• 08.05.19

Do tiny home owners actually live more sustainably? Now we know

In an unprecedented study, PhD student Maria Saxton looked at 80 people who downsized to tiny homes to quantify whether their environmental footprints really got smaller.

[Photo: Luke Stackpoole/Unsplash]

BY MARIA SAXTON 5 MINUTE READ

Interest is surging in tiny homes—livable dwelling units that typically measure under 400 square feet. Much of this interest is driven by media coverage that claims that living in tiny homes is good for the planet.

It may seem intuitively obvious that downsizing to a tiny home would reduce one’s environmental impact, since it means occupying a much smaller space and consuming fewer resources. But little research has been done to actually measure how people’s environmental behaviors change when they make this drastic move.

For my doctorate in environmental design and planning, I sought to fill this gap in knowledge by developing a study that could provide measurable evidence on how downsizing influences environmental impacts. First I surveyed 80 downsizers who had lived in tiny homes for a year or more, to calculate their ecological footprints in prior housing and current ecological footprints in their tiny houses. Then I conducted nine in-depth interviews to learn about behaviors that changed after downsizing.

I found that among 80 tiny home downsizers located across the United States, ecological footprints were reduced by about 45% on average. Surprisingly, I found that downsizing can influence many parts of one’s lifestyle and reduce impacts on the environment in unexpected ways.

THE UNSUSTAINABLE U.S. HOUSING MODEL

In recent decades, the building trend has been to “go big.” Newly constructed homes in the United States generally have a larger average square footage than in any other country in the world.

In 1973, the average newly constructed U.S. home measured 1,660 square feet. By 2017, that average had increased to 2,631 square feet—a 63% increase. This growth has harmed the environment in many ways, including loss of green space, increased air pollution and energy consumption, and ecosystem fragmentation, which can reduce biodiversity.

The concept of minimalist living has existed for centuries, but the modern tiny house movement became a trend only in the early 2000s, when one of the first tiny home building companies was founded. Tiny homes are an innovative housing approach that can reduce building material waste and excessive consumption. There is no universal definition for a tiny home, but they generally are small, efficient spaces that value quality over quantity.

People choose to downsize to tiny homes for many reasons. They may include living a more environmentally friendly lifestyle, simplifying their lives and possessions, becoming more mobile, or achieving financial freedom, since tiny homes typically cost significantly less than the average American home.

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Many assessments of the tiny-house movement have asserted without quantitative evidence that individuals who downsize to tiny homes will have a significantly lower environmental impact. On the other hand, some reviews hint that tiny home living may lend itself to unsustainable practices.

UNDERSTANDING FOOTPRINT CHANGES AFTER DOWNSIZING

This study examined tiny home downsizers’ environmental impacts by measuring their individual ecological footprints. This metric calculates human demand on nature by providing a measurement of land needed to sustain current consumption behaviors.

To do this, I calculated their spatial footprints in terms of global hectares, considering housing, transportation, food, goods, and services. For reference, one global hectare is equivalent to about 2.5 acres, or about the size of a single soccer field.

I found that among 80 tiny home downsizers located across the United States, the average ecological footprint was 3.87 global hectares, or about 9.5 acres. This means that it would require 9.5 acres to support that person’s lifestyle for one year. Before moving into tiny homes, these respondents’ average footprint was 7.01 global hectares (17.3 acres). For comparison, the average American’s footprint is 8.4 global hectares, or 20.8 acres.

My most interesting finding was that housing was not the only component of participants’ ecological footprints that changed. On average, every major component of downsizers’ lifestyles, including food, transportation, and consumption of goods and services, was positively influenced.

As a whole, I found that after downsizing, people were more likely to eat less energy-intensive food products and adopt more environmentally conscious eating habits, such as eating more locally and growing more of their own food. Participants traveled less by car, motorcycle, bus, train, and airplane, and drove more fuel-efficient cars than they did before downsizing.

They also purchased substantially fewer items, recycled more plastic and paper, and generated less trash. In sum, I found that downsizing was an important step toward reducing ecological footprints and encouraging pro-environmental behaviors.

To take these findings a step farther, I was able to use footprint data to calculate how many resources could potentially be saved if a small portion of Americans downsized. I found that about 366 million acres of biologically productive land could be saved if just 10% of Americans downsized to a tiny home.

FINE-TUNING FOOTPRINT ANALYSES

My research identified more than 100 behaviors that changed after downsizing to a tiny home. Approximately 86% had a positive impact, while the rest were negative.

Some choices, such as harvesting rainwater, adopting a capsule wardrobe approach, and carpooling, reduced individual environmental impacts. Others could potentially expand people’s footprints—for example, traveling more and eating out more often.

A handful of negative behaviors were not representative of all participants in the study but still are important to discuss. For instance, some participants drove longer distances after moving to rural areas where their tiny homes could be parked. Others ate out more often because they had smaller kitchens, or recycled less because they lacked space to store recyclables and had less access to curbside recycling services.

It is important to identify these behaviors in order to understand potential negative implications of tiny home living and enable designers to address them. It is also important to note that some behaviors I recorded could have been influenced by factors other than downsizing to a tiny home. For instance, some people might have reduced their car travel because they had recently retired.

Nonetheless, all participants in this study reduced their footprints by downsizing to tiny homes, even if they did not downsize for environmental reasons. This indicates that downsizing leads people to adopt behaviors that are better for the environment. These findings provide important insights for the sustainable housing industry and implications for future research on tiny homes.

For instance, someone may be able to present this study to a planning commission office in their town to show how and why tiny homes are a sustainable housing approach. These results have the potential to also support tiny home builders and designers, people who want to create tiny home communities, and others trying to change zoning ordinances in their towns to support tiny homes. I hope this work will spur additional research that produces more affordable and sustainable housing choices for more Americans.

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Maria Saxton is a PhD Candidate in Environmental Planning and Design at Virginia Tech. This post originally appeared on The Conversation.

Having a birthday and acknowledging that you’re one year older and that you can’t slow TIME down brings a certain sense of reminiscing, don’t you find? This was therapy so if you will indulge me…Thank you in advance and I hope it blesses you! Below, you will find my Birthday wish with an invitation to join the mission!

CHALLENGES

It’s been a crazy journey, this tiny house business. The major challenges we’ve faced since going tiny almost two years ago, actually have less to do with the lifestyle and more to do with exterior people entering the scene and taking advantage of us due to owning a company. Before I expound on a few of the challenges, I want to express my gratitude here and in more detail at the end of this post. The gratitude I feel overcomes all the drama for sure!

As a startup company, we put everything in and drained our savings and resources to make it through year one. To this day, every single dollar we make goes right back in to the company so you end up working for free, which as you can imagine, after two years, gets old. No one said it’s easy to run a start up company, especially being family owned and operated. Of course, you wear all the hats and juggle all the balls!

Some of the hi-lights have been

• Watching our daughter, Christianna, run our marketing department with such talent, skill, and ease: PRICELESS!
• Todd teaching our son Andrew valuable work ethics and skill through on the job training: PRICELESS!
• serving our clients to make their dreams come true
• seeing God’s provision come miraculously when we had all but lost hope! (One time, an unexpected $1900 check, another $2800, then $15,000 and another $10,000.)
• making new friends along the journey
• gratitude for people’s kindness to believe in us. We even had an angel investor contribute $75,000, allowing us to keep our doors open.
• a newly found passion for community, relationships, and helping the homeless
• None of these beautiful things would have happened outside the trials and challenges we pressed through because our WHY and DREAMS are bigger than the obstacles!

Lenders want a track record before they will loan you money, yet you need that capital in the beginning. How does that make sense? You can also see why most companies fail in the first 5 years.

“Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.” I have not gone public with this story that began almost two years ago. I have protected the reputation of the parties who wronged us. (I will not give names, but you may ask me in private if you’re concerned about encountering these people in our community, lest they rob you blind as well.) Honestly, I was too hurt, betrayed, mad, frustrated, stressed, angry, to speak in an honorable way before now. My momma taught me, “If ya ain’t got nothin’ nice to say, don’t say nothin’ at all!” One day soon, in this blog, I will expound on these stories, again without names.

You may or may not know this, but in our HGTV episode, they never once mentioned our company name. This was a huge disappointment which meant for people to find us, they had to use my name and do a google search.

BLESSINGS

• Todd: True story: I woke up to his kiss, wishing me happy birthday before he headed off to work. The night before, it struck me in a phone conversation with my mom, that I was actually turning 46. (I thought I was turning 45). I bemoaned this fact to Todd before bed so the next morning, he says, “I much prefer the 46 year old “YOU” to the 23 year old “YOU”! I guess Beauty and youth ain’t everything: wisdom and wrinkles can make you a better person if you let them!!! I also remember after a few months in our tiny house, he said, “I love living tiny with you!”
• Despite the many challenges and high stress of the journey, we are still very much in love and better for having gone through the trials!
• HGTV: We made new friends; a whole new world opened up to us and we are thankful and excited to do more of it shortly we hope!
• Heart for homeless: mainly through our connections at Community First in Austin, Texas, they are housing over 200 people, many in tiny houses after just 3 years.
• Specific people who have helped us along the way: Mel and Deb Christiansen, Lois and Sonny Snyder, Beth and Brandon Carrier, Christianna Snyder, Andrew Snyder, Elisabeth Snyder, David Eickbusch (soon to be son-in-law), Raymond Lunsford, Mary Perlitz, Sonia Bryan, Hunter Boon, Candice roost page, Elizabeth Rose, Bill Lucas, Cori Dyer, Genae Browne, Nikki Murphy, Blake Lindley, Cynthia Edwards, John Gilbert, Rosalind, LeeAnn Kramer, Rapha God ministries, Living Water Ministries, Brent Bates, Keri Kropp, Robert Upton, Linda and Tucker Klaassen, Max Duncan, Christy Cracraft, Clint Fiore, Jesse Engler, Sean Murphy, Callie Roberson, Stephen Mooney, Katie Jordan. (There are so many more, too many to list here).
• The kindness of our community rallying around to support us is truly astounding and life-giving!
• Trips: We had so much fun hauling our house to tiny house shows across Texas, Illinois and Michigan, landing on the family farm last summer. (the very best way to visit family is to bring your own house!!)
• Two miraculous success stories emerged from this time. I wish I could expound, but they are not my stories; I just got to be in relationship with them and partner with God in a miracle of healing inside and outside! If you ask me, I know they’d love to share with you personally!

CALL TO ACTION! Please consider donating to this local charity for my Birthday: https://www.facebook.com/donate/451381335693212/

I chose this charity because their heart is for the homeless and we are working together to build tiny homes to help solve this problem in our city. I’d be so honored if you’d join this mission, even with a $5.00 donation today!

What do I love about Mercy Gate? The success stories that have come from it. Videos on their website, and the leaders of it have been my girlfriends for a very long time so I believe in them! The fact that they are helping the down trodden and forgotten have hope again!