Both Australia and New Zealand have a tendency towards big houses — so much so, Australia now has the largest new houses in the world. Despite a downward trend in occupants, between 1984–5 and 2002–3 the floor area of new Australian houses rose by 40 per cent and has since increased further. In New Zealand, it grew by 73 per cent between 1976 and 2006.
A symptom of this oversized trend is the McMansion. Typically found on the urban fringe, these often ugly, large buildings are usually built to the edge of the lot, swallowing up the outdoor backyard space. There is no evidence that living in a large house makes people happy; in fact, the opposite may be true.
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Large houses contribute to low urban density, sprawl, car dependence and corresponding health problems caused by lack of exercise. Environmentally, they require large inputs of materials and energy, put pressure on non-renewable resources such as oil and metal ores, and swallow up bushland and farmland.
Properties in Australia and NZ are some of the world’s most unaffordable and the trend is worsening. Meanwhile, rents are becoming increasingly steep: many low-income households pay out at least 30 per cent of their income each week. Many younger people accept they’ve been priced out of the market and have resigned themselves to either renting or living with their parents. Others are looking around for out-of-the-box solutions that contradict mainstream ideas about what housing should look like.
Tiny house options
As house sizes blow out, at the other end of the scale a trend towards small housing is reflected in residences such as inner-city micro-apartments, granny flats, cabins and caravans. Shipping containers have become increasingly popular as the shells for alternative homes. But managing the toxic risks from treated wall paints and pesticide-coated floors can be expensive and not everybody likes living inside metal.
Recreational vehicles (RVs) and mobile homes are frequently associated with the growing “grey nomad” movement. However, new RVs have toxic problems of their own, often emitting formaldehyde and styrene from their construction materials. Trailer parks have sprouted across the US but residents, generally from a lower socioeconomic stratum, are marked by social stigma.
Meanwhile, America is in the throes of a new, fast-growing tiny house movement that turns traditional assumptions about housing on their head. These ideas were stimulated by figures such as the architect Sarah Susanka, author of the 1997 book The Not So Big House, but earlier examples include early 20th century German allotment huts and shantytown housing in developing countries.
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A tiny house can have a floor space of anything from around 5.6 to 60 square metres. Many have an elevated sleeping loft while others comprise two storeys. Wood is a popular building material and, unlike an RV, a tiny house is built to last.
Things kicked off in the late 1990s with the founding of the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company in Northern California. Back then, the company’s diminutive residences appealed mostly to people interested in off-grid living. By the late 2000s, with the arrival of the global financial crisis, purchasers tended to buy them for economic reasons. Around that time, tiny houses started to attract media attention and the movement has steadily attracted interest and enthusiasm since. Anecdotal evidence suggests the tiny house idea appeals more to single women than single men, although the reasons for this have not been thoroughly investigated.
Anybody interested in purchasing a tiny house from Tumbleweed will pay US$57,000 and upwards (AU$69,000/NZ$74,000), with a mortgage-style 15-year instalment payment option. A self-build from a set of plans is significantly cheaper and many DIY-ers have gone ahead despite no prior experience other than attending a construction workshop. Some houses have been made from salvaged materials, further cutting costs.
Most of today’s tiny houses are built on wheels using trailer frames, enabling them to be towed and relocated. Where planning rules prohibit permanent structures, a tiny house on wheels is an ideal workaround. To many, this will conjure up romantic associations of ornate gypsy caravans and smallness of scale does offer greater scope for aesthetically pleasing attention to detail.
Typical locations where tiny houses are moved to or constructed include rural blocks of land, backyards (especially for young or elderly people living with a family) and tiny house parks. With the right zoning permissions, one creative solution is urban infill. While official codes often ban tiny houses plus other alternative living structures such as yurts, many people go under the radar and action is generally taken only in the event of a complaint.
Fortunately, the authorities are slowly coming around to the idea that tiny houses are more a solution than a problem and some communities are embracing them. In 2014, the town of Spur, near Lubbock in West Texas, with a population of a thousand, became America’s first tiny-house-friendly community, allowing them to be built anywhere in town. Walsenburg in Colorado permits tiny houses in some zonings, as long as they are situated on foundations and connected to the mains. Among larger cities, Portland and Seattle have the most progressive policies, although tiny houses cannot be the primary housing unit on a lot.
In Australia and NZ, where the tiny house movement is very new, dozens of mobile dwellings have been built or are under construction. The NZ eco-business Biobuild is interested in moving into this embryonic sector, and hands-on tiny house building workshops have recently started in Victoria.
New Zealand pioneer Bryce Langston is enthusiastic and takes a refreshingly non-commercial attitude. After finishing his prototype tiny house, he intends to open-source plans free of charge online as a means of empowering would-be builders.
To Langston, tiny houses represent a social revolution whereby young people who feel excluded from the housing market can aspire to home ownership. In his view, “The majority of people who build tiny houses are creating places that they will themselves live in and a lot more love, care and attention goes into their homes than those that developers build for someone else.”
A homelessness solution
Many solutions have been pursued for the homeless but rarely has the idea of giving them homes been broached. In the US, provision of accommodation to this group is generally cheaper or the same cost as managing the problem with less effective Band-Aid solutions.
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Within the past year or so, a movement to create tiny house parks for homeless people has spread rapidly across the US, despite challenges such as bureaucratic hurdles and the NIMBY attitudes of nearby residents. These dwellings have generally been built with volunteer labour, some from homeless people themselves.
In East Austin, Texas, the Community First! tiny house park offers micro-homes to this group for minimal rent. The project, which was instigated by the faith outreach service, Mobile Loaves and Fishes, features a community Garden, beehives, chickens and a tool library. When completed, it will have at least 200 dwellings. Several other smaller initiatives are underway in Newfield (New York State), Olympia (Washington), Portland (Oregon) and Madison (Wisconsin).
Counting the benefits (& costs)
Many people report feeling happier in tiny houses and live in them by choice. Empty-nesters frequently find their houses excessively large for their needs and feel drawn to something smaller. In contrast to today’s large, anonymous indoor spaces, a tiny house is cosy and homely and, like being in a tent, it can feel pleasantly compact and self-contained.
Avoiding expensive mortgages, high rents and pricey repairs give a tiny house occupant the economic freedom to pursue their life’s passions rather than feel as if they’re running on a hamster wheel.
The urge to simplify one’s life is a strong motivating factor, especially given that possessions tend to rob home-dwellers of precious time. Living in a tiny house is a powerful lesson in deciding which items are really needed, as all non-essential clutter will have to be relinquished. Time-draining housework is kept to a minimum as there is very little cleaning to be done.
It also means transcending consumerism, as there’s no point buying something if there’s nowhere to keep it. Time that would otherwise be devoted to shopping can instead be directed towards more creative and fulfilling pursuits.
Because their size encourages residents to spend time outside, tiny-house dwellers are more likely to engage with, and contribute to, their surrounding community. This reverses the modern trend towards spending increasing amounts of time indoors and being more insular within one’s own private bubble.
In a family situation, younger children typically take to tiny houses like ducks to water, treating them like a play-space such as a treehouse or fort. A lack of indoor space also encourages them to go out and exercise instead of being glued to a screen. For all families with children, the issues of noise and privacy have to be planned in advance.
Water & energy systems
A tiny house is a step towards becoming more self-sufficient while lowering one’s environmental impact. However, the practicalities of life that people take for granted in a regular-sized house need to be thought through.
Where water isn’t being fed into a house via the mains, the easiest and healthiest solution seems to be an indoor storage tank made of steel and designed for top-ups via a garden hose.
For greywater not connected to the sewer, the best environmental disposal option is to feed it onto a garden area without edible ground-level plants. Keeping everything that goes down the sink biodegradable will avoid damaging the soil. The second-best option is to construct a soakaway in the ground.
Where there is no flush toilet setup, a composting toilet is a good option, ideally one that separates the different wastes and that dries out the solids that can later be used as compost.
Laundry can be the biggest headache of all. Ideas include washer-dryer combination units and portable hand-crank washing machines that have the downside of being unsuitable in cold weather without a dryer. A communal laundry is good for a village situation, or you could just cop out entirely by employing a laundry service.
If you’re off the grid, as many appliances as possible (fridge, cooker and hot water) will need to run on gas. Electricity is best supplied by a 12-volt battery running off solar, but this will limit power use to a few small items. For heating and cooling, good insulation is a key factor. Vented gas heaters are most popular, although some choose wood for heating. Shading via overhead vegetation, awnings and screens is ideal for summer cooling.
The downsides
Having a tiny house also has its drawbacks. Towing can be a pain when faced with windy roads, steep hills, low overhead bridges or overhanging branches. It also requires a vehicle such as a 4WD with a fair bit of grunt that will probably use more fuel than a sedan. As a result, mobile tiny house owners often prefer staying put to travelling.
Some comments online unkindly suggest that tiny-housers are responding to economic oppression by living in a shoebox. However, this ignores the fact that nearly every tiny house resident is making a choice to enhance their quality of life.
In densely built-up urban areas, a major trend towards tiny houses could leave the inhabitants feeling they are living in a beehive rather than a city. Most urban construction of tiny houses has so far occurred in Europe and Japan, parts of which, probably not coincidentally, are among the world’s most densely populated regions. If the tiny house movement were to position itself as a solution to overpopulation, it may have a PR problem on its hands.
Despite the limited drawbacks, tiny houses have struck a chord in a section of the population where people remain interested in downshifting, in sloughing off unnecessary baggage and in finding their life’s purpose.
For more details, visit tinyhousesaustralia.com.
