TINY HOMES: CONCEDING TO AN ERA OF DISPLACEMENT
THE TINY HOUSE movement represents a generation of (mostly) young people seeking hope while settling for less. The perception has been that Tiny Houses are a solution to the challenges/obstacles to home ownership. Instead, they’re an adaptation that accepts the problems as given, and seeks to squeeze out what little comfort is available in the margins.
From Sonoma to Syracuse we are confronted by the monstrous impacts of real estate and development industries. Ever hopeful, despite having significantly fewer resources than their parents, millennials across the country are captivated by the good intentions of eco-conscious designers and have expressed delight in the prospect of having a tiny house of their own. Tiny House Communities (THCs) have begun to pop up here in Sonoma, and across the country, and have begun fighting legal battles for their right to exist. Generally these communities must fly below the radar or comply with zoning regulations based on sewer/septic limitations, noise and aesthetic ordinances, and building codes, essentially operating like trailer parks, although the demographic of the occupants is quite different. Here in Forestville, California, one such community is being evicted, called out by their neighbor who was distressed by the presence of unusual structures in the yard next door. Whether this distress was caused by actual physical disturbances, or by the psychological distress of having something unusual next door, I do not know.
The fact that Tiny Houses have gained such a following is a result of the constraints under which millennials are coming of age. Real estate continuing to bubble and burst, the costs of higher education quickly exceeding its benefits, and job opportunities primarily at the bottom of the heap, most millennials won’t pay off their college loans or ever own their own home. While media anxiously gabs about “Millenials just aren’t buying houses. Young people today don’t have the same values as their parents,” the trend is actually a result of the conditions beneath it. Young people can’t afford land or a house, (and if they could they wouldn’t trust the banks who would own their mortgage anyway). So, they’re tempering and placing their aspirations elsewhere, such as, in Tiny Homes. They blog and post and twit and tumbl about Tiny Houses as if building their castles in the clouds, tiny castles in digital clouds, as if saying “Ok, we can’t afford a house or the land to put one on. We’re going to have to move a lot to follow jobs and low rents. We really want a house, but it’ll have to be a tiny house on wheels.”
We see the word ‘tiny’ being applied as if it’s trendy, instead of representing a real diminishing of resources and aspirations. Of course, the intention of decreasing one’s resource consumption is honorable. To live lightly on the land and use only what one needs are ethics that could change the doomed course of human history if they were embraced by popular culture and market makers. Tiny houses represent one way of doing this and are beautiful in this respect, but there are very many other ways of reducing our consumption, some that don’t require us to live in cramped quarters under constant threat of eviction. And by the way, aren’t these the conditions that are somehow meant to be alleviated by living in a Tiny Home? Aren’t tiny homes supposed to be a preferable alternative to desperately high rents in tiny, crappy apartments?
To really address the problems of titanic housing prices and housing-related over-consumption will require a different set of actions than building stylish mobile-homes. We will have to work together to form collectives with shared resources enough to buy and maintain land. We’ll have to push against zoning and building codes to allow different arrangements of residents to live on so-called ‘single-family’ lots. If we do this, then we can talk about the shape and size of our houses. For now Tiny Houses are mostly appealing as glossy images, next to pictures of Jeff Bridges’ beard and artichoke-stuffed peppers on some hipster tumblr feed.
I know many of you who express excitement about Tiny Houses, but do you really want to live on a quarter acre parcel with ten other people, sharing an outdoor kitchen and porta-potty while under constant threat of eviction? This may be exciting at first, but it is obviously not a long-term solution to our need for stable homes and communities. Personally, I would love to have a house and a yard with the time to enjoy it. It doesn’t need to be big. I will be a good steward of the land; striving to have a net-positive impact on the ecology in which my home is embedded. I want my kids to inherit the land and to always have the option of returning to it. For now I can either live in my car or settle for living in a shed behind a suburban home while paying off the owner’s mortgage; which, let’s face it, is exactly what a Tiny House is.
