What Happened to the Tiny Homes Revolution?

An article by Eve Andrews for Grist critiques the tiny homes movement—an idea that seems to have come and gone in the public consciousness, not to mention the newsfeeds of planning publications.

What once seemed like a revolution in housing and culture—born from a crisis of housing affordability and the ravages of the Great Recession—now seems like an “Instagram aesthetic,” according to Andrews.

But for all the hubbub, tiny houses never really entered the mainstream realm of homeownership. Instead, they entered the province of tourists seeking a brief decampment to a smaller-scale, climate-friendly lifestyle. You’re more likely to encounter one while scrolling through $300-a-night Airbnb listings than browsing Zillow.

Still, Andrews is unwilling to call the tiny homes movement a failure, rather it’s more of a victim of unrealistic expectations: “[T]he expectations placed upon it were too high: that it could take on all the sins of a bloated, profit-driven housing industry, and deliver us as a nation to a humbler, happier way of living,” writes Andrews.

The source article, linked below, includes a while history of the tiny homes movement, including the highs provided by the debut of a Netflix home improvement show in 2014, Tiny House Nation, to the lows of the Airbnb-ification of the movement.

Andrews also sees some reason for optimism that the ideas that birthed the tiny homes movement still have a chance at wider adoption, including in the resources tiny homes provide people experiencing homelessness and as a popular new typology of housing, the accessory dwelling unit.