Older divorced women priced out of housing are finding a lifeline in tiny home villages

• Single older women are turning to tiny home villages after getting divorced.
• One US village said roughly a third of its residents are older divorced women.
• There's a major financial reason this group is "tremendously overrepresented," said one expert.

Margot Hollander got divorced at 62. Among the many decisions she faced in 2023 as she navigated life after marriage was the practical question of where she would live.

"After the divorce, I had to settle somewhere," Margot Hollander said, sitting at the small dining table in her modern tiny home, her miniature dog at her feet.

At the time, she was living in Eindhoven. It would have been a long wait for social housing. As a retired dance teacher in her 60s with no steady income, she had little chance of securing a mortgage and struggled to compete on the private rental market with high-earning couples. Left with about 145,000 euros ($170,407) from the sale of her marital home, Hollander, now 64, knew a house in the city was out of her budget.

"Your choice is limited," Hollander told Business Insider.

Then, while browsing online, Hollander came across Minitopia, a tiny home village in her hometown of Eindhoven, in the south of the Netherlands. A prebuilt tiny house was listed for sale. She bought it in January 2024 in cash for about 143,000 euros, marking a new phase in her post-divorce life.

There were a considerable number of offers on the property, she said, but "I was the lucky one."

Tiny home villages are attracting divorced women

The Minitopia Foundation works with local governments to turn derelict land into tiny house communities. More than 150 plots are spread across five sites in the southern Netherlands.

Of the nearly 2,000 people on Minitopia's waiting list, across all five sites, one key demographic stands out, Rolf van Boxmeer, its cofounder, told Business Insider.

"A big part of it is divorced people," van Boxmeer said, estimating that around 30% of those on the waiting list were single women, many of them older and divorced.

"We've attracted a lot of these people," he added. "They need a home, fast, that they like. They are a bit older and don't usually have waiting-list priority on social housing."

Minitopia in Eindhoven, where Hollander lives, is the largest of the foundation's sites, with room for 100 tiny houses. Like Hollander, some buy their tiny homes secondhand, while others apply for a plot to build from scratch for as little as €5,000, though more typically closer to €75,000.

Residents then pay ground rent to the foundation, usually a few hundred euros a month, depending on the size of their plot. It's an affordable way onto the property ladder, and the model has proved popular.

Divorced women often buy tiny homes with cash

Sidra Gifford, 54, who lives alone in a tiny home at another Minitopia site in Valkenswaard, said there are at least two divorcees in the 13-home community. In her view, the move into tiny-home villages is often driven by necessity, particularly the difficulty of finding a rental after a breakup.

Tiny homes can offer an alternative for people who have cash after a divorce but lower ongoing incomes, making it harder to secure a rental or a mortgage, said Mariska van de Velde, a real estate agent helping Gifford sell her home.

Because of their size, they are typically more affordable than traditional properties. But the homes are usually bought in cash, because in the Netherlands, they generally do not qualify for mortgages, as the land itself is not owned.

"For people who are recently divorced, most of the time, they've got a house that's going to be sold, so they've got the cash," van de Velde said. "So they're able to buy a tiny house to live in."

It's not just a Dutch trend

For Minitopia, older divorced women make up a sizable chunk of would-be residents. There are similar examples outside the Netherlands of divorcees turning to tiny homes. In Oregon, one woman built her own tiny-home village after struggling financially following a divorce. In Texas, another set up a community primarily for older single women.

Escape Tampa Bay Village, a tiny-home community with 33 residents in Florida, told Business Insider it has also attracted a significant number of older divorced women. "Roughly one-third of our residents fall into the category of older and/or divorced women, many of whom seek a simpler, more manageable lifestyle," a spokesperson said.

Alice Elizabeth Wilson, a lecturer in sustainability at Manchester Metropolitan University, whose Ph.D. focused on women's usage of tiny homes, told Business Insider that it's increasingly common in capitalist economies for older, divorced women to turn to tiny housing.

"Older single women, especially older divorced women who have historically been in heterosexual relationships, are tremendously overrepresented in the tiny-house space," she said.

Many of these women have spent much of their lives in unpaid roles, such as raising children, Wilson added, making them less likely to have significant financial resources of their own.

"They are left in a position where they don't have savings, they don't have access to assets, they don't have a big pension pot," Wilson said. "Tiny houses are really one of the only potential solutions that these women can actually afford."

Tiny homes offer more than a practical solution

The trend is often shaped by a perfect storm of factors, namely housing supply, affordability, and household composition, said Clara H. Mulder, professor of demography at the University of Groningen.

"Divorce often creates urgency to find housing, and women, in particular, often experience negative income consequences from divorce," Mulder said. "I would also expect older divorced women to often live alone."

Mulder added, "Taken together, those factors may make tiny homes a practical and welcome housing solution for divorced women in later life."

For Hollander, moving to Minitopia has become more than just a practical decision after her divorce. Over the past two years, she said, she has come to love her tiny home and community.

"I hope this will be my last home," she said. "Though I hope I've got plenty of years left in it yet."