The 5 Biggest Challenges to Tiny House Living

CabinObsession | January 17, 2016 | For Sale, Tiny Houses

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Where there’s a problem, there’s a solution

Though tiny living is often nowadays thought of as better than the older model of having a big home (with a big mortgage), there are still several factors that tend to impede the tiny house movement. Ryan Mitchell from the Tiny Life outlines a few of them here:

Laws
The issue comes when you look at your municipality’s minimum habitable structure definition. These definitions almost always exclude Tiny Houses from being a dwelling and give code enforcement a strong leg to stand on when it comes to condemning your Tiny Home and/or levying fines.
Land
To have a Tiny House, you don’t need much land for the actual house, but you do need enough to be able to obscure the house from prying eyes in order to fly under the radar of code enforcement and curmudgeons.
Loans
At this point, banks don’t feel that Tiny Houses are a viable option because they don’t have a good resale value. This means their loan isn’t secured with collateral. It is this dynamic that means for us to get access to loans, we need to get creative.
Social Pressures
Tiny Houses fly in the face of such things, questioning much of what people hold dear. People can react in a very visceral way when we suggest there is a problem with the way things are. People work their whole lives to get as much stuff as they can, to suggest that is wrong, in a way, is to suggest their life’s work is wrong.
Fear
This ties into a few of the above points, but is none the less a real barrier. When faced with the prospect of bucking the system, initiating a radical lifestyle change, and spending a good chunk of money to do it, it can be scary. I know from personal experience when you are close to the moment where you must make the decision, where you have to take the leap, a whole series of self-doubts come to the surface.