Last weekend, some dozen little houses appeared on a big patch of dirt and trampled grass in Colorado Springs. The occasion was the Tiny House Jamboree, which had been advertised as the largest-ever gathering devoted to houses that contain no more than four hundred square feet of living space. Some of the homes had been placed there by the building companies that specialize in them; others had been brought by tiny-house owners themselves.
I’d shown up with the preconceived notion that I would find thousands of rabid, perhaps slightly hunchbacked, tiny-house residents eager to evangelize for their low-budget, small-environmental-footprint lifestyle. Instead, I found that many of the tens of thousands of people at the jamboree were like me: curiosity-seekers who live in normal-sized houses or apartments and were there, it seemed, mostly to reinforce their own sense that living in tiny houses was sort of weird. We arranged ourselves into endless queues to gain entry into the edifices—some of which looked like miniaturized cabins, with miniaturized windows and miniaturized decorative touches, and others of which resembled trailers or shipping containers. (At least one was a refurbished shipping container.) The lines gave the affair a vibe of exclusivity, although, really, they were long mostly because the houses could only fit one or two people at a time.
Inside a hundred-and-seventy-three-square-foot home constructed by Sprout Tiny Homes, of La Junta, Colorado, I found a kitchen and bathroom of perhaps a couple dozen square feet, combined (making them no tinier, it must be said, than some of the kitchens and bathrooms that I’ve seen in New York). In the main room, a Murphy bed slid into a wall, while another bed sat atop a loft, accessible by ladder. The home was meant to be sufficient, apparently, for a family of four. I asked the man fielding questions, a representative of the builder, whether he lived in a home like this. Guardedly, he said no. How big was his house? “A lot bigger than this one,” he allowed.
Next door, a representative from another builder, Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, of Sonoma, California, admitted that there have been limits to the hoped-for rise of tiny-house culture. The main barrier, from her perspective, is that because the houses sit on wheels, most jurisdictions consider them R.V.s, in which it’s illegal to live full-time. But tiny houses face a broader cultural challenge, too. In a 2011 article about the tiny-house movement, Alec Wilkinson explained its aims:
At the time of Wilkinson’s article, the U.S. was only beginning to recover from the subprime-mortgage crisis and the resulting economic crash, and it seemed plausible that people had learned a lesson about the hazards of our capitalist, materialist culture, especially as they relate to real estate. Not so much. Since the housing crisis ended a couple of years ago, new homes are again being constructed in large numbers, and the average size is creeping back to boom-time levels. Of the single-family homes built last year, nearly half had four or more bedrooms; the median size was two thousand four hundred and fifty-three square feet. Colorado is experiencing a renewed real-estate boom, and the housing developments alongside the interstate between Denver and Colorado Springs rarely evoke the virtues of conservation and smallness.
That hasn’t stopped tiny-house adherents from trying to proselytize. In a clearing at the jamboree, enthusiasts were giving talks with names like “Tiny: A Movement for the People, By the People” and “Create Your Freedom.” “I do believe strongly that ‘tiny’ is this word that is relevant to perspective,” one presenter announced. “It’s not very sexy, but I like to replace it with ‘adequate.’” The notion of living “adequately” speaks to the willingness of tiny-house enthusiasts, by and large, to sacrifice creature comforts in order to make a statement about consumer culture and its damaging effects.
Committing to this ideal requires an open mind about things like indoor plumbing. A couple of hours later, I met a young couple, Kiva Ganie and Jake Stevenson, from British Columbia. “It’s so expensive to buy a house,” Ganie said. “It’s not going to happen.” Instead, she and Stevenson were spending twenty-five thousand dollars to put up a tiny house on Ganie’s parents’ acreage. Ganie is a farmer and Stevenson is an electrician, so they are fairly well-equipped for this sort of living. They showed me a computer rendering of the homemade composting toilet that they plan to build, which is really a plastic bucket under a toilet lid. “If you dilute pee, like, ninety per cent, it’s totally O.K. to water your plants,” Stevenson said. Ganie and Stevenson are documenting their project on YouTube. “It’s sort of like the ultimate fort or something,” Ganie told me.
Many of the tiny-house enthusiasts I met were like Ganie and Stevenson—single people or couples in their twenties. But entire families have been known to move into tiny houses, too, meaning the movement’s best shot at enduring might be embodied in the children whose parents are raising them in tiny quarters. It's not clear that the youngest generation of tiny-house residents is absorbing the anti-capitalist message, though. Before leaving the jamboree, I found a seven-year-old named Cyrus sitting outside a tiny house with his mother. She explained that her husband had built the home for the family, but they were now selling it because he had found a job in Hawaii. The family had lived in it, in Colorado, for just six weeks, after moving out of a house of more than three thousand square feet. In the new place, Cyrus’s mother and father slept in one lofted room, and he and his two brothers shared another. Cyrus wore a Lego T-shirt and held a Furby on his lap. I asked him if he had needed to get rid of a lot of his toys when his family had moved into the tiny house. He said he had, and explained that he had been in charge of deciding what could fit in the brothers’ room and what had to go. I wondered why they’d kept the stuffed animal. “My brother just said, ‘I’m keeping the Furby,’ ” Cyrus explained. “I said, ‘You gotta give me five bucks,’ so he gave me five bucks.” The Furby stayed.
