Transcriber: Valeria Ugarte
Sometimes, biggest ideas come in the smallest packages,
really, really small packages.
Think, for instance, of a house so small
that it fits within the footprint of a parking space.
Totally crazy, right?
Maybe.
But the truth is more and more Americans
are choosing to live in tiny houses built on trailers.
With our economy still reeling and our natural resources running out,
maybe it isn't so strange, after all, to have a house that's mobile
and costs nearly nothing to maintain.
I've been involved in the tiny-house community for over a year now,
and I dream of building my own house someday.
Today, I'm going to talk a little bit about what tiny houses are,
why they're becoming so popular,
and how they can offer three priceless ways
that they can change your life for the better.
But before I delve into that, I want to talk a little bit
about how I became so enchanted by these little houses.
Now, I'll be the first to admit
that when I was a child, I was a little bit weird.
I had this really funny fascination with housing and the places people lived.
First, I wanted to live in a wigwam,
then I wanted to live in a boat,
then in a treehouse.
Going to open houses with my mom
was one of my favorite ways to spend a Sunday afternoon.
I would hoard my dad's copies of Fine Homebuilding
and pore over them for hours.
And I would even draw floor plans of fantasy houses I wanted to build,
which always included a big library with a secret passageway
behind one of the bookcases.
It was my biggest dream to build a house.
Fast forward to last year,
I'm about to start my final year of college,
and I'm worried about finding a job after I graduate.
I'm worried that my Liberal Arts degree won't be enough to help me
pay my student loans and keep a roof over my head,
until one day, I found this YouTube video of a guy
giving a tour of his 89-square-foot home on a trailer.
And that's when it hit me.
This could be the answer to both my worries and my dreams.
So, what exactly is a tiny house?
Generally, when people use this term nowadays,
they're referring to small mobile houses built on travel trailers.
They're basically like full-size houses
but shrunk down to a much, much smaller size.
This is because in order to tow a tiny house down the highway
without needing a special permit,
it has to fit within certain maximum size requirements.
So, a tiny house can be no wider than 8.5 feet
and no taller than 13.5 feet.
The length is a little more flexible.
So, to give you guys some perspective, think of your average school bus.
That's going to measure at 40 feet long.
A tiny house, on the other hand,
will usually measure between 10 and 24 feet long.
This one up here is 12 feet long.
But within this super tiny space,
tiny-house dwellers enjoy all the comforts of home:
a kitchen, bathroom, sleeping area, living space, storage,
everything you could need.
How is this possible?
How can something the size of some people's walk-in closets
house a person or more than one person
and accommodate all of their daily needs.
Well, first of all,
tiny houses are designed to utilize every square inch of space
as efficiently as possible.
Also, tiny houses borrow their utilities from the RV and boating industries.
These industries make everything from heaters to wood stoves
to kitchen ranges, portable water tanks,
solar electric arrays, and even composting toilets
that work really, really well in a tiny-house setting.
This is an example of a tiny-house bathroom.
You have a really compact shower-tub combo and a water-saving flush toilet.
So, some of you might be wondering, "Well, Amy, why don't you just buy an RV?"
Well, that's a really good question.
I mean, after all, RVs are cheaper than your average tiny house,
which according to a survey
conducted by Ryan Mitchell of the blog the Tiny Life
will cost about 23,000 dollars to build.
Also you can buy an RV at any time.
But there are many differences between RVs and tiny homes.
RVs are meant for temporary, seasonal living.
They're designed to be really light, really aerodynamic,
so you can tow them down the highway all the time.
They're also meant to be lived in during the warm summer months.
This means that they're not super strong and they're not super insulated.
A tiny house, on the other hand, is meant for full-time living
and has to be built to last for decades.
So, tiny houses are framed like normal houses with wood or even steel,
and they're bolted really securely to the trailer
so that they can handle hurricane-force winds
while you tow it down the highway.
They're also fully insulated to deal with the cold winter temperatures as well.
But tiny houses are not aerodynamic at all.
They're big heavy boxes, essentially,
and they're meant to be moved to a certain location,
placed there for a long time,
and you can move it if need be.
Also, another difference is customization.
RVs are built for everyone,
which means that they're really built for nobody in particular,
but tiny houses you can customize to fit your own certain specific needs.
So, say you have a lot of computer equipment,
or you need space to store your snowboarding gear,
or you want to have a space for friends to come visit you in your tiny house.
You can do all of that.
You can also adapt it to your personal style.
This house, for instance, was built by Christopher Smith and Merette Mueller,
who live in their tiny house in Colorado,
and they designed theirs to have a really nice cozy ski-lodge feeling.
This tiny house was built by Macy Miller, who lives in Idaho,
and she went with a much more sleek contemporary look for her tiny house.
This house, by the way, was built for only 11,000 dollars.
These are my tiny-house plans so far.
They change all the time, so nothing's final,
but I really want to put a miniature walk-in closet in my tiny house.
Also in terms of aesthetics alone,
I think most people would prefer to live in something a little prettier
than your average RV.
So now, some of you might be thinking,
"Well, Amy, how the hell are these things legal?"
Good question.
To put something that small on a permanent foundation
on your own land
is going to be flat-out illegal in most states.
But once you lift it up and put it on wheels,
then the lines get a little bit fuzzy.
That's when they're considered to be more like RVs or travel trailers.
So, what a lot of people do
is they'll park them on a friend or family's property.
Or you can pay rent to someone to stay on their land
or exchange services like yard work or attending to an elderly neighbor.
Or some campgrounds will even let you camp seasonally or even year-round.
But legalities say that you can't live in a tiny house full-time,
which makes things kind of difficult, sometimes, for people who live in them.
But the tiny house movement is growing.
Cities like Portland, Oregon, and Charlotte, North Carolina,
are becoming tiny-house hotspots,
which draws tourism and new residents to those areas.
There's also a growing tiny-house industry of builders, architects, consultants,
which would be a welcomed economy boost to any American community.
Also, some of these companies are even designing tiny-house communities,
where people can come and park their tiny houses with other tiny houses,
and thereby avoid Codes.
So, maybe cities could even use this concept to fill vacant real estate
or use as a homelessness solution.
So, as the tiny-house movement grows,
it brings new possibilities that it can carry into the future.
Now, you might be thinking that this tiny-house idea is really, really novel,
but it's actually not new at all.
People have been living in small, efficient dwellings
since the dawn of time.
Think, for instance, of the Native American teepee,
Mongolian yurt,
the Romani Vardø, which we commonly call a gypsy wagon,
or even the hippie bus.
But the idea of efficient living sort of got lost in America
with the rise of suburbia.
Houses got bigger and bigger and bigger
until we ended up with enormous treeless developments of McMansions like this.
According to the US Census Bureau,
in 2010, the average American home size
was 2,392 square feet.
That's a lot of space.
But a gentleman named Jay Shafer, whose video I saw last year,
helped change the dialogue in America.
He founded the Tumbleweed Tiny House company in 2002,
and his beautiful house designs took the American imagination by storm,
especially in the wake of the mortgage crisis
that happened only a few years afterward.
His tiny house has appeared on CNN, ABC, NBC, Oprah, and more.
So,
dozens of people across America live in these tiny houses now,
more of them are building,
and tens of thousands of people are fans of this idea.
But what about people like us in this room:
college students and new grads and young professionals?
What can tiny houses offer to us?
Well, something we're all worried about
is finding that fancy grown-up job after graduation.
With a tiny house,
you can go where the work takes you and move your location very easily.
So imagine, for instance,
that you're a year or two out of college and your company lays you off,
but your old college roommate who now lives in Seattle
wants you to help him out with his start-up.
So, what do you do?
You hitch up your house to a truck and go.
Without spouses and kids to worry about,
young professionals are at an advantage with a tiny house
because they have an increased freedom to switch careers.
And if you have a job that's location-independent,
meaning you work from home, your location options increase even more.
In addition to career stability,
tiny homes offer a degree of financial flexibility as well.
First, when you live in something
that's about five percent the size of an average American home,
it does not cost very much money to heat and cool it.
Dee Williams, who lives in Portland, Oregon,
used to spend 300 dollars a month on her utility bills
before she lived in a tiny house.
Now she only spends eight dollars every month.
Living in a tiny house is simply better for your wallet and for the environment
since you're not spewing tons of greenhouse gases into the air
to heat space that you're really not using.
Tiny houses are also, probably, the most cost-effective way
to have full ownership over your housing.
So, if a tiny house costs 23,000 dollars to build yourself
or 50-60,000 dollars to pay a company to build it for you,
that's definitely not cheap,
but that's nothing compared to buying a full-size house
and tying yourself to a 30-year mortgage.
And if you think about it, 23,000 dollars
is about how much you're going to pay in rent in a major city like Boston
for only a year or two.
And if someday you get married, start a family,
and want to buy a normal-sized house,
the financial transition will be much easier,
and you can still keep your tiny house after that.
So, some of you might be thinking,
"But, Amy, I get the career stuff, I get the financial stuff,
but I just can't live in something that small.
I have too much stuff!"
It's true.
If you live in a space this small,
you're going to have to get rid of a lot of your junk.
And this is an idea that actually scares a lot of people.
We like our stuff, and we like to buy more of it,
but the truth is, the things we own have power over us.
They have the power to keep us rooted in one place,
and they have the power to drown out our need for human interaction.
But once you detach yourself from the things you own,
you find that you're free from the restrictions they place on you.
Also, when you minimize the things you own,
you're also forced to interact with the world around you;
you're forced to go out into the community.
So, instead of lifting weights at home, you can go to the gym with your friends,
or instead of collecting thousands of books,
you can support the local library.
And instead of staying inside hold up in your house all the time,
you can go out and find new hobbies and meet new people.
So a tiny house forces you out into the world,
and the world in turn becomes full of possibility.
So, for now, my tiny house is still a dream in my head.
I have a lot to do before I can build anything.
I have to start a savings account and start saving up money,
I need to read as many books as I can about tiny-house building and design,
I need to sell and donate the things I don't need
to people who need them more than I do.
And I need to connect with tiny-housers both locally and across America
to build my own support network.
Tiny houses are what I like to call a gateway dream.
It's the dream that makes other dreams possible.
What will I do once I live in a tiny house I build myself?
Will I travel?
Will I start a business?
Will I perform and make art for a living?
With a roof over my head that no one can take away from me,
all doors are open wide,
and I would call that an idea worth spreading.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)