Tiny Towns – 21st Century Affordable Housing – note 5

Health as a Factor of Tiny Home Living

Today we look at how health could affect each age groups’ propensity to live tiny. Statistics on health, in general, are elusive and we have loosely applied what we could assemble to our target groups.

First, we applied a “Prevalence to Disabilities”. The purpose was to identify that some people in each age category would not be able to or not feel comfortable living without assistance. While this does not apply specifically to tiny homes, it does relate to all forms of accommodation and living arrangements. Overall, we calculated 18.73% of the target group would be affected by disabilities making tiny home living an unfavorable choice.

Next, we looked at how health issues would affect some people’s ability and desire to live tiny. We have used Hypertension as the indicator. In general terms, hypertension is abnormally high blood pressure, indicating a state of great psychological stress. It can be an indicator of current conditions or developing conditions, so we felt it could also dictate the comfort-level of prospective tiny home owners. This was used to further reduce the number of potential tiny homeowners by 20.24% when the age-grouped percentages were applied.

The chart below begins with the tiny homeowner’s market potential that we have developed up to and including Householder demographics, shown in column 1, then the Disability factors are applied to move to column 2 and lastly, the Hypertension factor is applied in column 3. 

While it is difficult to accurately predict the true impact health and physical ability will have on independent tiny home living, we feel that these adjustments are reasonable, based on the historical data available.