The big problem with tiny houses

THEY’RE big on Instagram, YouTube and Netflix, but in real life tiny houses are only a small part of the affordable housing puzzle.

Despite #tinyhouse on Instagram having in excess of 1.3 million global posts (and growing), the pint-sized property phenomenon in Australia is still more of a lifestyle trend than a housing solution, warns Dr Laura Crommelin from the UNSW City Futures Research Centre.

The urban and housing policy researcher said that while tiny houses are definitely cheaper to buy or build than a typical home, and look inviting on social media, it’s a different story in reality.

“The challenge with housing affordability is not just the cost or size of the [house] itself. The price is [mainly] in the land,” Dr Crommelin said.

“If it’s a [genuine] house, presumably, you need some land to put it on, and that has to come from somewhere and be paid for somehow. You don’t solve the land problem by replacing a different type of house with a smaller, tiny house.”

Dr Crommelin also argued that, realistically, apartments are a more economical use of space for the whole community rather than tiny houses.

“You can fit more apartments on a piece of land than you can tiny houses,” she said.

She added that if the tiny house trend took off, communities would need to thoroughly consider all planning implications.

“Fragmented land ownership is something we already grapple with, so it would be risky to subdivide. And much like apartments too, if people are going to be living in tiny homes, they’re going to need other infrastructure to support them as an add on to their smaller personal space like parks, shops, community spaces, libraries, and public services,” she said.

As long as the great Australian dream is still to own one’s own home (whatever the size), Dr Crommelin said tiny houses will not be a silver bullet solution. But they do provide food for thought in how we should plan the suburbs and cities of the future.

Heather Shearer, research fellow at Griffith University’s Cities Research Institute, has interviewed several tiny house dwellers across the country to find out why they chose to minimise their lives.

She discovered that one of the greatest challenges is deciding where to put a tiny home (whether it’s a fixed, or on wheels) as different council regulations can be ambiguous and confusing.

“I found that younger people don’t really care if it’s legal or not because if you’re in your 20s or 30s it doesn’t really matter if you’ve got to move on. It’s like a stepping stone, they see their tiny home as a way of getting into the housing market,” she explained.

“However, older people who may have invested all of their superannuation or savings into a tiny house are very concerned about the legality of it and where it is. It’s also quite important to them to be closer to hospitals, their adult children, transport or other social services.”