Texas Tiny Homes
I recently arrived back from Texas where myself, Tim White (LSE) and professional photographer Cian Oba Smith were braving 40-degree heat, snakes and an array of large and terrifying insects to undertake research into the tiny home movement in Austin and the surrounding area.
The research is part of a project funded by the BA/Leverhulme small grants scheme, which Dr Mel Nowicki (Oxford Brookes) is also a leading member of.
It was an intense time to be in Texas. Already in the grips of a long, sweltering summer, Austin is also suffering in the political heat following the recent overturning of the constitutional right to abortion in America.
At the same time, the city is experiencing a housing crisis so extreme that it makes London’s housing issues look tame in comparison.
There was a palpable sense of urgency among the people we spoke to in Texas, a sense that the housing market has become entirely unsustainable, and no adequate solutions are being mobilized quickly or effectively enough.
As well as this temporal tension, there is a specific spatial tension that defines Austin’s housing crisis too.
Austin is a blue city in a red state. In recent years the city has been hyped as a new tech capital in the US, a reputation cemented by the relocation of Elon Musk to the area to set up Tesla headquarters. Austin is also a haven of hipster bars, restaurants and music venues and is relatively LGBTQ friendly, anti-racist and pro choice as American cities go. However, drive just five minutes out of town and you’re in a very different cultural milieu: gun ranges, wild hog hunting and pro-life billboards.
As Austin gentrifies, left leaning people are being squeezed out into the republican regions surrounding it – still geographically close but ideologically a million miles from the culture of Austin.
And squeezed is the appropriate word, because many of the people leaving Austin are downsizing as they do so, moving into tiny homes in its outskirts or in nearby towns.
We journeyed around Austin’s periphery, staying in tiny home communities and having a very personal experience of the realities of living in small spaces. Almost all tiny homes are 399 sq. ft, coming in just below the 400 sq. ft cut off for what qualifies as a recreational vehicle and thereby exemption from building taxes and regulations. Most are long and thin, divided into a kitchen-living room, a bedroom and a bathroom, sometimes with a mezzanine providing a second sleeping area or study. Normally, tiny home dwellers buy the actual house but rent the plot of land it’s on from the site landlord.
From their branding, you might expect tiny homes to appeal primarily to younger adults. They have a quirky, hipster cachet and their diverse aesthetics range from cute miniatures of american dream homes with white picket fences around the front decking, to wacky ad hoc constructions from re-salvaged materials. However, a larger share of the people we spoke to were middle aged or retired adults. Many were downsizing after suffering job losses or medical crises that had left them with big debts. Some had elected to downsized to free up capital to enable their children to by first homes.
Interestingly, around two thirds of tiny home residents are women. Many had moved into tiny housing following divorces or bereavements and the reasons they cited for choosing a tiny house spoke to both the gains and losses of moving forward from family homes. A key driver was the desire to finally be free from hours spent doing domestic labour. Tiny homes provided an escape from the unending cycle of cleaning required in large, American houses. Another was the search for a stronger and closer community within which to enjoy single, retired life.
Tiny homes are also being mobilized to house people experiencing homelessness in Austin. Tiny housing has been applauded for the speed with which it can provide secure and affordable accommodation, although some people we spoke to thought that out of town tiny home communities for rough sleepers were being deployed primarily to remove visible street homelessness in Austin.
While entagled with this politicized removal of homeless people from the city centre, the tiny home movement also encompasses people deliberately seeking to remove themselves,; venturing "off grid". We visited a relatively isolated tiny home community built entirely by hand from salvaged materials as the fulfilment of one man’s ‘vision quest.’ We also met people who wanted to build their own tiny homes on unrestricted plots so that they could, as far as possible, avoid subservience to or dependence on a government they condemn.
Despite the prevalence of off-grid imaginaries, most tiny homes are on established sites for recreational vehicles and, fascinatingly often sit in close proximity to RV parks and mobile home developments. While technically classed with these longer standing housing forms as recreational vehicles, tiny homes brand themselves very differently, appealing largely to a demographic that would see themselves as more affluent and aspirational than residents of mobile homes and RVs. This branding has been so successful that prices for tiny homes are rising rapidly, despite conventional mobile homes offering more space for considerably less money.
The Tiny Home movement raises many interesting questions about the future of housing, the future of cities, the tense political landscape of America, and changing experiences of gender and domesticity. It also demands that we reconsider how imaginaries of freedom and housing are changing, given that the Tiny Home movement develops a narrative of freedom from the mortgages, bills and cleaning of big houses that would once have epitomized the american dream.
In the coming months, me, Tim, Mel and Cian will be exploring these questions and more in articles and a book about the tiny house movement in the particular, peculiar context of Austin, Texas.
If you have a Crisis Culture story or project that you would like to share on this site then we would really love to hear from you.