Make Mine Extra Small
October 19, 2015
Perhaps some of you are as fascinated as I am with a recent movement based on making things smaller. This way of thinking has been popularized on TV shows which feature “tiny homes”. The idea of extreme downsizing to these very small houses makes for interesting home design discussions. The show chronicles how homeowners go from having two to three thousand square feet of living space to tiny dwellings of two to four hundred square feet.
The smaller home is not a new idea. The Airstream Company has been making small homes on wheels with clever designs since the 1930s. They just happen to be labeled mobile homes instead of what is perhaps a better and hipper marketing term for today’s consumer: “tiny home”.
The tiny home movement is really about affordability. There seems to be real merit, and maybe even staying power, in the custom design of an inexpensive moveable living space that is tricked out with cool design features.
In California, Oakland residents are embracing the next evolution of the tiny house. Rental prices for apartments in the Bay Area are already some of the highest in the country, so community planners must consider more affordable and creative options.
In an unused warehouse in Oakland called Containertopia, metal shipping containers are being converted to provide living space for young San Francisco workers. A young entrepreneur has taken the shipping containers and converted them into 160 square foot living spaces for workers who have just started their careers. With rents at an affordable $600 per month, a waitlist has begun.
According to the report even smaller residences are becoming popular in the Bay Area. Artist and charity groups are building rolling homes that measure eight feet by five feet for use by the Bay Area’s large population of homeless. The boxes are the size of a small U-haul trailer and are being provided free of charge.
With this growing desire to go smaller and smaller, I should not have been surprised at the Wall Street Journal’s Commercial Real Estate Market update this week which reported that the public storage industry is experiencing a significant shortage. In almost all parts of the country the demand, as reflected in both occupancy rates and price increase, has never been so good. It would seem that folks downsizing to smaller living options, either out of choice or economic necessity, are finding it too hard to throw away some of their accumulated stuff. The desire to get small and keep all our stuff seems be presenting opportunities in more than one real estate sector. Having currently lived in the same place for 28 years I have no idea where I would even start to go small, let alone tiny.
Carl Gambrell
