If you haven't bought a house in the UK yet, and you're not destined for great things, you're in a pretty awkward situation. Prices have been going sky high.
On my road, in a not so lovely part of Hackney (it's East London, not Chelsea or Mayfair) a 3 bedroom house is currently on the market for £394,000 (that's a shade over $760,000 at today's rates). Which is why we're renting one bedroom in part of a house.
The problem is, I read, that housing stock is increeasing by only 160,000 houses a year. But the numberof people for them is increasing by 200,000. So the market stays high and edges higher.
Green belt laws mean that houses can't be built in certain areas designated as countryside. Meaning that all those fields remain just fields. It has the specific purpose of stopping dwellings encroaching on the countryside, towns merging into each other etc. etc.
This stops new houses being built (any type of house). Although I can see the point of this, I feel disappointed and let down that they don't consider ecological houses as a different class of house.
In the UK, with land at a premium, we're going to have to re-think the way we house ourselves and the way we use our land (and that the rules about using it properly work too).
So it was a welcome sight to see these tiny houses showing that you don't need to build big to have a roof over your head.
This is my 5 minute crash surfing course on small houses:
- Let's go and look at Henry David Thoreau's house at Walden Pond
- Then watch the video of Gregory Paul Johnson's 140 square foot house (about 3.6m squared) from PBS
- See the gallery of small houses here
- What about a Jot House? Sustainable, low cost, prefabricated.
- Going traditional? Why don't you build your own yurt?
- Visit Jay Shafer's Tiny Tumbleweed Houses - beautiful aren't they?
Light-hearted surfing aside though, in the very real housing shortage we have, with sky high prices, houses like this might just become viable prospects for those who, like me and Glenn, don't own our own homes.
Obviously these dwellings test the limits of their art, but living smaller might just be the way that all of us can get the opportunity to live on and own a tiny patch of this, our sceptred isle...
P.S. Antony found a great link to a guy in Denmark who lives in an allotment house. How beautiful life would be if I could live in an allotment house!
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