These shockingly small houses were built to match what a 25-year-old can actually afford

Three new houses have just been built in Sweden that aim to meet an underserved segment of the market. Geared toward young, first-time home buyers, the houses have been designed and built to match the average incomes and savings of 25-year-olds. In a housing-constrained place like Sweden, that seems like a good thing, but there’s a catch. Because the houses are built to match what young people can afford, they are incredibly, oppressively, unrealistically small. And that’s intentional.

The three tiny houses range from about 20 square feet to 48 square feet (1.9 square meters to 4.5 square meters), offering little more than four walls, a roof, a toilet, and a place to sit. There’s not even enough room to lie flat on a bed.

These houses are not actual products, but part of a housing reform campaign led by Riksbyggen, a Swedish housing developer, and the creative agency BBDO Nordics. Rather than explain the challenge of housing affordability with numbers alone, Riksbyggen opted to show, at full scale, what affordable housing would actually look like. The three homes will be taken on a tour throughout Sweden, offering people a chance to step inside the nation’s housing crisis.  

The house sizes are based on Riksbyggen’s Square Meter Index, which combines income, property prices, and mortgage conditions to show what is affordable to young people making the average income in different Swedish cities. Young people in the city of Umeå, for instance, can afford the 48-square-foot model. In Gothenburg, the average affordable house would be 33 square feet. In Stockholm, the house would be just 20 square feet.

By building these three houses, Riksbyggen is hoping to push for three housing affordability reforms: boosting housing production, making lower-cost loans available to first-time buyers, and reintroducing a program that builds social housing for the elderly, which would make more homes available to younger buyers.

The homes may be spurring action. Sweden’s housing minister, Andreas Carlsson, has visited the homes, squeezing his tall frame into one of the house’s half-beds.

“We see real political momentum behind all three proposals, although to varying degrees,” Riksbyggen’s CEO, Johanna Frelin, tells Fast Company. “The strongest political support currently seems to be for a state-backed start loan for first-time buyers, while investment support for housing for older people is also gaining renewed attention.

“Our proposal for the state to share more of the risk in new housing construction is more politically challenging,” Frelin adds, “but the need for action is increasingly recognized. Ultimately, we hope the campaign can help turn that recognition into concrete policy.”