Sustainable tiny houses designed to live in expensive cities

Housing prices are still hot in big cities, even in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis. In San Francisco, where rental rates have been skyrocketing in the last decade, they suffer only a -11% decrease. Cities like New York, London, or Hong Kong are known for being unaffordable for students and young workers. Even cities not as densely populated, as Vancouver, have become extremely expensive.

Shifting Nests is a project made of sustainable, low-cost tiny homes that could be employed to transform empty parking lots into inhabited community gardens. Proposed by Canadian Bla Design Group, it won the first prize in the Bee Breeders 2019 Microhome competition. The “nests” are a prefabricated housing solution “consisting of plywood, metal cladding, and corrugated polycarbonate on a series of simple frames”, with zones for resting, bathing, cooking, living and dining, and – unexpected! – farming. “We would like to see how this design might be adapted to other cities and climates”, the jury wrote in his official commentary. With the situation created by the pandemic and new attention to low-density living, this project assumes a renewed value.