While America spins into increasing political turmoil, I choose to talk about....tiny houses

I must have mentioned before that I am a bit of a sucker for looking at tiny houses, mostly on Youtube now.  That New Zealand guys's Living Big in a Tiny House is a deserved success:  he's likeable, always positive, and been all over the world highlighting all types of tiny house.

I can imagine that, as a single man in my 20's, or during the early period of marriage, I could have happily lived in such a very small space.  (My wife was certainly used to living in what we would consider to be pretty much a micro apartment before she met me.)   There is also a lot of talk about how older single women, post divorce and (more likely than men) left with little money could do well in very small residences too.   Assuming you could get over zoning laws that prevent these residences being on their own tiny lot of land, I think it is sort of obvious that they could meet a part of housing market if they could be done well. 

But, let's go through the things that bother me in nearly every single tiny home I see:

*   why do I seem to be the only person in the world who keeps thinking:  "yeah, it's cute and all, but it's a box with windows and doors with no eves.  In wet weather you have to keep every door and window shut??"   Not to mention getting soaked while getting to or from a car.   Look at this as a typical example:

That Youtube channel does feature a lot of New Zealand tiny homes, and admittedly, when it's wet there it's probably not particularly hot and closing windows might not make you feel like you're your in a hot steam box, like it does in Brisbane in summer, when we get most of our rain.   But honestly, isn't any deck more useful covered, even in a cooler climate?

*  Loft bedrooms in which an adult cannot stand up.   That would wear thin pretty fast, I reckon.  My mind even strayed to wondering if some tiny home bedrooms limit couple's sex positions.  

*  Stairs with no rails, in spaces where if you fell off them you would hit your head on a kitchen bench.  Like this:

Years ago, I used to note death trap stairs in fancy schmancy Japanese architectural houses;  now I am continually amazed that adults who buy or build a tiny house can't imagine the risk in walking down stairs like that in darkness, ill health, or while even slightly drunk.  It's not that it's impossible to have a rail on a narrow stairway, for God's sake:

Isn't it just bleedingly obvious that this is ten times safer than that in the previous photo??

*  Permanent versus relocatable homes.   In Big Living, the host is, perhaps 90% of the time, showing people who have found someone else's land on which to park their (movable) tiny home.  (Usually, I assume, for a small occupation fee, although that is never discussed.)   Tiny homes built on trailers are, let's face it, pretty much just a fancy caravan, and Councils have never liked people using their land to live in caravans as the only residence.   For tiny houses to really make a difference, I reckon you have to get away from the permanently trailered ones, and get more into the idea that they are viable actual permanent homes on their blocks of land, without the ongoing bother of body corporate levies for strata title, too.   Sure, I have no problem with them being prebuilt units that are easily re-locatable, but leaving a "house" on a wheeled trailer permanently just isn't the same as a house sitting on the ground (or perhaps more likely, on stumps.)

When I Google the topic, I see that there has been a fair amount of discussion about town planning changes that may be necessary to allow the growth of tiny homes as permanent residences.  See this American article as an example.   

In this context, I have found some discussion of "pocket neighbourhoods", which are planned developments with small residences but usually sharing a common garden or other facilities.  From a Forbes article about them:

Pocket neighborhoods make up small clusters of houses in urban, suburban, or rural settings in which small-footprint homes are arranged around a shared common area. The closeness that is created in these communities encourages interaction among neighbors and is perfect for people who seek a stronger sense of community than is found in a conventional neighborhood. They want a more caring supportive, safer, and connected place to live.

This sounds nice, but is it really that different from what can be offered in a well planned strata title development in Australia?   I suppose it is, if there is a sense of ownership of (say) the shared garden.   Strata title can develop nice, free standing, small house settings with communal parkland, but it's always got pretty expensive body corporate levies - I suppose in part because no one wants wants to put in their own effort to maintain a communal facility, so they pay people to do it.   I would be curious to know how "pocket neighbourhoods" deal with this - I presume it is up to the owners to take more direct control of things like a communal garden, but what do you do if one or two owners couldn't care less about (or are simply unable to make) a contribution to it's upkeep?

 As for the shared garden ownership:  if you put part of the garden on each lot title, you have the issue of a crank owner wanted to keep the rest of the community off their patch.  Although I suppose you could deal with that just by everyone having an easement over every else's patch?   Or maybe, I don't know, you could have communal ownership via a "court company".   This is an idea that pre-dated strata title, and there are still subdivisions in Brisbane that work this way:   the central access road to each lot on the subdivision is owned by a "court company", and everyone who buys in that "court" gets a share in the court company when they buy the lot.  All the court company has to do is collect money to resurface the road when needed, and perhaps pay for public liability insurance.   But the court company doesn't have to deal with all the other stuff your body corporate has to worry about - enforcing by-laws, having an AGM, paying for a management company to look after it, etc.   I suspect the cost of running such a system is substantially less than that under a strata title system.  

Anyway, how small are non-strata lots allowed to be in (say) Brisbane?  As far as I can tell, just doing a quick Google, a small house lot can be 180 - 300m2, although I suspect most are at the higher end of that range.  What's the average floor area for a tiny house?    

Most of the trailer built ones seem to be a maximum of 8 m long by about 2.5 wide (see this company's, for example)  Let's be generous and call that 24 m2.  A single car carport is about 3 by 6 m, so another 18m2.  If you are not going to have a tiny home on wheels, you can go crazy with floor space, but according to Wikipedia, anything under 37m2 in floor area is considered a tiny house.  So, for a rough tiny house footprint, let's go with 30m2 of "house", plus 18m2 carport, plus covered outdoor area of (say) 8m2:  56m2 in total.  

So you should be able to fit three tiny households on the smallest residential lot in Brisbane, and have a few square metres of dirt for yard for each.  Of course, without some extremely careful planning, you might still be able to hear every conversation the neighbours are having in their bed at night, but people do live in some pretty quarters in existing caravan parks and seem to survive.

Speaking of caravan parks, when I Google "subdivision for tiny houses" I get links to articles like this one: 14 Liveable Tiny House Communities, but honestly, most of them just look like up market trailer parks.   And we do have mobile home parks in Australia already which have small, demountable houses sited permanently on rented lots.   My Mum used to live in one on the Gold Coast, and it was pretty nice.   But can't we work this out without the ongoing cost of rental?   My mother could afford it on the pension, but it didn't leave a lot of money left over for anything else.

So, that's what I want to know more about - successful town planning that allows for outright ownership of very small lots, perhaps with communal yards/gardens (and that avoids the cost of body corporate levies as far as possible).   

I'll come back to the topic later....