The modern age offers a number of complications for people. Whether it’s the housing market that seems to be as stable and predictable as a house of cards or a global economic structure that can’t settle on how it works when things get even a little rough, there are a number of ways the average person’s life can be complicated through no fault of their own.
This is particularly true of where we live, as a wide variety of factors outside our control can make a massive impact on our choices of where and how we live. Fortunately, the rise of modern technology has offered a number of solutions that for many people counteract at least some of the complications.
One such solution is the rising popularity of tiny houses. By way of terminology “tiny house” generally refers to any residential building with under 500 square feet (or 46 square meters) of space, though given as the movement is still quite new, exact figures are somewhat variable.
These houses are also referred to as “small houses” but many people also feel that “small house” should refer to houses between 500 and 1000 square feet in size. As we can see, the concept of tiny houses is still under development, but for the purposes of this article, “tiny house” will refer to any housing structure under 500 square feet in size.
Some would argue that the concept of the tiny house is an idea whose time has come. In the past four decades, the size of the average home has increased by well over fifty percent, while the size of the average family has actually decreased.
Meanwhile, as the infamous housing market meltdown proved, even the once rock solid investment of land and housing is not a true unshakable economic foundation. With this in mind, a number of theorists, particularly Sarah Susanka, Lloyd Kahn and Lester Walker have proposed that perhaps it would be better for modern people to choose smaller dwellings rather than the historical push for larger, more ostentatious homes.
The idea of tiny houses has taken some time to reach mainstream acceptance, though the recent popularity of “simple living” has coincided with the growth of interest in tiny house. After Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, a number of tiny houses were built as an alternative to FEMA trailers (that were later discovered to contain toxic levels of formaldehyde), though these designs were more of interest to resort and suburb developers than disaster relief agencies.
The financial crisis that spanned from 2007 to 2008 brought a great deal of attention to the potential of tiny homes as the housing market collapsed, but even to this day, only one percent of houses sold are under 1000 square feet or less in size.
That said, more and more people are showing an increasing interest in tiny homes. In this time of economic crunch, the main advantage of these homes are their cost; between 20,000 and 50,000 USD is a typical cost for a house, a fraction of what a larger house might cost, almost always requiring a massive mortgage that may never be paid off. Some of these homes can also be affixed to wheels, enabling them to become truly mobile rather than planted in the ground allowing the owner to move their homes with their lives.
Whether their jobs send them around the country and they need a novel solution to remain grounded while constantly traveling or they simply wish to see the world, a tiny home that’s mobile offers certain advantages even RVs do not.
Despite their small size, tiny homes really are built to last, using the same materials and techniques as a traditional house, but on a much smaller scale. Their size also calls for users to focus less on acquiring a great deal of material possessions and gathering up clutter.
More and more people are looking for ways to declutter their lives, and a tiny home offers a severe form of encouragement for not acquiring too many possessions that would otherwise create a great deal of stress. The simplicity of a tiny house can also offer a potential means to ease the strain on the planet from the ever growing human population.