I toured a 'pocket community' of tiny home - the builders are trying to help solve the housing crisis in Canada
Was just driving through a town in southern Manitoba and pulled over to take a break and saw these tiny homes: https://i.imgur.com/hG9NAGR.jpeg
Tiny homes have always intrigued me so I talked to the owner. Its in a trailer park and this was a lot that was available for development so they had 16 tiny homes built in three sizes. The smallest is a 510 sf one bedroom, then a slightly larger one bedroom and the biggest one is a 920 sf two bedroom.
They are "modular" homes which means they were manufactured in a factory a couple of hours away and trailered into the site. But despite the fact they travelled by trailer and that they sit on screwpiles instead of a foundation, they are fully built as regular homes.
Its cold here in winter (down to -40c) so the homes are super insulated with about 12" of insulation in the floor and ceiling and 6" in the walls with another 2" of foam insulation on the outside walls. They are completely heated by the mini split system with the addition of a convection electric heater in each room to keep them warm in the coldest part of winter. Amazingly in a place where my own bills for electricity can hit $250 in winter without heat, the most the owner said she paid was $80 for electricity including heat.
The interiors look like any regular home only smaller:https://i.imgur.com/aFufGMI.jpeg and definitely dont give the same vibe as a mobile home. It feels like a house with small rooms.
So far the 2 bedroom units are selling fairly well but the one bedrooms arent moving as easily. Part of the problem was covid. In this town a 'starter' home can easily be 350k and they were hoping to sell these from 80k to 120k. But during covid everything skyrocketed from materials to moving costs and the least expensive unit is now 175k and the biggest one is 220k. Add on the 350 a month for lot rent, which includes yard care/shovelling, and its pushing the envelope of what most would consider "affordable" anymore but there's not much they can do now to bring the price down.
Buyers so far tend to be those who are looking for tiny easy to care for space: a widow who sold her house and wants something small she can leave and go travelling, a guy who works for a railroad who's only home one week a month, a new immigrant family who are just happy to own something rather than pay the same amount in rent.
I applaud them for having a vision and actually pursuing it. There are some kinks to work out and it would be great if the prices could drop significantly but at least its an alternative to renting or buying an older mobile home. Its one of the first tiny home communities Ive seen up close and I came away with a positive impression. I think its going to be a great little community of tiny home lovers.
I was expecting something much smaller. Coming from the perspective of a downtown condo dweller, 510-920 sqft is just regular sized homes.
Maybe for a condo it seems normal but 510 is pretty tiny for a detached house. There are many jurisdictions, including the one my son just bought in, where anything under 700 sq ft is considered "too small" to be viable as a home. He bought a house that's 682 sf and there was only one bank that would give him a mortgage because of the size. He's going to add 20 sf before the next renewal so he can shop more banks next time.
I’ve always been fascinated with tiny homes; the smaller the better. I’m a pianist and a piano technician though, which begs the idea of something “modular” to be unfit for my wants and needs in a tiny home. Unfortunately, I’d have to have something specially built around this hypothetical piano but I’m getting off track.
Thanks for your assessment of this option! I really appreciate the insight because I’ve thought about living in a trailer park recently and having a more home-like experience with the tiny home sounds much more pleasing.
I dunno if I’m adding much in terms of Tildes’ conversation, but I just had to say thanks!
Whenever the topic of tiny homes comes up, I keep thinking of this video by Adam Something. He's one of the YouTubers criticizing weird tech bro ideas from the likes of Elon Musk. A lot of these kinda ideas seem fun, futuristic, or environmentally friendly, but the devil's in the details, and they usually end up being much worse than very conventional solutions.
TL;DW:
Ehh... I mean yes, apartment complexes are always going to be a more efficient land use per person solution. But I feel that's kind of paving over the whole missing middle density that comes up so often. I used to rent a unit in an old Bungalow Court, which as far as I'm concerned is just tiny home equivalents from decades past, and it was really nice. Relatively affordable, easy to upkeep, yet no shared walls, which if you've ever lived in an apartment complex, can be a huge QoL improvement.
I genuinely do think there is room for smaller-scale, still-detached construction.
But that's the point of a tiny home. These are owners who have lived in apartments and want to have a home without shared walls, a parking spot right outside their front door and a yard , even if its tiny. Its not always about efficiency of space, its about feeling like you own a 'home'.
I feel that despite the "trying to solve the housing crisis" tag ,what the tiny home builders are trying to achieve is make cheap homes that can go in trailer parks. They're succeeding there, at least
(skip to the ~8:00 mark, the first 8 mins are about Musk hype and idiot fans)
As a European I find it funny you call a 85 m^2 house tiny.
It's not big, but it is bigger than my apartment.
Do you equate apartments to houses in Europe? Apartments are generally quite small here too, but houses aren't. An 'average' 3 bedroom house is a minimum of 1600 sf and 2000 sf is not unusual. But those are usually bought by people with children.
As of 2021, 46.4% of EU residents lived in apartments. This is averaged across the entire EU, so in some countries it's an even higher proportion -- here in Germany it's 56.4%, and in Spain it's 65.7% -- and in others it's a lower proportion (in Ireland it's 10%). I'm having trouble finding a hard percentage on this for the US, but I did find a stat that 39% of US renters live in apartments. This means that the rate when including all Americans is almost certainly MUCH lower, since the home ownership rate in the US is relatively high (~66% of homes in the US are occupied by their owner). So I think it's safe to say that in most of Europe, a far larger proportion of the population lives in apartments compared to in the US.
It is also definitely far less uncommon for families with kids to live in apartments here in Europe than it is in the US. I got sick of googling, but for my anecdotal experience: My apartment is 84 m^2 (and that includes a huge balcony, so the floorplan without that is almost certainly smaller than these tiny houses) and I have neighbors with kids in units with the same floorplan or only marginally larger ones.
I think a large part of the difference for us, here in Canada is that we literally have vast open areas that are not populated. Canada has 10 MILLION square kilometers and a population thats only nearing 40 million people so a density of only 4 people per sq km. That's absolutely massive amounts of room compared to any other developed nation (not that a lot of it isnt inhospitably cold but thats not my point)
So I dont think most Canadians think small... it's more like 'we have the space, may as well keep building the city out further and further into the surrounding farmland. Why build UP when we can just build OUT and have our own house?
Only in the last few years have I heard more civic governments saying 'we have to stop this spread, its too expensive to provide infrastructure thats so spread out' And so there's a new push for "densification" of housing. But even that doesnt necessarily mean building more apartments - there's a push for putting basement suites into single family homes, putting in garage suites or backyard homes or maybe tearing down an old house and putting in a duplex or a fourplex.
The people I know who actually WANT a small place are usually looking for a condo - so they still own it, not rent it, but someone else is hired to do all the maintenance and yard work, they only have to take care of what's inside their four walls. But the "American dream" which is also very much the "Canadian dream" is to own your own detached single family home. If you get the white picket fence, the wife, 2 kids and a dog, you're living the dream lol
I cant say it always make sense. Personally I LOVE small spaces and living in a 320 sf (3 m^2) RV right now for a few weeks at a time, is just perfect.
I don't think it makes sense to equate the size of a country with how many people live in flats vs apartments -- this certainly doesn't hold when you compare countries within the EU with one another, since there's such wide variation between them. Ireland and the Netherlands both have lower percentages among EU countries, and neither has huge swaths of empty land at the scale of someplace like Canada. There's obviously a rural/urban divide in it -- obviously far more people live in apartments in big cities and very few do in rural areas -- but I don't think the size of the country is to blame for differences in how small towns and suburbs are constructed, at least not principally. I suspect that's far more cultural than it is practical, at least on North America's end.
Im only commenting because this is an interesting point Ive never real thought about before not because I really disagree strongly or anything... but I think the size of our country is exactly why we have the culture we do. When my grandparents came to Canada they landed on the east coast (Halifax, Nova Scotia) and boarded a train with very little money, only to ride for days 3/4 of the way across the country to end up in the prairie provinces (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta). My wife's grandfather travelled by train and then horse and cart 5300 km across Canada to get to his new land.
Why so far? Because they were given either free land or very cheap land if they would promise to clear the trees, till the earth and build a homestead, which they did. These are Europeans (Dutch/German/Russian/Swedish in my family) who travelled halfway round the world to build farms and small towns literally by the sweat of their brow and create their Canadian dream. There was zero thought of anything less than having a quarter of land (160 acres, 65 hectares) and the idea of an apartment would have been completely foreign to them, especially with large families (5 to 8 kids was not unusual). They came for the land, and the wide open prairies.
Eventually of course those small towns became bustling cities, but that Canadian dream remains in the hearts of many Canadians, although as we become far less rural and much more urban, its being forced to shift to smaller and smaller dwellings.
Thats my theory anyway :)
I'm not going to claim the size of the country is completely inconsequential, but I just don't think it's the main factor when a relatively tiny country like Ireland also has high rates of people living in homes instead of apartments.
Those look similar to the Katrina cottages from years prior; there are still a few scattered communities of them throughout the US Gulf States, as far as I know.
I’ve always been partial to smaller, more compact homes, myself. It’s interesting to see them popping up recently in more places.
I lived in a cottage community just outside Seattle for a while.
The houses were all two stories and 700-900 sq ft. There was a parking lot with one car port per property. Between the cottages was grass, sidewalks, and scattered common areas. It was split into two parts with 12 cottages each.
I didn't know anyone who lived across the parking lot, but I knew everyone on my side. During lockdown we'd sit outside in a common area when it was nice out and eat lunch together with social distancing. It was very pretty in the summer and a really nice place to live until someone moved in who apparently needed as much drama as possible. She'd choose one cottage at a time and bully the tenants out. She forced out an elderly couple, the wife was being treated for brain cancer but the problem lady didn't like their kid. When she finally targeted us I ended up hiring a lawyer to send her a cease and desist.
I'm not sure how she caused this, but someone kept stealing her catalytic converter. The weird part is that none of the other Prius' were touched.
This experience pushed us to finally buy our own house, one without an HOA. I love my new place, but I miss the nice people and neighborhood we had before someone ruined it. I guess this is more of an HOA/bad neighbor complaint. I lived there happily for six years.
Actually, are these tiny homes? Like, in the official sense of the term? From what I can find, the maximum size to qualify is usually 400 or 500 square feet.
That said, these are still on the smaller size for houses. I can also see the appeal of a collection of tiny homes like this, you get some of the perks of an apartment building but without having to share walls with neighbors. So long as they're well-constructed, it seems like a big improvement over apartments and mobile homes.
Since there are a few tiny home lovers here Ill share my all time favorite tiny. This is called the Twelve Cube Home because its 12 x 12 x 12 but if you look at the actual footprint of the house without the deck its actually only 8 x 12 or 96 sq ft. Like the builder said, a lot of people mistake it for a storage shed.
Its got to be the most efficient use of space Ive ever seen of a full featured home - its still got lots of storage, plenty of kitchen cabinets, 4 kitchen appliances, full bathroom, washer/dryer, queen size bed plus a single bed upstairs and even a slide out office desk. Its pretty ingenious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1fFConfF-Q&ab_channel=ShawTVNanaimo
This size is about perfect to me and as an European I always liked the how these American homes look. My condo is just 38m^2 (~409 freedom units) and it's spacious enough for 2 people to live comfortably, however one additional room for hobby stuff would by nice to have.