Timothy Birdnow

How the tiny home movement collapsed and why it was always a terrible idea.

They were, in essence, large campers as opposed to actual homes. Not even full sized trailer homes, just camper sized. When I was in real estate we would occasionally have studio apartments but we could never keep them full; people called in a few months asking us to move them. Studios were just too small and the tenants became claustrophobic after a while. And there was no place to put their stuff either.

People forget that they still have to have utilities, a lot, and all the things a regular house has. Also, the trim work requires as much effort and time - probably more - in a tiny house as opposed to a big one. More square footage does not necessarily mean more work.

And, as the article mentions, there are still all the fun little goodies like municipal inspections and the like, and codes were not written with these things in mind.

A few years ago there was a story that made me laugh; here in St. Louis a teenage girl built a tiny home and had it in her parent's back yard. A thief came and simply carted her house away! Then thieves stole another tiny home from a suburban area where Habitat for Humanity had built it.

Funny but it's going to happen when you can put your house on a truck bed.

I really like some of these tiny houses on television and would love to have owned one so I could take it to the country and use it as a cabin. They are nice places to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. The Ozark Hilton, my home-made cabin in the pines, is about five hundred square feet - larger than most of these crazy things.

But of course I was not going to pay $40,000 for it. I could just get a camper for less.

Anyway the "sustainability" movement, the Gang Green environmentalists and the Left, want to get us all used to the idea of living with less, having less, using less energy. Energy is the measure of wealth in modernity and so basically they want us POOR, living frugally. So many of them are still stuck on stupid, buying into Paul Ehrlich from the seventies. They dream of people living in 250 square feet, basically in cells like prisoners. They flatter themselves that they are the wise ones, the enlightened, and that everyone should live poor and be virtuous like they are. It's a form of mental illness.

I once got into it with some tiny home advocates on ST. Louis University's website. They were all gung-ho about building them for the homeless and I pointed out they could buy full sized houses in neighborhoods on the north side and rehab them for less than the tiny house would cost, and that the homeless recipients would quickly tear up so small a building in short order. Naturally they simply said "nuh-uh!" but could give no good reason why the tiny houses were a superior idea to buying an existing house with utilities and a lot already there. St. Louis is lousy with abandoned houses and people are always deeding their abandoned property to the Mayor.

Tiny homes are for tiny people and if anyone should think this a good idea needs their head examined.

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