Having grown up in trailers, I wholly disagree. Every trailer I've lived in is larger than any tiny home that I've seen, as they're striving to be as close to a "normal" house as possible. Tiny homes come from a completely different design philosophy, and as result, give a completely different experience than a trailer. They're also more portable than trailers, though the latter's name makes it sound more moveable.

You'd be more correct to say that tiny homes are gentrified RVs.

    > ...gentrified trailers.

So? It's a perfectly fine way to live for some folks in some circumstances. There's nothing wrong with that and more options in housing is better.

One advantage of small houses is that they tend to encourage more diversity of design, materials and higher build quality than your typical trailer or tyvek/plywood mass development tract home.

Not necessarily. Look at this house for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUZcHeszQU

It's amazing what you can do with 20sqm.

This house looks amazing! But it doesn't seem like a "tiny house". I thought tiny houses were by definition on wheels with a more flexible way to hook up and out of utilities?

I don't think so. Rather, typical zoning codes in the US don't really allow for permanent tiny homes, so they usually have to be built on trailers in order to be legal.

I've seen plenty of "tiny home" projects built out of old shipping containers for example.

Not necessarily. Many are stationary, built on standard foundations. Though given their size, they are definitely easier to move than larger buildings.

Your statement assumes trailers as a negative. Conceptually, I love trailers. All you’ve done is reveal your biases without making any kind of statement. “I hate trailers.” Yeah, cool story, bro.

gentrified is a useful feature - trailers have earned their bad quality reputation. There is no reason they can't be higher quality.

until they push up the price of trailers and make them less affordable to poorer people that relied on them.

Though a used tiny house is probably competitive to a new trailer and still has the original quality. Or until trailer manufactures figure out that tiny house people are willing to pay a little extra for a superficial luxury look but they care about price more than quality overall. I don't know if the latter is true or not, only time will tell.

I want to clarify that I don't necessarily think that this is a bad thing. The "american dream" where everyone owns a 4000sq ft home, a wife, 3 kids, a car for each person and a backyard with a pool and a trampoline is not sustainable even in the short term. It's important to make the sustainable choices cool.

As an European I find it weird that these people decided to go live in a place with a backyard and no public transport though.

The real problem with gentrification is displacement. Or at least that’s the problem we should be most concerned about at a socetietal level. Everyone needs a place to live, and if some middle class people find a smaller house is what works best for their financial situation then that is OK. What we really should be concerned about is whether everyone — especially lower class people — can afford a home.

More like a gentrified log cabin if you ask me... nearly everyone used to live in places about this size. Having a huge home for everyone and their dog is a rather modern development, and often people don't even use most of the space in their house, or don't use it well anyhow. I personally would want more space, but it's an interesting development in culture.

But where does that put manufactured homes?

Has that happened, like, anywhere?

Have you seen the prices of co-living spaces? When it was called "flatmates" it used to be half the price. Tiny homes is just the next step.

not really there are some startups doing these designs for those with low income to promote financial stability among working poor in the US