My love affair with tiny houses

Whenever I'm in a hotel room, my mind automatically goes to thinking about how I could configure the space to live in it. This sort of fantasizing is an extension of my childhood preoccupation with imagining, while I was lolling in the bathtub, how I could turn the bathroom into my home. (Fold-down bed over the tub, minifridge under the sink...) 

My fantasy vacation place is one of Brownie's Cabins on Route 6 in Wellfleet. (If anything's on my bucket list, it's a week or two in one of these little gems. The only downside: you really do need a car to get to and fro.)

Maybe I couldn't live in one of those 100 square foot NYC apartments, but I know I could go small. 

I lived for a number of years in a studio apartment (which quite nicely had a separate kitchen, a separate foyer, pretty good closet space, and an alcove that served as an office). And, although I would prefer something with a separate bedroom, I'm pretty sure I could do it again. Which is a good thing, given that - if I live long enough - I will need to be in a smaller space if I need assisted living.

Right now, I have 1,240 square feet. If and when I decide to up stakes here - which will likely come at some point, given that I have a narrow, winding interior stairway which, although I do have a railing, just ain't going to age well - I'm destined to live in smaller quarters at some point. 

Anyway, because of my lifelong love affair with tiny living, I have long been enamored of the tiny house movement. 

I avidly watched the tiny house show when it was on HGTV, and once went to a tiny house exhibit in Brattleboro, VT. 

So I was a bit dismayed to see a recent headline in Wired that read Whatever Happened to the Tiny House Movement?

Oh, no!

One of the first tiny-house folks - Jay Shafer, founder of Tumbleweed Tiny Houses - is sometimes credited as the father of the "minicottage aesthetic that launched the [tiny house] fantasy. He kicked things off in the late nineties/early oughts. 

The idea particularly seemed to enchant people who idealized a low-footprint, quality-over-quantity style of life—one in which they could awaken in a loft bed, wrap themselves in linen, brew a French press in a compact yet exquisitely designed kitchen, emerge onto the tiny dew-covered porch, and sip thoughtfully as sunlight filtered through pine needles.

At my age, I really couldn't do the sleep-in-the-loft thing, even if there were a staircase (vs. a rope ladder). No way this girl is going downstairs to pee in the middle of the night. And, no, emptying a chamber pot would NOT work. Plus I don't drink coffee, so I wouldn't be brewing with my French press. But "exquisitely designed...dew-covered porch..." Yeah, it does enter my mind. 

There's so much to like about tiny houses. Cheaper than a normal-sized home, let alone a super-sized McMansion. Smaller environmental footprint. Less storage, so it discourages mindless over consumption. Plus so damned cute...and oh so Instagrammable...

Alas, tiny houses never caught on in anything more than a tiny way. 

If you watch HGTV, most home buyers fall into the bigger = better category. They need a great room, two offices, guest quarters, an ensuite master, walk in closets. 

People may not want to live in a tiny house - and, admittedly, tiny house living is really not compatible with having kids, or even having a spouse; I definitely couldn't have done a tiny house with my husband; 1240 sq. ft. worked fine, mostly because it was on two floors - but apparently a lot of fantasizers wouldn't mind vacationing in one. These days:

You’re more likely to encounter one while scrolling through $300-a-night Airbnb listings than browsing Zillow.

The "movement," which started out as pro-sustainability, has shifted to pro-greed. And so we have vacationers playing at being weekend sustainabililty-ites, and landlords raking it in. In the same way, a ton of apartments and houses have been swept off the old-fashioned, once-normal real estate market. When once these apartments and houses would have been available to buy or rent, they're now in the short-term, more lucrative game. 

Some of the decline in the hottie rating of the tiny house movement is the inevitable petering out of (and backlash to) any fad. Let alone the reaction to one that was so virtue-signaling, as the tiny house movement was associated with holier than thou, anti-consumption snobbery. (No wonder I was drawn to it...)

But it turns out that it wasn't just greed-heads who were drawn to tiny housing. Sometimes it was outright fraudsters. 

As in Matthew Sowash, a Colorado (where else!) tiny house builder (as CEO of Holy Ground Tiny Homes), who cheated 189 tiny house buyers out of $6M, taking deposits but never delivering a finished product.

The nonprofit company spent more than $400,000 to buy and repair race cars and other vehicles in addition to $35,000 in real estate in Colorado and Alaska, according to an 81-page report filed Friday and obtained by the local Fox affiliate station. (Source: NY Post)

Doesn't sound like Sowash was much of a businessman from the jump.

The tiny home company was operating at a loss, according to the report. It spent $4.4 million on materials to construct homes it then sold for just $2.6 million in 2021 and did even worse the following year — spending $5.3 million on materials for homes sold for $2 million, the [company's bankruptcy] filing states. 

What an awful business model. Nonprofit, indeed. 

Despite the dimming of the movement, I'm still a tiny house fan girl. Maybe some day... (Brownie's Cabins or bust!)