Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/19/buy-a-tiny-house-at-ikea.html
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Creepy bot voice sez you best recognize how amazing this tiny home is, human.
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Since this project isn’t so dependent on friends and family donating free or near-free design and construction labour and materials, it brings the claim of hipster tiny house proponents that “anyone can do it” closer to reality (assuming “anyone” has $50k in cash and no kids). There’s still the matter of finding and paying for a place to put it, though, since not everyone has parents or relatives who can provide the land gratis.
There’s potential here in terms of governments licensing the design for a Housing First solution. Ikea’s 187sqf isn’t a lot, but it’s better insulated and more pleasant to live in than on the street or in a tent.
Note: The project website doesn’t appear to exist yet.
According to another article it was a concept Ikea sales site that was shut down. Ikea did the furniture and fixtures and interior design, but the base house itself is sold through the Escape site.
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Geez, as a 2nd owner, my mom paid this amount for a 3-bedroom hose with a finished basement in Wichita, KS. I guess the only thing the IKEA home has on her is the ability to move it around, unless a tornado hits.
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I guess it would not help sales if they simply called it what it is: a very small trailer home. Nothing against trailer homes, but it seems like the main purpose of calling it a “tiny home” is to make it feel hipster-approved, when calling it a trailer home would send them running in the other direction. Glad it has solar panels and composting toilets though.
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Trailer park? I mean this thing is basically about the IKEA equivalent of a large camping trailer.
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Is “Travel & Leasure” the magazine where you can find lease listings for such abodes?
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That would be the most accessible option. It’s also one that tiny house proponents don’t usually like to talk about or feature in their videos or Instagram feeds, lest they be associated with the poors and the olds.
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Hipster gentrification comes to KOA.
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Yeah I was gonna say that there are plenty of places where you can get a “manufactured home” or “modular home” as they’re usually pitched. On a lot.
There are infact a ton of them sitting vacant in many countries, particularly the US. Intended as retirement housing but unsold.
They’re often considered a bad deal for affordable housing or a bad solution to housing crises. Since they tend to come with predatory maintenance fees and still require rent (paid on the lot). While they lack density and access or connection to developed areas.
But at least you can get a mortgage/loan on them. And redeveloping the vacant ones is a lot more promising then selling new ones to people that can already afford land.
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Buy a tiny house at IKEA,
live in it for three months, then throw it in the trash like most of the other flimsy junk you buy from Ikea.
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Yeah, the problem with this idea, at least in the U.S., is that the demographic who might be most immediately interested in a home like this largely lives in geographical areas where this is impractical. There are almost no mobile home parks near my city anymore, and those that are still here are very expensive and very rigidly run and really only still exist because the family owned the land long before it became so valuable.
This does seem like a pretty slick idea for someone who wants to basically add an easy guest house onto their property or as an option for a grown child who wants to continue to “live with the parents” but have their own place.
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The really important thing here is that this fulfills the prophecy at long last.
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This. “Tiny homes” are hipster mobile (manufactured) homes or RVs. It would be nice if the latter two things could be destigmatized instead of inventing this new dumber version of them. They are an important part of our housing system, but they have the same problem that tiny homes do: land to put it on.
No discussion of tiny homes ever seems to discuss the land it is sitting on, which is 90% of the problem. The other 10% already have plenty of good solutions (RVs, cabins, manufactured homes, A-frame kits, etc etc).
I say it in every thread on this topic, so apologies if I’m grinding an axe, but the modern hipster “tiny home” movement is mostly poverty tourism.
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Mostly what you see are people buying beautiful pieces of land to put them on, or “borrowing” a corner of family or friend’s land. Thus revealing the lie of this whole thing- if you’re privileged enough to be able to acquire or use land for your hipster cabin, then you are not “saving the world” but are in fact part of the system that has created homelessness to begin with.
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Hm. That’s going to get recursive.
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Is it flat pack?
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Now available at the BoingBoing Store, (party lights not included).
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It also has solar panels and a composting toilet which is pretty awesome. So other than running water (campers usually have big water storage tanks) you would be able to live more or less “off the grid” and wouldn’t need utility hookups with one of these.
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The tiny house movement thinks the answer to unpleasant city living is an even worse suburban sprawl, rather than putting in the effort to make those cities more liveable.
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