So over on Jezebel there was an article about how the tiny house trend seems to be on the outs and people of course brought up tiny house hunters. The main thread was mostly full of sympathy for the kids and pets people saw on the show, especially the kids who instead of a room or rooms get an awkward loft they can’t stand up in and has no doors.
And OF COURSE some dipshits come in and are all “please, this sort of this is totally normal in the rest of the world, ya’ll just like American Excess” and it was like. No. You dingbats. Intentionally building an undersized house is NOT normal in the rest of the world.
Firstly, the people on the show are exclusively middle class or higher. For all these people talking about how “oh, I stayed in a studio apartment in Korea for a year as a young professional that was this size” A) that was you as a young single person just starting out, not a middle class family, something tells me a middle class family in Korea probably at least has a multi-room apartment if not a house, depending on area of residence and B) even in the smallest villages in the remotest places on earth, people do not build their homes intentionally too small to see what nifty lifehacks they can add to manage to make the space livable. Presumably because they are not rich enough to afford that stupidity.
Secondly, everyone intentionally misunderstood our sympathy for the kids. “Oh, you want a McMansion where every child has their own room and playroom and ten thousand toys!” Um, no, but we think that maybe the kids deserve, y’know, a truly separate room from the parents? A room they can stand up in? Maybe? And sure some siblings share rooms well and others learn to out of necessity, but making two teenagers share a crawlspace sounds like the prelude to one teenager killing the other out of sheer frustration (there’s a huge difference between a poor family telling two or three kids to share a room in an apartment and a moderately wealthy family making them share a crawlspace with no doors!!!). Also I noticed most of the kids’ spaces lack even the minimal storage the parents’ have on the show. Like, there’s room for a mattress and maybe a box or two of stuff? Maybe?
Also tiny houses tend to break building codes. Building codes initially made to make landlords build places for poor people that actually have enough space to live that some yuppies now find “too limiting”. Building codes to make sure the basic utilities are available to the house. Building codes that require things like being handicap accessible (I have yet to see a tiny house that could accommodate someone on crutches, much less a wheelchair or walker). Like, quite a few tiny houses are genuinely illegal due to their small size.
Like, I understand that plenty of people live happily in a 900 sq foot home or a 700 sq ft apartment, but tiny houses are, by definition, under 400 sq ft. There is a HUGE difference between 300 and 900 sq ft, people. Usually a difference of several doors, actual toilets, and your kids not hating you.
