Tiny houses | Do you really want to live there?

Social media platforms are flooded with videos of micro apartments and tiny houses that rack up tens of millions of views. But do the clicks translate into new occupants?

In a busy area of ​​south London, close to a busy tube station and bus network, sits a tiny house in a dumpster.

This plywood house of just over 1.5 square meters is made up of a central floor, wall shelves for storage (or for sitting), a kitchen counter with a sink, a hotplate and a toy-sized refrigerator, and a mezzanine with a mattress under the vaulted roof. There is no running water, and the bathroom is a portable toilet outside.

The ‘Skip House’ is the creation and home of Harrison Marshall, 29, a British architect and artist who designs community buildings, such as schools and health centers, in Britain and abroad. Since he moved into the free dumpster (called skip in Britain) in January, videos of the space posted on social media attracted tens of millions of views and dozens of inquiries in a city where studios rent for at least $2,000 a month.

“People are forced to move to smaller and smaller places, micro apartments, tiny houses, just to try to make ends meet,” Harrison Marshall said in a telephone interview.

Social media platforms are having a field day with micro-apartments and tiny houses like Mr. Marshall’s, proof of the curiosity this lifestyle arouses. Small spaces have captivated viewers, whether they’re responding to soaring house prices or a different, boundary-pushing lifestyle, as seen on platforms such as the Never Too Small YouTube channel ( Never too small). However, while there is no accurate count of the number of tiny houses and microapartments on the market, the attention brought by social media has not necessarily enticed viewers to move in en masse, perhaps be because these spaces can sometimes be painful to live in.

Mr Marshall noted that 80 per cent of people who contacted him to express interest in moving into a house like his in the Bermondsey area were not serious, and that “most of those contacts are just wind and chatter.” According to him, tiny homes are romanticized because luxury living is overexposed.

“People are almost desensitized by social media,” he said. According to Marshall, people are more interested in content about the “on-the-go or off-grid lifestyle” that overlooks the other side of the coin: showers at the gym and portable toilets at the gym. outside.

The post-pandemic rush to big cities has pushed rents to record levels, intensifying demand for cheap housing, including spaces barely larger than a parking space.

But while social media audiences may find the lifestyle “entertaining and relatable,” as one expert put it, it’s not necessarily an example to follow.

Viewers of the microapartment videos are like visitors to the Alcatraz federal penitentiary in the San Francisco Bay Area who “walk into a cell with the door closed,” said Karen North, a professor of digital social media at the University of Southern California.

Social media users want to experience what’s happening at the “abnormally small end” of the housing scale, she said.

“Our desire to connect with different people – including influencers and celebrities, or people who live in a different place in a different way – can manifest itself on social media, because we have the feeling like you’re making a personal connection,” she said.

Real pressures

Although these small spaces are not a common choice, residents who take this step are driven by real pressures. For people looking to live and work in big cities, the post-pandemic housing situation is dire. In Manhattan in June, the average rent price was $5,470, according to a report from real estate brokerage firm Douglas Elliman. Citywide, the average rent is $3,644 this month, according to the listing site Apartments.com.

The housing situation is similar in London. In the first three months of the year, the average asking rent in the British capital hit a record high of around $3,165 a month as residents who left the city during lockdowns returned in droves.

In Asia, city dwellers face similar pressures and costs. In Tokyo, in March, the average monthly rent reached a record, for the third month in a row. Currently, that rent is around $4,900.

So when 21-year-old Ryan Crouse moved from New York in May 2022 to Tokyo, where he was a business student at Marymount Manhattan College, he rented a 1.5 square meter microapartment to $485 per month. Videos from his Tokyo studio have gone viral, garnering between 20 and 30 million views across platforms, said Crouse, who moved to a larger apartment last May.

Mr. Crouse believes the pandemic has heightened curiosity. During lockdown, “everyone was on social media, sharing their spaces” and “sharing their lives,” and apartment tour videos “went crazy,” he says.

Curiosity on social media seemed to reach a frenzied level for New York-based media planner Alaina Randazzo during the year she spent in an 80-square-foot, $650-a-month apartment in downtown Manhattan. There was a sink, but no toilet or shower: they were down the hall and shared.

Yet videos of her microapartment on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram have been viewed tens of millions of times, she says. YouTube influencers, one of whom has a cooking series, have filmed in his microstudio, and rappers have sent him messages asking him to do the same.

“The photos give the impression that the apartment is a little larger than it actually is,” notes M.^me Randazzo, 26 years old. There are so many little things to do in these apartments that you don’t think about. »

There is “a factor cool around microstudios these days, she says, because “you’re selling someone a dream”: that they can succeed in New York and “not be judged” for living in a tiny apartment.

Plus, “our generation likes reality,” she explains, “someone who is authentic” and who is trying to build a career and a future by saving money.

But that wasn’t the kind of life M^me Randazzo could lead for more than a year. Today she shares a large New York town house where she has a spacious bedroom. She doesn’t regret her microapartment: “I love the community it gave me, but I don’t miss banging my head on the ceiling. »

This article was originally published in the New York Times.