Tiny Homes: Big Promises

By Ella Harris Mel Nowicki Tim White

In recent years Tiny Homes have become big business. Existing in a legal grey area between mobile homes and conventional housing, Tiny Houses allow for savings on land and construction costs, and a burgeoning industry has developed around the concept.

Championing minimalism, community and anti-consumerism, the phenomenon has become a media sensation. HGTV's Tiny House programming averages five million viewers per week. Tiny Housing is being promoted as an aspirational housing choice. While pitched against aspirational consumerism it is in many ways subsumed into it, with Global brands like ikea now offering a range of products specifically for small living spaces. The appeal of Tiny Homes has grown so much that there's even a Tiny House extension package for the video game 'The Sims'. Despite their branding as trendy and innovative, Tiny Homes can be seen as a crisis culture for several reasons including that they provide an option for people unable to afford traditional housing, are used as a response to homelessness and - more recently - have been adopted as a means of cheaply social distancing or self isolating during the Covid Pandemic.

Myself - Ella Harris, and my colleagues Mel Nowicki and Tim White are exploring this fast growing phenomenon.

Tiny Homes in Austin

We were recently awarded a BA/Leverhulme Small Grant to explore Tiny Housing in Austin. The project examines the role of Tiny House developments in response to the now-chronic US housing crisis. In Austin – widely seen as the epicentre of the Tiny House movement - Tiny Homes are being pitched as an urban housing crisis solution for demographics ranging from homeless populations to middle-class professionals. Through exploring the aesthetics and narratives used to promote Tiny Homes online, and conducting interviews with both producers and users, this project is aquiring in-depth understanding of the phenomenon’s emerging geographies. It will generate crucial insights into how Tiny Housing reflects and influences meanings of housing and home at a time of turbulence. As part of the project we're working with photographer Ciba Oba Smith who will be documenting Tiny Homes and their residents in Austin. Together, his images and our findings will be the basis for an illustrated book about Tiny Homes.

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Ella Harris

Ella Harris is a researcher and writer interested in 'crisis cultures', epistemically just creative methods and inventive knowledge exchange strategies. She is currently working on the project Story Arcs at Bath Spa University as the Narrative Exchange Champion as well as undertaking freelance research for clients including Natural England, Caring in Bristol and the Runnymede Trust.

Previously, Ella was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Geography Department at Birkbeck, University of London. Prior to this, she was an ESRC postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She's also worked as a research assistant in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway University on a collaborative project on pop-up social housing. She completed a PhD in Cultural Geography at Royal Holloway University in 2017.

Ella has published widely on subjects including the cultural geographies of precarity, pop-up culture, housing insecurity, immersive cinema and interactive documentary. Her book on pop-up culture is out now and her latest interactive documentary, about COVID-19 lockdown in London, can be found here.

Mel Nowicki

Mel Nowicki is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Geography at Oxford Brookes University. Broadly her research interests lie in housing inequality, precarity and the concept of home. Mel's research projects have included: understanding the impact of the criminalisation of squatting and the bedroom tax in London, experiences of family homelessness and temporary accommodation in London and Dublin, and the rise of Tiny Housing as a 'solution' to global housing crises. Mel has published work both in academic journals, national news websites, and in a policy context. Her forthcoming book, Bringing Home the Housing Crisis (Bristol Policy Press) brings together multiple strands of her research to consider how the concept of home is politicised in order to de-legitimise working-class and low-income people's rights to home.

Tim White

Tim White is a PhD candidate on the Cities Programme at LSE. His doctoral research examines the rise of the co-living sector - corporate shared housing for young professionals - and he has undertaken work in London, Berlin and San Francisco looking at the production and consumption of this phenomenon. Prior to starting his PhD, Tim worked as a researcher at LSE Cities.

Tim is interested in how cities are reshaped by money and power, particularly at the intersection of housing, finance and technology. Prior to and alongside his PhD, he has worked on a number of research projects, including: understanding the experience of high-density housing in London, exploring the Tiny House phenomenon in Texas, and reviewing international policy on foreign property ownership. His work has been published in a range of academic and non-academic contexts, including Urban Geography and The Guardian.

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