The tyranny of tiny living

MY husband and I share a 492-square-foot apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We inhabit a "micro apartment", or what is sometimes called a tiny house. This label is usually proudly applied to dwellings less than 500 sq ft, according to Wikipedia. We are unwittingly on a very small bandwagon, part of a growing international movement.

But deep inside the expensive custom closets and under the New Age Murphy beds, the pro-petite propaganda has hidden some unseemly truths about how the other half lives. No one writes about the little white lies that help sell this new, very small American dream.

Here, on the inside, we have found small not so beautiful after all. Like the silent majority of other middling or poor urban dwellers in expensive cities, we are residents of tiny homes not by design, but because it is all our money can rent.