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Tiny houses entice budget-conscious Americans (AFP)
In a country that nearly always believes bigger is better—think supersize fries, giant cars and 10-gallon hats—more and more Americans are downsizing their living quarters. Welcome to the world of tiny homes, most of them less than 400 square feet (less than 40 square meters), which savvy buyers are snapping up for their minimalist appeal and much smaller carbon footprints. The tiny homes revolution, which includes those on foundations and those on wheels, began a few decades ago, but the financial crisis of 2008 and the coming-of-age of millennials gave it a new impetus. The proliferation of home improvement shows on networks like HGTV fueled the trend, inspiring customers ready to personalize their own small living spaces.
Cost is one of the driving factors—a tiny home of just over 200 square feet with a customized interior can go for about $50,000—a massive savings over a McMansion in the suburbs.
[...] Despite the advantages, the tiny homes movement is far from widespread. Rough estimates put the number of tiny homes in the United States at a little more than 10,000. The first sticking point is financing—would-be homeowners are finding it impossible to get traditional loans for non-traditional houses. Banks are instead offering medium-term loans of up to seven years—at significantly higher interest rates than regular loans. But the main obstacle is a legal one: most municipalities and towns ban residents from living year-round in anything on wheels, and often have statutes requiring homes to be at least 900 square feet.
[...] To vault over the many legal hurdles, many tiny home buyers are setting up their places without permits from local urban planning officials. But others are opting for tiny house communities, which are on solid legal footing and are sprouting up all over. Tiny Estates in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania took over a former campground and obtained the necessary permits to accommodate tiny homes on wheels. "It's important to go to your town meetings, your borough meetings and just say, 'Hey, here's what they are'," says Berrier. "It's not some clandestine little sketchy thing. These are beautiful tiny houses, well designed. If anything, they add property value to things."
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday June 20 2019, @01:34PM (15 children)
If you go to the trouble, and have the money, to buy land why wouldn't you just build a house on it then? Unless you have some kind of mobile home fetish.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @01:45PM (13 children)
Because at the moment I have $30-50k I want to spend instead of $100k+...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:55PM (1 child)
Seems like I chose the right neighborhood - not only will you not be getting a mobile to live in near me, you won't even afford a lot.
Buying a cheap mobile and slapping it on a cheap piece of land is what Red State America is built from, as counterintuitive as that may seem.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21 2019, @01:05AM
Well I'm torn between that and $500k condo with $20k in fees and taxes per year. I'd rather just save my money and wait out the crash. I may run some goats milk experiments while I'm at it too.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday June 20 2019, @06:20PM (8 children)
Well for under $30K you can buy a brand new fully loaded 26~27 foot travel trailer. Most of the "Tiny Homes" I've seen are just heavy wood frame boxes on trailers that require a very large truck to tow.
https://rv.campingworld.com/rvclass/used-travel-trailer-rvs [campingworld.com]
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday June 20 2019, @07:28PM (7 children)
If travel trailers are like RVs they don't wear very well at all. A year of actually living in an RV wears it out pretty bad. They don't have enough ventilation so you get mold issues.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday June 21 2019, @03:07AM (6 children)
Beg to differ. Lived in a travel trailer for 24 years. Mold was not a problem. Roof maintenance was a nuisance (needs to be resealed at least every other year, or you will have leaks) but otherwise... depends on the trailer. An old Airstream or Rollohome can stay in very good shape for decades, with just ordinary maintenance. Solid wood interior (and you can still get this) holds up far better than composite. Main difficulty is sufficient insulation for extreme conditions (hot or cold) -- generally you need to build some surrounding structure to ward off sun or preserve heat (and prevent your pipes from freezing, if you're hooked up).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday June 21 2019, @02:20PM (5 children)
Interesting. I wonder if that's an issue with my sample size (n=2) or a real difference in travel trailers and RVs?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday June 21 2019, @05:00PM (4 children)
Don't know...I've lived in two different travel trailers (always in harsh conditions), and used two others for long term storage, all very different makes and quality. Still own one of 'em, and it's a 1974 model. Might be partly differences in quality of workmanship (eg. Airstream), but I suspect more the fact that most people don't know how much roof maintenance any sort of mobile home (on an RV or its own chassis) needs to stay watertight, because the durn things FLEX, both the frame moving in the wind or on the road, and the metal skin being subject to temperature creep. Seams dry out and start microleaks. Uncoated aluminum corrodes, eventually gets porous, and then you get seeping right though the skin. Let that go on long enough and you'll get frame rot inside the roof and along the bottom, and maybe the floor rots out too.
There's commonly some condensation inside the metal skin, tho that's not a big problem if the whole is weathertight and the interior gets occasional ventilation. Might be an issue in Louisiana or Florida where nothing ever really dries out. But I expect it's a problem there with regular houses, too. But mold otherwise? I'd be up there resealing the roof, cuz that's probably the root of the problem.
Biggest difference in interior durability is the same as we see in cheap modular homes: solid wood outlasts composite and plastic by a wide margin, even if you're careful. My original trailer had all solid wood interior, and it was still in good shape when the whole was finally retired -- at 52 years old, having been lived in fulltime most of its life (accumulated storm damage/repairs finally caught up with the exterior). The one I still have has a better frame (it has a mobile home undercarriage, which is serious overkill), interior not nearly as good, but still livable.
My sister has been shopping for a trailer for extended use, and I will say I've not been at all impressed with most of 'em -- don't like the suspension (WAY too soft, especially with that high center of gravity too many have to avoid the expense of wheel wells -- fucking *hazardous* in a crosswind), not impressed with most of the layouts (looks homey, but not very efficient if you need it for more than a weekend), and what's with all the poorly fitted cheapass plastic in a $40,000 trailer??!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday June 21 2019, @09:01PM (3 children)
The problem we had with the RVs (early 90s Winnebago and late 90's? Allegro) wasn't with the roof. That part was ok. For ventilation they had one or two pop-up roof vents, and one window that would open. That wasn't sufficient to ventilate them. The breath of three people sleeping in it plus steam from washing and cooking, would condense on the coldest surfaces, the windows. There was nowhere for that water to go, and the water soaked into the walls and upholstery. This delaminated the wallpaper and caused super annoying/gross mold issues.
... add to that the heater couldn't keep up with the windows being open and it wasn't a great time.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday June 22 2019, @12:51AM (2 children)
Yeah, heating 'em with propane in cold weather is an exercise in futility. I had a wood/coal stove in mine and that was comfy, but not practical for everyone (and a lot of work). But it sounds like your real problem was lack of insulation, so the interior walls never did warm up, hence condensation where you don't expect it -- I didn't have that problem with myself and several dogs in the trailer, but mine was pretty well insulated, as they go.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday June 22 2019, @02:51AM (1 child)
A couple of times we lit up all four burners on the (gas) stove to warm it up quick. It worked, but I was worried about Carbon Monoxide poisoning the whole time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Saturday June 22 2019, @03:37AM
The way to do that is to just use one burner (or two if it's really cold -- like below zero), and put a nice thick clay flowerpot upside-down over the burner, turned down as low as it will reliably stay lit and burn all blue. Yeah, it'll produce some CO but no worse than if you were cooking over it, and it's a rare trailer that's so airtight that CO is a serious problem, plus there's generally some venting over the stove that sucks it up. -- This method is considerably more efficient than using the propane furnace, where most of the heat goes up the chimney. And your propane lasts weeks, not days.
And if you need humidifying (not you :) sit a tin can half-full of water on top of the pot.
Learned this trick (and used it for many years) from someone who was heating an entire 10x50 trailer with just one burner, with outdoor temps just above freezing.
CO getting to a problem level causes a vague but persistently unpleasant headache, so at least if you're awake, you can get reasonable warning. This was how I discovered a busted vent pipe in my current house (which has a real furnace), tho it didn't set off the CO monitor.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday June 21 2019, @12:25AM (1 child)
As pointed out by OP, you will therefore lose those $30-50k over the next few years.
Unless you're allergic to other people, use the 30k as a downpayment on a real condo, which doesn't have have to be bigger than a tiny house, but will appreciate.
Or, 50k will pay for rent in many places for many years, without the inherent risks of ownership.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21 2019, @01:08AM
Why will the land be worth zero?
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Sunday June 23 2019, @05:59AM
Because they are cheap, many are actually decently well built, and you don't mind used you can pick one up for next to nothing. You'll also have your house a lot quicker than building it too.
It's a place to live and if you aren't planning on moving anywhere soon who cares about the depreciation? Besides, many times the real value when you sell is the land and not the buildings. The added value of any house you build is going to be less than the cost of the building materials and the labor.