Vince and Sam are newlywed twentysomethings who’ve been bunking with family for a year. Finally, they’ve saved up enough to buy a palace to call their own. Well, sort of: They want to shrink their footprint and expenses by living in a custom-built, 204-square-foot stand-alone house in southern New Jersey. It has to have room for gym equipment—they’re fitness buffs—and a study for Sam, who’s in medical school. Even Vince’s adorably headbanded mom isn’t sure how it will all fit. When Vince and Sam first see their new digs under construction, tall and narrow like a top-heavy garage, Vince admits they’re “freaking out on the inside.”
So goes a standard episode of Tiny House Nation, the first of a half-dozen miniaturized real estate shows that have recently premiered. “We discovered that for millennials, there was an overriding social trend of extreme downsizing, and we wanted to dig deep into that,” says Gena McCarthy, executive producer of the show, which began airing last year after the Biography Channel morphed into the youth-focused FYI network. Last summer’s first season averaged 257,000 viewers per week, according to Nielsen; this season’s average viewership is up 77 percent, to 465,000.
