What Can Our Obsession with Tiny Houses Teach us About Ourselves?

Alice Wilson

7 min readApr 1, 2022

I think we are obsessed with tiny houses for three key reasons:

1) They epitomise our constant yearning for escape

2) We love the idea of simplicity and freedom

3) Tiny houses are cute

The popularity of tiny houses

Why are we obsessed with tiny houses? Based on Google search terms, tiny houses started to get really popular around 2014. That’s when lots of articles, blogs, and social media accounts started popping up about them. It seems like that has just been growing ever since.

Jay Schaffer set up the tiny house tumbleweed business in 1999 and has been working solidly ever since, so tiny house are not new.

Why was it 2014 that saw a spike? I wonder if it could be because the 2008 crash decimated everyone, and then it took a few years for the trend to really grow in such a way that media would start to notice.

In other words, five or six years is the lag time between people scrambling for ways to survive the financial apocalypse and their survival mechanisms becoming part of the collective conscious.

It’s a bit of a bleak theory, I concede.

Are tiny houses a fad?

Well, in the time between 2014 and 2020 we have seen such cultural treasures as ‘vines’ come and go, ‘fidget spinners’ achieve and then lose peak popularity, and the multi-player game Fortnite briefly occupy the collective consciousness.

Throughout these vacillations, tiny houses have remained a constant. They have even increased in popularity despite some sporadic and disparate economic recovery.

If tiny houses are only an attempt to survive under conditions of economic hardship, does their proliferation tell us that something is deeply wrong with the economy, the housing market, and the state of employment.

Tiny Houses Are Cute

We like them because they are small and things that are small are cute.

Ants are not cute because they are always small. A house is not usually small, so when we see a tiny one, it strikes us as cute.

Is this because most tiny houses are presented as clean and well designed and nicely decorated? Probably. A minging tiny house would probably evoke a disgust response.

Three questions I keep coming back to

What can we learn about how to be happy from people who live in tiny houses? Insights from the best things about living tiny and how these apply to non-tiny lifestyles, urban planning, home build and design.
Work is the new religion. What can tiny housers teach us about challenging the dominance of work? When your expenses are reduced by 70% you can make a lot of different choices about what work you do, for how long each day, and for how much money.
Why are tiny houses so popular? They have taken on an almost cult-ish presence in popular media over the last five years. What does their increasing popularity teach us about ourselves, our values, what we are drawn to?

Tiny houses as a plant pot, and you as a plant

As any keen gardener will know, starting your seeds off in a tiny little pot is best for them.

Young seedlings are weak vulnerable to pests and inclement weather; small pots protect them as they grow into teenagers.

When the time comes, you need to put them into bigger pots or plant them out into the ground. If you keep them in the small pots that they grew up in, they will not flourish or reach their full potential and beauty.

Can we use tiny houses in the same way?

The affordability of housing is commonly measured by calculating whether the average cost of rent in an area is less than one third of the average wage in the area.

In York where I work, the average monthly wage is £1,787 and the average rent for a one bed flat in the city is £753 per month.

That means that the average single person living in the city spends 42% of their wage on rent alone. To stretch the metaphor; this is not a hospitable pot for a young seedling.

This seedling is called Grace. She is a recent graduate who works in digital marketing. Like many people, she doesn’t earn the average mean wage for the city, she earns less. This means she spends 57% of her wage of rent.

Nevermind, she thinks, it’s not for long. I’ll save up and I’m sure if I work hard I can get a promotion.

However, with 57% of her wage spent on rent, a further 20% on utilities, internet, phone bills, and a further 20% on food, this leaves Grace with 3% of her wage left over for fun, hobbies, saving for her future.

Maybe I should move into a house share, she thinks.

Maybe she should. Grace could get a single room in a four bed house in a neighbourhood half an hour out of the city and it would save her £200 per month.

But a bus pass for the month is £72 and she will lose an hour every day commuting to and from work; at the moment it’s just a ten minute walk.

And she would have to deal with the politics of a house share; dirty kitchens and bathrooms, who takes the bins out, why has somebody used all of her shampoo, when can she have family to stay over, she has to wait until Stephen has finished in the kitchen before she makes her tea and in the end she just gives up and orders a takeaway.

Not worth it, she decides. Not a good plant pot.

Let’s see, she thinks. Maybe I can save up for a deposit for a place of my own. The average house price in York is £281,080; even a cheap one on the outskirts is £180,000.

Most lenders require a 10% deposit on a mortgage. Grace calculates how long it will take her to save up £18,000 on her current salary and finds out it will take her 14 years.

She is 25 now, so she will be 39 by the time she can afford to put a deposit on a house in York. And how much will they cost by then?

Grace is a patient woman, but even this seems a little excessive.

She hears about a local social enterprise called TinyHousePlot who are trying to get a tiny house development built in the city.

These houses are no larger than 50m2, about the same size as the flat she currently rents. The company help residents to design and build their own tiny house.

TinyHousePlot links residents with suppliers who can finance the construction too. Sounds good.

Each tiny house has a garden and there is a communal house where everyone can get together to cook, or rent a workspace, or put on an art exhibition.

Grace calculates that including the repayment to the house builders and the user agreement fee paid to TinyHousePlot for managing the land, she would be £300 per month better off and would have a private home of her own. A home that she owned and even designed herself.

This seems like a comfortable pot in which Grace could grow, gathering strength and resilience, until she was ready to move into a bigger pot.

Both my research and my business focus on people like Grace, and many others who are like her.

Successful models of what we are trying to do with OpHouse exist, for example Minitopia in the Netherlands. This tiny house development includes a family of four, older divorcees, couples, students, and residents taken from the social housing register.

My own research includes a single father who lives in a tiny cabin in the woods so that he can work part time and spend the rest of his time with his young daughter.

A single artist who lives in a converted horse box so that he can do the artwork that he loves and that brings him fulfilment but doesn’t pay enough to allow him to rent or buy in the South of England.

A young couple who transformed a van into a tiny living space and have spent the last year travelling around Ireland, next, Milan.

The common thread that binds tiny housers

The common thread that binds these different people in their different tiny houses together, is that they can make choices which do not centre on market relations. Tiny houses offer a way out.

They are less vulnerable to being trapped in unhappy jobs or unhappy relationships because they cannot afford to leave. Again, tiny houses offer a way out.

They have time freedom; tiny house residents don’t have to frantically cram their hobbies and socialising into the weekend, assuming they are not too exhausted from their 40 hour work week for that. For the third time, tiny houses offer a way out.

Tiny housers speak of their ability to prioritise the most important things in life; not stuff, not clothes and iPhone’s, “shiny baubles” as one of my participants described them.

They prioritise relationships and a sense of freedom.

Freedom from the tyranny of a 30 year mortgage debt or from living at the mercy of private landlords. Further freedom from having to work 40 hours per week to pay for a house that they seldom have the chance to enjoy.

To summarise:

1) Tiny houses epitomise our constant yearning for escape