"Twelve people who had been living on the streets of Seattle are now snug in 12 tiny houses tucked into backyards throughout Washington’s largest city."

"And each little dwelling is likely the most sustainable house on its block. Solar arrays on the roofs of the homes provide more than enough power for heating, lighting and cooking, even in Seattle’s not-so-sunny climate. And all the materials and fittings — from the juniper wood for the exterior of the 230-square-foot structures to the induction cooktops in the kitchenettes — were chosen to meet the highest environmental standards.... Each Block home piggybacks on the homeowner’s water bills... and is hooked up to the grid via the homeowner’s account with the local utility.... The homes are built as permanent housing but are designed so they could be deconstructed and moved elsewhere. So far, all the structures have stayed put."

From "Tiny Homes for the Formerly Homeless/A program that builds small energy-efficient houses in the backyards of Seattle residents is helping to address a persistent problem" (NYT).

Just yesterday, I was observing that the topic of "tiny houses" had dropped out of present-day discourse.

I was commenting in off-blog life, so I can't prove to you that I'd noticed the absence of this particular thing. It's hard to notice all the things that are not being talked about. And sometimes you just notice if the talk resumes. 

But I did talk about it yesterday, and the topic has resumed. The NYT has: "95-Square-Foot Tokyo Apartment: ‘I Wouldn’t Live Anywhere Else’/Meet the young Japanese who have decided to live in a shoe box." 

"The art critic John Berger once remarked that 'the state of being envied is what constitutes glamour' — and glamour, Berger thought..."

"... was what our culture (especially advertising) pushed us to aspire to. The cocktails, cars and expensive clothes that prove our superiority. Berger would have been horrified to discover how envy has triumphed, and become, perhaps, the predominant modern social emotion. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook earn our engagement (our clicks and eyeballs) by feeding our envious, self-wounding appetite for others’ achievements.... Nietzsche writes with acute psychological perception about the way the vain, self-promoting man wants 'to give joy to himself at the expense of his fellow men' by aiming at a reputation so high 'that it would have to cause them all pain by arousing their envy.'... Half the moral fury on social media is envy in disguise, something that should give pause to those who desperately seek to be envied. Inspiring envy in others is a potentially self-destructive hobby...."

From "Online moral fury is often just envy in disguise/Inspiring jealousy is considered a great achievement but it also drives others to want to tear us down" by James Marriott (London Times).

Writing this post, I discovered I had a tag called "envy shortcircuiting," but I'd only used it the time I created it, and I'd meant for it to be something I was going to keep track of. In that post, the subject was "poverty appropriation," where people who have a choice chose something associated with poor people. I wrote:

"Mr. Gates was already working on his dream home before marrying Ms. Gates in 1994.... The place was 'a bachelor’s dream and a bride’s nightmare'..."

"... with 'enough software and high-tech displays to make a newlywed feel as though she were living inside a video game.'... After six months of discussions about whether the entire project should be scrapped, Ms. Gates decided to influence further construction by incorporating her preferences — and insisted on making the place a home for a family and not a lone tech wizard.... Perhaps Mr. Gates may now recommit himself to designing and building a smart house (though that may not be a challenging project for him today, now that connected devices are everywhere). Because despite the changes she made to the couple’s home, Ms. Gates recently expressed misgivings about continuing to live there. 'We won’t have that house forever....I’m actually really looking forward to the day that Bill and I live in a 1,500-square foot house."

From "Who Gets Xanadu 2.0, the Gates Family Mansion? Melinda Gates, at least, has been open about her desire to live in a smaller house" (NYT).

A 1,500-square foot house. I guess I can give this post my "tiny house" tag. How big is the "Xanadu" mansion? 66,000 square feet. That's 44 times the size of the house she purported to dream of. In a house so big, why worry about your estrangement from the other person? So easy to avoid them. Even hard to find them. Or I guess there were electronic devices to help you find them — in case you ever want them. It's beyond separate bedrooms. You're living in a place the size of a small town. Go live in another part of that town.

"So he hauled a new generator into his S.U.V., strapped $800 worth of wood onto the vehicle’s roof and drove down into one of the city’s ravines in the middle of the night..."

"... to build... a wooden box — 7 feet 9 inches by 3 feet 9 inches — sealed with a vapor barrier and stuffed with enough insulation that, by his careful calculation, would keep it warm on nights when the thermometer dipped as low as minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. He put in one window for light, and attached smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Later, he taped a note to the side that read, 'Anyone is welcome to stay here.' Since then, Mr. Seivwright (pronounced Seeve-right), 28, has built about 100 similar shelters with a crew of 40 volunteers and more than $200,000 in donations. He has hauled them to parks across Toronto where homeless encampments have slumped into place — jarring reminders of the pandemic’s perversely uneven effects. The city’s bureaucrats called them illegal and unsafe, and stapled trespass and eviction notices to many, informing their residents that the city had rented out hotel rooms for them. They served Mr. Seivwright with an injunction, ordering him to stop putting the structures on city-owned land." 

From "The Carpenter Who Built Tiny Homes for Toronto’s Homeless/Khaleel Seivwright built himself a wooden shanty while living on a West Coast commune. Then he started building similar lodgings for homeless people in Toronto to survive the winter" (NYT).

The box is not much larger than a coffin (which tends to be 7.17 feet by 2.5 feet), but people prefer them even when they know "the city had rented out hotel rooms for them." A city can't allow a shantytown — far below its standards of habitability — to grow up its in its parks. But Seivwright is nevertheless celebrated.

I can see how building these squalid boxes and depositing them around town works as protest art, speaking loudly to the people of Toronto about the poor and desperate people who live in their midst. The city is providing hotel rooms, but if these people are in hotel rooms, the housed citizens of Toronto won't need to agonize about them.

To be in the box is to be inside but outside, seen but unseen. To be in a hotel room is to be thoroughly inside and unseen. That's what the city prefers. I don't think the article explains why it is what the homeless prefer.

(To comment, you can email me here.)

FROM THE EMAIL: Owen writes: 

Sorry, this guy sounds whack. These boxes are not Habitats for Humans but a kind of litter. There’s a reason why cities have governments, poor and stupid and cruel as they may be; and it’s to help manage the risks to health and safety that come with our common lives. Your analysis takes some account of the “City” as if it were a bumbling bureaucracy —easy to mock, that. But what about the *citizens* of the city? The suffering nameless individuals who pay the taxes, try to mind their ways and be decent to each other, try to build lives and raise families, try to *use the (few, crowded, worn) amenities* of the city? Who now find the homeless occupying their parks, cadging and foraging and leaving a trail of trouble, encouraged now by characters like this to repurpose the precious open space into flop-houses and latrines? Do the citizens not get a voice in this little hippie happening?

I think citizens are getting fed up with this. Not just in Toronto, either.

If you love Thoreau and are irritated by interlocutors who assert "He was just a self-centered misanthrope"...

Here: Peter Bagge makes the pro-Thoreau argument in comic book style (Reason).

FROM THE EMAIL: Balfegor writes: 

Isn't the characterisation of Thoreau's critics in that comic a bit of a straw man? I had heard that he was a self-centred misanthrope, yes, but mostly I hear people mocking him for play-acting at self-sufficiency while his mother was still doing his laundry. He strikes me as a recognisable type: the 19th century equivalent of a trust fund socialist.

The NYT tells its readers about the woes of life in a "tiny home" during the lockdown...

 ... in "The Drawbacks of Living in a Tiny Home During a Pandemic Lockdowns are harder when you’re stuck in a small space and can’t stockpile food or toilet paper."

And the 2 top-rated comments are:

I've got news for you: most NYC apartments don't have the storage for weeks of supplies, either. 

And:

Hooray for Ms. Jacques' and her children and how they are managing in their tiny home. As a former apartment dweller in New York City, I thought I'd mention that many a New Yorker would kill to have that kind of 660-square foot space...and with a loft!

The article uses the term "tiny home" to refer to all sorts of abodes — a converted "cargo trailer," a tricked-out school bus, and a renovated detached 1-car garage — but never mentions apartments, the tiny homes New Yorker's have dealt with forever and without any sort of trend to create a structure of delusion around the challenge. For those who did let the "tiny home" delusion inflate their spirits pre-pandemic, the cramped space seems to hurt in some special (trendy?) way.

ADDED: Blogger no longer autocompletes tags, so I have to remember or guess what my tag is. Here, I guessed "tiny home." No. It's "tiny house." I have a personal stake in the "home"/"house" distinction — because of my last name — and I rankle at the sentimentality of referring to real estate as a "home." And now I really must quote Bob Dylan:

“What kind of house is this,” he said

“Where I have come to roam?”

“It’s not a house,” said Judas Priest

“It’s not a house . . . it’s a home”

Tiny-house boat a sunrise.

At first, I thought it was an ice shanty out there...

 

 ... but there's no ice. 

 

If it's a houseboat, it's a tiny-house boat. It looked pretty out there in the morning light.

"The multimillionaire former CEO of online shoe store Zappos died on Friday, nine days after he was dragged unconscious by firefighters from a blazing Connecticut house..."

"... in the middle of the night. Tony Hsieh, who was worth an estimated $840 million, had retired three months earlier from the billion-dollar business he helped found, and was just 46 years old. The alarm was raised at 3:30am on November 18 and firefighters forced their way into the New London home after being told someone was trapped inside.... He insisted on a $36,000 annual salary... and he sat in an unassuming cubicle among the other employees. When Zappos set up a new warehouse in Kentucky, the paper said, he packed a pickup truck with materials, drove to Kentucky and got to work bolting together shelves and unpacking shoes.... Hsieh, who had a passion for llamas and alpacas, had a pet alpaca named Marley and dog Blizzy. He lived in an Airstream trailer, part of a village... known as Llamapolis... [I]n 2014, he transformed a parking lot in the city into a 'micro-living oasis', made up of around 30 RVs. He also had two pet llamas which lived in the trailer park community with him. As of 2020, he was still living in the tiny trailer, unmarried and with no children."

The Daily Mail reports.

Here's a view inside Hsieh's Airstream:

"Joe Rhodes, who’s been on the move in his 'Traipsemobile' camper for 10 years, has made a life of eating in restaurants, drinking in local bars and going to gyms, where he uses the shower."

"'But what’s happened is that those spaces where I was living my life have slowly but surely all shut down,' he said. As the crisis worsened, he fled to a friend’s home in Dallas, where he is now parked in the driveway. He has access to the house, a shower, a meal or bed should he desire, but he feels keenly aware of not wanting to impose on his hosts.... Robert Meinhofer, 49, has been living in a one-bedroom trailer with his wife, Jessica, 42, and their two children since 2015... which is marooned in his in-laws’ driveway in Mount Dora, Fla. 'Once you stop traveling, it turns into a routine and then we’re, "Oh my god, we’re in 26 feet of living space and my daughter is running down the middle of the R.V. and my son is trying to have video calls with his friends," and it just feels like the walls are closing in on you,' she said. Then there’s the added stress of parking a few feet away from relatives who don’t endorse their itinerant life. 'In an R.V. park, everybody’s in the same situation and you understand that you choose to live in a small space,' Mr. Meinhofer said. 'But my in-laws — they have never really approved of our lifestyle, so whenever we go to the house we’re very conscious that it’s not our place.'"

From "Sheltering in Place in an R.V. Is Not as Fun as It Sounds/With parks shut down and utilities harder to come by, drivers of motor homes are finding themselves trapped in the vehicles meant to liberate them" (NYT).

"We just built what we wished we had."

Living off the grid in northern Wyoming.

A charmingly practical view of what it takes:

"Don't steal, because you could be stealing someone's dream."

(If only thoughts like that were persuasive! But it is kind of sweet.)

"Today, I rarely hear teens show any desire to have anything I’d consider a normal adult life."

"Yes, I know, even that word—normal—triggers teens these days.... I’ve overheard my oldest daughter and her friends discuss their post-college plans. They all say they want to get married, for a few years, get divorced, travel the world, be single in their 40s, date both guys and girls, just to try it out, even if they aren’t bi, and never, under any circumstances, do they want to have children. Ever. They actually show an open contempt for anything that connotes permanence or settling down. They want careers that will allow them to jump from company to company. They don’t want to own a normal house. That’s too much of a commitment. They want something temporary, like an apartment, or something small, like a tiny house on wheels.... When I was a teen, I wanted a permanent relationship. I wanted a life-long career with the same company. I wanted a house. I wanted kids. I wanted to be 'that guy' who retired from his place of employment with a nice farewell party after 35 years of service, and spent his retirement babysitting his multiple grandchildren in the same house where he raised their parents. And right now, half of the teens on Quora read that last paragraph and shuddered. It sounds like a nightmare for them."

From a Quora answer to "What’s the most frustrating thing about getting older?"

"I'm the man in the box..."

"Buried in my shit/Won't you come and save me?/Save me...."



That's song that played in my head, when I saw this in the Washington Post:



The author of the song, Layne Staley, is not a man in a box. He died (at the age of 34) and was cremated.

You can see that WaPo article is topping the most-read list in the "Lifestyle" section.

[Getaway, a rental cabins business,] presents a dire vision of urban life, and then offers itself as the antidote. It evokes the Japanese practice of forest bathing, and disconnection, and a little curative isolation... and not a single wine glass... absolutely no WiFi....

It’s ridiculous, but I expect to feel some instant woodsiness that never materializes. Even though I play Bon Iver on the Bluetooth radio, and then take the provided torch outside to our fire pit and sprinkle the (provided) firestarter over the (provided) logs, and light our first campfire and make some (provided) s’mores.

The comments on the NYT piece "Where Can You Park a Tiny Home?" are completely out of sync...

... with the tone of the article. The article is all empathetic to the tiny houselers. Boldface added:

For some, flouting zoning restrictions is an accepted, even celebrated, aspect of a culture that rejects the American appetite for big houses, rampant consumption and excess stuff. “It’s one of the last things we have where you can kind of stick it to the man,” Marcus Stoltzfus, a co-owner of Liberation Tiny Homes, near Lancaster, Pa., said with a smile.

In the right setting, illicit tiny-house dwellers can usually get away with it. “If it’s off the road and you’re on good terms with your neighbors, you probably won’t have an issue,” said Dave Cramer, an owner of Hudson River Tiny Homes, in the Albany area....

For the time being... finding a place to live long-term in a tiny house requires creativity, flexibility and considerable networking....

But the comments are not accepting the Creative Rebels template:

1. "What is completely missed by the author, and ignored by the tiny home advocates, is that the building codes exist for a reason. There are very important reasons we have, for example, 2 doors, indoor plumbing, fire resistant walls between kitchens and dwellings, ventilation in bathrooms and a whole bunch of other lessons that have been written in blood."

2. "To live in a tiny home and tread lightly on the planet, rent or buy a tiny home stacked with many others and located in a walkable neighborhood near public transit so you can sell your car. In other words, move to an apartment. It's a healthier and greener way to live than plopping a tiny home down on your own lot in the country."

3. "Nice desire to live 'off the grid' with no municipal regulation or overhead. But that's no reason to be exempt from tax and regulation while tapping into private or municipal services illegally, and there needs to be regulation of fire and safety codes as well as sewage disposal for the sake of others, and documentation about sale and resale for safety reasons. And all should have to meet insurance standards and be insured, just like everybody else in everyday America. Expensive but true."

The word "tax" doesn't appear in the article, which does, however, mention the wheels on the house: "Most tiny homes are built on wheeled trailers that can be towed. Unlike R.V.s, however, tiny houses are generally not wheeled for touring, so much as for flexibility of location." Flexibility of location or tax avoidance?

"‘Tiny Home’: Affordable, Stylish — but a Bit Too Easy to Steal."

NYT headline.

“Who steals a house?” said the home’s owner, Julie Bray. She said she prototyped and built the unit to attract customers to her timber business, and she intended to put it into mass-manufacturing by the end of the year — in part to respond to Australia’s increasingly unaffordable housing market.

I don't know why this is at all surprising. If something valuable is on wheels and unattended, why wouldn't it attract thieves?

I was talking with a friend who was pushing the idea of buying an R-Pod. He loves his, but one of my questions was, once you arrive somewhere and detach it from your car, what keeps it from getting stolen? The answer seemed to have to do with the pervasive goodness of other people in the area where you'd be leaving it. That or some sort of "boot."

"I live in a double-wide trailer. It's not like I require a lot... It comes, delivered to the door, in 2 weeks..."

"Very easy to clean. Simplicity at its finest. Sure, you don't have some of the finer luxury things like big thick shag carpet... but that stuff's never really meant a lot to me."

Kid Rock explains to Dan Rather why he likes living in a double-wide trailer (even though he has money and will spend it on land and a private plane):



This gets the "tiny house" tag, of course. And I wouldn't make a new tag for carpeting, but I already have one, so I'm interested to publish this post so I can click on the tag and find out whatever made me blog about carpeting intensely enough that I — with my resistance to the creation of new tags — made a tag for it.

"There are also small changes to be made: not adding salt to food, so one then needs less water..."

"... finding enjoyment in housework (which [he] finds 'never ceases to be novel'). The writer rubbishes curtains and doormats as extravagances. He praises the self-restraint of vegetarianism, but admits to longing for small pleasures such as tea and coffee ('Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them!'). To a modern reader, [it] reads like a combination of how-to-do minimalism and an inspirational poster. It is the ancestor of all the modern guides on how to live and eat and think purely – not by an author with a minder and a splashy book deal, but by a man hellbent on reminding everyone that 'money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.'... There has been a revival of interest in [his] ideas. A recent opinion article in the New York Times called the man the 'original declutterer,' connecting [him] to organising maven Marie Kondo’s prescriptions for culling belongings.... And, of course, corporate America has already adopted his philosophy, with construction companies offering stressed hipsters and city dwellers 'luxury' tiny homes.... Funnily, these primped-up cabins are not that far from [his] life back in 1845 – looks poor on the face of it, but not so much inside. With their folding tables for 10 and secret recesses for widescreen televisions, these cabins are made with the same imaginative flair [he] possessed, as he reimagined a bucolic suburban lot into wilderness, a two-mile walk from town as isolation...."

From "In Thoreau's footsteps: my journey to Walden for the bicentennial of the original de-clutterer" (in The Guardian).

Ah! I'm only just realizing that today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau. Click on my Thoreau tag for proof that I really have cared about him for a long time.

ADDED: I'm looking back into old posts in the "Thoreau" tag and noticed this one from 2005, on day 26 of a 35-day project I called "The Amsterdam Notebooks," which collected a set of drawings that I made in Amsterdam in 1993 (when I was traveling alone and had a fountain pen instead of a camera). The book I was reading was "Walden," and here are a couple pages I made in a museum:



Enlarged: here and here.

The "Shed of the Year."

I'm giving this the "tiny house" tag, even though these are (mostly) not tiny houses. They're sheds. I just don't like tag proliferation.