“Why are there so many shows about tiny houses? Because people can’t get enough of them. According to an HGTV spokesperson, their tiny house programming gets an average of 5 million viewers per week combined.”
“You could say that tiny houses are having a tiny bit of a moment.”
“For the people portrayed onscreen buying or building tiny houses, a few common themes emerge, most of which are connected to not having to spend as much time and money on paying for and maintaining a large house.”
“They want to rid themselves of unnecessary possessions; to not feel beholden to maintaining a too-large house, particularly cleaning it; they want to be out of debt; they want to live more “green”; they want to own a home but don’t want to pay a mortgage; they want to be able to pursue hobbies and travel as they see fit; they want to spend more time with each other or with family (which they say they are able to do because they now have more time, and because they are forced into a small space together); they often want to live off the grid, or at least in a remote area.”
“They want to live, in essence, a simpler, more pared-down life — and the rest of us want to watch them do it.”
“Tiny houses may be cheaper than “regular” houses, but they’re not free — they tend to range from $25,000 for something bare-bones to $75,000 or more for a more well-appointed one, and those prices don’t include land. And because they’re not traditional homes, it’s more difficult to get a mortgage for them, meaning most people who buy or build tiny homes pay cash or self-finance — an option that’s not available to everyone.”
“If part of the American Dream includes owning your own home, then perhaps these tiny homesteaders are simply carving out their own space in an unforgiving real estate landscape. But as with anything real-estate-related in this country, even tiny houses come with their own set of privilege and class assumptions that end up dictating who gets to live in them and where they get to put them — and often shut out those who could benefit the most from the tiny house movement.”
“Indeed, if there was ever a patron saint of tiny houses, it would be Thoreau, whose words from Walden — “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately” — are often invoked in discussions of tiny houses. The implication is crystal clear: The only way to live a truly authentic, meaningful life is to live in isolation in nature, with minimal possessions and, it seems, minimal interaction with other humans.”
“But, as The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz has written, Thoreau has himself long been misunderstood, and his writing, particularly in Walden, misinterpreted. That book, Schulz argues, is “less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.””
““Going tiny” implies that the person who is moving into a tiny house is doing so to escape their previous life of excess: They are coming from one place and going to another. This has made it, by definition, a middle-class movement, one that eschews identification with people who have lived in “tiny” homes for decades — whether that “tiny” home is a mobile home, an RV, or just a really small apartment.”
“And so the tiny house movement has an inherent privilege built in: Going tiny is a choice. If you’re coming from a more abundant place, in which you could live in a 2,000-square-foot house but you choose to live in 200 square feet, then you can be part of the community. If not, well, you’re just poor.”
“And thus, there’s something performative about the act of going tiny that brings to mind the critique of consumerist mindfulness. It’s not enough to just “go tiny”; you also have to appear on TV, start a blog, and proselytize about your new lifestyle.”
“Because while people have been living in small homes forever, it’s just that now, as (overwhelmingly) white and middle-class people are doing it, there’s finally something to celebrate. It’s not new for people to be living in RVs or mobile homes; it’s just that now there’s a new vocabulary to gentrify living in a small space.”
“And while building a tiny house may not be as expensive as building a full-size house, its nebulous legality still requires time and money to navigate the thicket of codes and regulations pertaining to tiny houses — and to be comfortable with living off the radar of local code enforcement authorities.”
“Finding a place to put your tiny house is often an afterthought — but it can be the most difficult part of the process, in part because of the inherent privilege of who gets to bend the rules and who feels comfortable skirting the law — or pushing for it to be changed, as it has in Fresno, California, and Nantucket, to name a couple of recent examples of municipalities that have passed tiny house ordinances allowing them to be parked there.”
“On tiny house shows, the vast majority of people featured are white — young white couples, young white single people, older white single people. And according to Jewel Pearson, a 47-year-old black woman who lives in a tiny house in North Carolina, that’s indicative of the tiny house community overall.”
“For middle-class white people, who by and large have not had to deal with the burden of historical housing discrimination, the decision to go tiny is less fraught than it is for black people.”
“And while there’s a sense of freedom for white middle-class people being able to drop off the grid or just “go tiny” wherever they’d like, for people of color it’s much more complicated. Even if they wanted to live in a city, many cities are not hospitable to tiny houses, and so whether they want to or not, they’re forced into more rural areas. “The rural areas aren’t necessarily friendly to people of color,” said Pearson. “Where a white person doesn’t have to think about all that, there’s a different safety issue that I have to be mindful of.””