Tiny houses
today
i’m going to talk to you about freedom
the freedom to do certain things
and the freedom from having to do
certain others
and how tiny houses might be implicated
in this
so over the last two years of my phd
research the key
question that seems to come up again and
again is how can you step away from a
system
you depend on where you identify that
it’s unfit for purpose
or even harmful how can you extricate
yourself from that when you depend on it
for your survival
so this key question can be broken down
into three main areas
the first one is how can you step away
from a live to work
mentality the uk has some of the longest
working hours in europe
and a recent survey from the trades
union congress
has shown that half of brits feel that
their work is meaningless
the second part of this question is how
can we step away
from the work to spend mentality
ubiquitous
advertising and compulsory consumption
uh an implicit part of our society
and many people want this to be
different but don’t know how to make it
so
the third part of the question is
intrinsically connected to the work to
spend mentality and that’s how can you
step away
from the eco side an economic system
based on
growth at all costs demands so we’re
going to examine these questions a
little closer
um by using a story so i’d like to
introduce you to parvist
this is parvis she’s a recent graduate
she’s a clever girl she’s got a degree
in statistics
she’s living in a house share it’s a bit
messy there’s often dishes in the sink
she can’t always cook when she wants to
as a recent graduate
she’s earning the average higher
education lever salary in the uk
of 22 399 pounds
which leaves her after taxi national
insurance with a monthly income of 1
572 pounds and 61 pence
this is a bit of a problem because
recent studies from abc finance have
indicated that the cost of living for a
single person
in the uk is 2 249 pounds a month
this means that parvis has to stay
living in her shared accommodation where
there’s always someone in the bathroom
the tenants change all the time she can
often feel like she’s living with
strangers
and somebody is always stealing her
cheese from the communal fridge in the
kitchen
she’d like this to be a little bit
different she looks into what it would
take for her to have a place of her own
and she finds out that the average house
price in the uk is 256 000 pounds
she knows that this means she would need
a deposit of twenty five thousand pounds
and an ongoing salary of thirty seven
thousand pounds a year
in order to meet her monthly mortgage
repayments of one thousand
twenty four pounds per month for twenty
five years
and in order to begin this process and
save up for her deposit
she would have to remain in the shared
house for 14 years
with the cheese steelers she works a lot
takes up a lot of her time commuting
preparing for work being at work
unwinding after work she’d like to spend
more time in the community
volunteering or perhaps learning to play
the french horn
so she starts looking into other
alternatives she quickly discovers tiny
houses
falls into a youtube pinterest instagram
rabbit hole
and emerges 16 hours later disheveled
but enlightened parvis has learned that
the average build cost of a tiny house
is 35 000 pounds which compares very
favorably with the purchase price of 256
000 pounds for a traditional home
she’s also learnt that the average size
of a tiny house is in the region of 30
meters squared
which is in part why it’s so much
cheaper to build in the first place
but also contributes to its
affordability in the lifetime of the
building
because the most money and energy we
spend in our home is in heating and
cooling
so a smaller space demands less energy
and less carbon burden
in the lifetime of the property harvest
has learned that most tiny houses
are built with no permanent foundations
they take the form
of shipping containers log cabins
trailer-based models or even converted
vans
this means that many tiny houses are
off-grid and use renewable clean energy
sources like solar power
wind turbines water harvesting systems
something else that she’s really
attracted to about tiny houses which she
doesn’t think she’d be able to access in
any other way is that she can design
and build a house that specifically
meets her individual needs
she recognizes that this reduced cost of
living opens up
a whole roster of different employment
choices
perhaps she could work part-time maybe
she could move into a different industry
that has a lower salary but is much more
meaningful for her
she also sees that living in a smaller
space means that she wouldn’t have
the storage facilities for her 200 pairs
of trainers
and this might help her to move away
from compulsory consumption
in other words parvis wonders whether
tiny houses
might help her to step away from a live
to work mentality
step away from a work to spend culture
and extricate herself
from the eco side implicit in that
in her investigations however she has
identified that there are a few barriers
to this way of life
access to land is one of them about 60
percent of britain is owned by roughly
16
of the population lots of land that
could be developed is held as a
speculative investment
by overseas investors in the same way
that they might hold stocks or shares
and this artificially inflates the price
of land
access to finance for tiny houses is
also tricky because they definitionally
don’t come attached to a parcel of land
and the land is the asset against which
a mortgage loan is secured
planning policy also needs to be updated
in order to be able to understand what
tiny houses are
and how to extend legal permissions to
them so that they can be lived in as
primary residential dwellings
there are a few fantastic examples
around the world of
real people who are really addressing
these issues the new zealand tiny house
association
is the first national association in the
world to draft new legislature
which incorporates tiny houses into
renewed planning policy zoning laws and
building regulations
and then a little closer to home the
tiny house community
in bristol is making fantastic progress
with bringing
self-built eco homes to the city of
bristol
and in the city that i’m speaking from
today a social enterprise called op
house is working closely with the
council
and the community to bring the city the
first self-built tiny house plots
so i’d like to finish by leaving you
with a quote from a gentleman called
jay schaefer who’s been building tiny
houses for almost 40 years now
he says too many of our houses are not a
refuge from chaos
but merely extensions of it and i wonder
how many of you watching this talk can
relate to that
and what you think about tiny houses as
a potential way to speak to some of
these issues
thank you very much for your attention
and thank you from harvest
you