The Problem with Tiny Houses

The “Tiny House Movement” is great, but it’s also a failure. It’s great that people are starting to think outside the imprisoning mortgage and rent system, but the guise of environmental-mindedness needs to be questioned. The total dollar savings over a foundation house is unquestionable, but looking more closely, not only is the cost “savings” questionable, but the utility vs. cost isn’t great.

The tiny house movement appears to be as rooted in environmental motives as it is in protest of conventional economic norms. The reduced size of the houses is supposed to be less resource intensive in construction materials required, as well as less energy intensive due to less volume of space to heat, clean, and maintain. For many of those savings, there is a true savings to be had. But to what end and is it really saving anything?

The reason for the environmental question is that the tiny house movement is really just creating new housing spaces. It’s not replacing, repurposing, or improving current housing spaces; it’s creating new demand for building products and creating more housing spaces. From a pop-enviro-culture perspective, the creation of smaller, more efficient spaces is great. But it’s NOT great to be creating new demand for new building products, flatbed trailers, etc, only to create MORE housing spaces. The creation of these spaces either leads to more room being made for others to come into empty housing spaces and/or it leads to the abandonment of pre-existing housing areas. In essence, the tiny house movement is just a new form of consumption and a new pathway for population growth, which is in conflict with the core of current problems that environmentalism is concerned with.

Tiny houses are often recognized for being a better dollar savings over a conventional home. But are they really? Tiny houses are often 100-200 square feet, sometimes a little more. The costs I frequently see on the internet are between $18,000 and $35,000 for construction materials. If we look at cost per square foot, that’s $90-$350/square foot at the extremes of those numbers. A $200,000 house with 2,000 square feet is $100/square foot. The tiny house only solves one problem: Total cost. Dollars per square foot, tiny houses cost as much or more than real houses.

That’s why the tiny house movement needs to move toward recognizing RV dwelling as part of the tiny house movement. RV’s over 10 years old have lost so much of their value, few are worth very much. My Winnebago Brave was 14 years old when I bought it and had lost over 80% of its original value. My 200 square foot [RV] tiny house cost only $50/square foot, which is a tremendous savings over the cost of building a new structure and it was ready to go the moment I purchased it. Modern RV’s are well-insulated, the electrical systems are well designed, and are fully self-contained rolling homes.

RV’s make even better tiny houses than tiny houses, in part because they have lost their value due to high gas prices. Not too many people are wanting to buy gas for these beasts that get 4-8 MPG. As a tiny house, one can park it and move it only as-needed. I only move mine in the summer around town, then I will move it to another location once I locate employment. My gas costs are almost non-existent. I have put 300 miles on my Winnebago since I bought it almost two years ago.

There are fields upon fields of RV’s, rotting, waiting to be sold. The RV is a preposterous thing to begin with, but with gas prices over $3/gallon, they’re unsustainable for almost anyone to use recreationally. Which is one reason the tiny house movement is preposterous. There are fields of mobile, manufactured, tiny homes that have almost no value and represent a huge potential savings over the construction of a new structure to live in. These rolling, self-contained, pre-made and largely abandoned homes are a much better answer to the problems that tiny-housers are trying to solve. The most environmentally friendly thing one can do is to repurpose something that is unused or underutilized, rather than construction of new places and the creation of new demand for building products. Time for the tiny house movement to start looking at repurposing rather than just creating new construction. Tiny houses are just RV’s made with conventional housing products, which are heavy and require a big, powerful truck to haul them. Tiny houses solve only one problem, but they create all new ones.

Walking A Fine Line

Living in an RV, there’s a fine line that exists between trashy and adventurous. I only suggest this based on the stereotypes I run into and the ways some people seem to think about such a living arrangement. Whenever someone builds a “tiny house” on a flatbed trailer, the internet appears to stand up in applause. Often costing upwards of $30-$40 thousand dollars, tiny housers are often lauded as some kind of hero of the people for going to extremes to escape. When I tell people that I’m “doing the tiny house thing by repurposing a motorhome,” I get varied responses from “wow, that’s really cool!” to “yikes, living on the edge, huh?” The core of the response appears to be rooted in how each person understands financial freedom, responsibility, and the housing system.

Dodging the line between trashy and adventurous isn’t really a problem for me – as a graduate student with a history of successful career choices and an undeniably robust garage of adventure tools, the line itself only exists when meeting people and having to disprove their stereotype. The effect is an uphill battle every time I meet someone and an almost ubiquitous cultural disconnect on why such a lifestyle would have been arrived at in the first place.

Thinking about the cultural norms at work here, I must point out that I am amplifying a minority of reactions in order to make sense of it, but the minority of reactions end up having power. The way some people assume trashiness or dismal poverty can be almost oppressive. Words and reactions to my lifestyle, though infrequent, leave me sometimes feeling the need to prove myself more than I should have to. The reason this reaction comes about is that I find that those who are judgmental or skeptical are often carriers of pernicious stereotypes and are totally unaware of their place in a system that is there to keep them as poor as possible for as long as possible.

Hashing this out is almost ridiculous because I’m talking only about a tiny fraction of the reactions I encounter and the likely presence of discrete reactions that I do not directly encounter. Nevertheless, the presence of shortsightedness and *-isms is an ugly reality.

The reason I find this so fascinating is that dissenters are often in a far worse position than I am, financially, and with their life potentials. I own the roof over my head outright, I own a [real] house that I rent out, and my living expenses are a fraction of even the cheapest apartments. As soon as I start working again, I get to keep an unfair portion of my wages instead of paying for some slumlord’s luxury vacation or fancy car. I can rent an apartment, just like the [imaginary] dissenters, tomorrow and then have an RV to park in some cool place for the weekends.

Though this may be an imaginary problem, I anticipate the presence of such dissent, perhaps in those who know of me but don’t know me. And I must suggest that dissent is based upon a total misunderstanding of the financial system that I have created, the purpose of the system, and the flexibility of the system. This life project is based upon the idea that I am still young enough to unhinge my life, so the next phase can be rooted in security and lack of debt. But it’s hard to communicate these things to those who have never thought about how criminal it is to pay a landlord a “market price” for an apartment or pay endless interest on a home loan. While we will all be subject to these forces for our entire lives (in the middle and lower classes, at least), even in my crazy little situation, some don’t seem to even comprehend why someone would want to minimize their exposure to such a system by going rogue. Why not just pay for an apartment every month, right? Maybe I shouldn’t be so intent on flipping the system, but I am yet unchained and domesticated to the point that I can do this, do it well, and come out ahead. At least that’s the way I see it.

Tiny House Highlight: An Amazing Design

Not really related to my RV situation, but I thought of a design for a house like this a while back and then saw a live version of it:

http://tinyhouseswoon.com/escape-cabin/

I will have one someday.