the Internet and to power and therefore can perform any number of different job functions.
Tiny houses are an opportunity to rethink what it means to have a home.
For people who are middle-aged, tiny living represents many of the same benefits. But there are also certain life situations in middle age that make living tiny more viable. People in the middle of their