Updated yesterday at 12:00 p.m.
Farah Nayeri The New York Times
In a busy area of south London, near a busy tube station and bus network, a tiny house sits in a dumpster.
Just over 1.5 square meters in size, this plywood house consists of a central floor, wall shelves for storage (or seating), a kitchen counter with sink, hotplate and toy-sized refrigerator, and a mezzanine with a mattress under the arched roof. There is no running water and the bathroom is an outdoor portable toilet.
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 the UK and abroad. Since moving into the free dumpster (called a “skip” in Britain) in January, videos of the space posted on social media have 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 being forced to move into smaller and smaller places, micro-apartments, tiny houses, just to make ends meet,” Harrison Marshall said in a telephone interview.
PHOTO FROM INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT @THESKIPHOUSE
Harrison Marshall poses in his tiny house.
Obviously, minimal living has benefits, but it should be a choice rather than a necessity.
Harrison Marshall, architect and artist
Micro-apartments and tiny houses like Mr. Marshall’s are popping up on social media platforms, a testament to the curiosity this lifestyle arouses. Small spaces have captivated viewers, whether responding to rising real estate prices or a different, boundary-pushing lifestyle, as seen on platforms like YouTube channel Never Too Small. While there are no exact numbers on the number of tiny houses and micro-apartments on the market, the social media attention hasn’t necessarily enticed viewers to move in en masse, perhaps because living in these spaces can sometimes be painful.
PHOTO SAM BUSH, THE NEW YORK TIMES
View from outside of Harrison Marshall’s tiny house
Mr Marshall noted that 80 per cent of people who contacted him to express interest in moving to a house like his in the Bermondsey area were not serious and that “most of these contacts are just wind and chatter.” In his opinion, tiny homes are romanticized because luxury living is overrated.
“People have become 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 ignores the other side of the coin: showers at the gym and portable toilets at the gym.
The post-pandemic rush to big cities has pushed rents to record levels and increased demand for affordable housing, including homes barely larger than a parking space.
But while social media audiences find the lifestyle “entertaining and relatable,” as one expert put it, it’s not necessarily a role model to follow.
Viewers of the microapartment videos are like visitors to the Alcatraz federal prison 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 know what’s happening at the “unusually small end” of the housing market scale, she explained.
“Our desire to connect with different people – including influencers and celebrities or people who live in different places in different ways – can manifest itself on social media because we feel like we are making a personal connection,” says she said.
PHOTO SAM BUSH, THE NEW YORK TIMES
The cost of housing in big cities forces some people to live in very small, more affordable spaces.
Real pressure
While these small spaces aren’t a common choice, residents who take this step face real pressure. For people who want to live and work in big cities, the housing situation after the pandemic is dramatic. According to a report from real estate brokerage Douglas Elliman, the average rental price in Manhattan was $5,470 in June. According to the listing site Apartments.com, the citywide average rent this month is $3,644.
The housing situation in London is similar. In the first three months of the year, the average asking rent in the British capital hit a record of around $3,165 a month as residents who left the city during lockdowns returned in droves.
In Asia, city dwellers face similar burdens and costs. In Tokyo, the average monthly rent reached a record high for the third month in a row in March. Currently that rent is about $4,900.
When 21-year-old Ryan Crouse moved to Tokyo in May 2022 from New York, where he was a business student at Marymount Manhattan College, he rented a 1.5-square-meter microapartment for $485 a month. Videos from his Tokyo studio went viral, garnering between 20 and 30 million views across all platforms, said Crouse, who moved to a larger apartment last May.
Mr Crouse believes the pandemic has sparked curiosity. During the lockdown, “everyone was on social media, sharing their spaces” and “their lives,” and videos of apartment tours went “crazy,” he says.
The apartment viewing videos have gone crazy. It really highlighted small spaces like this.
Ryan Crouse, 21 years old
New York-based media planner Alaina Randazzo’s curiosity about social media seemed to reach frenzied levels 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 at the end of the hallway and shared.
Still, videos of her micro-apartment have been viewed tens of millions of times on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, she says. YouTube influencers, one of whom has a cooking series, have filmed in his micro studio, and rappers have sent him messages urging him to do the same.
“The photos give the impression that the apartment is a little bigger than it really is,” notes Ms. Randazzo, 26. There are so many little things to do in these apartments that you don’t even think about. »
Microstudios have a “cool factor” these days, she says, because “you’re selling someone a dream”: that they can make it in New York and “not get judged” for living in a tiny apartment.
Plus, our generation “likes reality,” she explains, “someone who is authentic” and is trying to build a career and a future by saving money.
But Ms. Randazzo couldn’t live a life like that for more than a year. Today she lives in a large New York townhouse where she has a spacious bedroom. She has no regrets about 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.