Could these £50,000, eco-friendly tiny homes be the answer to the UK's housing crisis?

Tiny homes may be the next fix for the UK’s housing crisis – and university students from across the country are joining forces to bring them to a town and city near you.

Homefolk, a youth-led social enterprise, was first set up in 2021 to find a sustainable solution to the housing crisis. Over 30 students from the University of Sheffield, the University of Glasgow and Queen Mary University of London will begin work to create affordable and sustainable ‘tiny home villages’ in urban areas.

The students, from architectural, medical and legal disciplines, will work under the guidance of award-winning Sheffield architect Sam Brown and Dr Anna Moore, a respiratory and clean air campaigner.

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Tiny homes are a small living approach where people live in homes more compact than traditional brick-and-mortar spaces. The homes are in response to unaffordable city rents, poor quality housing affected by damp and mould, and an eco-friendly alternative to city living. 

Each tiny home is estimated to cost around £50,000 to build, equivalent to roughly three or four years of rent for a one-bedroom flat in London. The homes are designed with eco-friendly materials such as structured panels and compacted straw insulation to increase energy efficiency and reduce heating bills. 

Adam Brown, a co-director at Homefolk, founded the project after a year working various jobs while completing his medical degree.

He says his time working as a teaching assistant with special needs children and at an A&E department in a hospital during the pandemic changed his perspective on housing.

“The teaching assistants were amazing, but they were also being paid £10 an hour, and they all had young children. Many of them were living in quite cramped conditions, and I just remember thinking, how do you share a one-bedroom flat with your partner and three young children? And you’re working with special needs kids all day?”

Brown said his own experience dealing with landlords partly inspired him. “My radiator broke. I remember trying to ask the landlord about fixing one of the radiators as I was in my bed all the time with an electric blanket on,” he said. 

But it was hearing the story of a cleaner in the hospital he worked at that pushed him to set up Homefolk.

“We had a woman come in with low oxygen levels. I asked her if she was working and she said she worked as a cleaner,” said Brown.

“I said to her: ‘Do you have flatmates?’ and she said she was from West Africa and lived with 14 others in a three-bed flat. I remember the anger I felt. The government messaging at the time was all about self-isolating, to protect lives. How can you self-isolate in cramped housing? 

“I felt really angry, because there were many other situations. People coming in and crying, begging us to be admitted to a ward so that they could be warm.”

Brown said the project was not aimed specifically at homelessness, but rather at “the building of new affordable housing, which is something that can be aspirational for everyone, not just for people experiencing a lack of a home.”

“I think a lot of the tiny home community movement is portrayed in the media as like an option for people with no other choice. We believe, as a group, some of the benefits of this way of living, environmentally, for people’s wellbeing and health, there are so many unique advantages to this that it would be an improvement on many of the standard options available to single people who are renting.”

Skeptics worry that the construction of tiny homes doesn’t remedy the bigger issue, which is the widespread lack of affordable housing.

Tiny homes are already established in the US and are one way to address the current 650,000 people without housing. Clusters of tiny homes exist in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and other expensive California cities, after the state of California implemented the 2022 California Building Code. Homes in the state must have a minimum ceiling height of seven feet and six inches, one room of at least 120 square feet of floor space, and a net floor area of no less than 70 square feet for all other habitable rooms. 

Many homes are backed by billionaires through philanthropies, such as the Sobrato philanthropic organisation by billionaire Silicon Valley developer John Sobrato. Other states, such as rural North Carolina, have the help of the Oak Foundation, which supports the construction of tiny homes for people experiencing severe mental illness and who are chronically homeless.

Michelle Waters, an architecture and design team member at Homefolk, said: “It’s a very interesting challenge of introducing a collaborative model of housing within the pre-existing, competitive model of housing, where money usually goes to large private company corporations and landlords and the money is never returned.

“This idea of building small, modular housing communities, the idea that the money can just stay collaborative and cooperative, and everyone has a bit of transparency within the housing units is what this project is about.

“The way of renting and buying houses doesn’t seem to be making any difference in fixing how difficult it’s becoming to buy a house. So we’re using this project to raise awareness about what could be achieved.”

Homefolk has begun outreach to local authorities, particularly in London, to find councils who would be willing to help secure planning permissions for pilot sites for tiny home villages. 

“We are also in early-stage discussions with multiple UK modular housing builders who are interested in the eco-friendly aspects of the design and potential media exposure it could bring to their businesses,” she added. “Our focus has been on gaining support for converting underutilised urban spaces into vibrant and affordable tiny home communities.”

Tiny homes in the US have the luxury of space to build. In the UK, space is a premium, and Brown believes tiny homes can be built on ‘grey belt’ land as part of a solution to alleviate the country’s housing crisis. 

The ‘grey belt’ refers to poorer quality parts of the green belt – usually disused brownfield land, car parks, or poor quality scrubland. The new term – an amendment in the government’s National Planning Policy Framework is part of a strategy to deliver 1.5 million new homes over the next five years.

The grey belt is a new category so no official government data exists. However, planning consultants Lichfield found an additional 1.4 million extra homes could be built if every identified brownfield site in England was built to its full capacity – slightly less than Labour’s pledge.

Labour says the grey belt developments must offer 50% affordable housing. This includes homes that are let at least 20% below local market rents.

Brown said: “I think this particular model is one of the most appropriate models to use greyfield sites of any that I’ve encountered […] I know that greyfield sites could be a really hellish environment to live in, like a tiny little box on your own with no greenery. 

“Conventional models are expensive. I feel that this model, I hope, is the beginning of a variety of different models for fixing housing.”

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