WATCH: 16×9’s “Tiny Homes”
Joel Fleck is a young law student flirting with a kind of personal anarchy. Joel lives in what he calls a “womb-like” 153-square foot house near Sebastopol, California, and he says the obstacles society places in the way of tiny home owners have turned him into a reluctant rebel.
He keeps his house on a trailer in his sister’s backyard. Local bylaws prevent him from making the location permanent.
“I just feel like they should let me live my life,” he says. “If they let me put it on a piece of property and pay taxes on it I’d be all for it but they don’t let me do that, so I’ll rebel and do it anyways.”
The home is unusual in ways other than its small size. First, there’s the toilet. It’s not for the fecalphobic: he calls it basically “a bucket and a box” because everything ends up on his personal compost pile, along with his other compostables.
“A lot of people are definitely scared of that,” he says.
Then there’s Joel’s shower. He’s six-foot-four. The shower cabinet is six-foot-two. So he’s had to carve out head-space from the floor of his loft above.
It’s one of the many accommodations that people in tiny homes happily make when they commit to the down-sized life. Living in a smaller space, every square foot counts. Every item on that tiny kitchen shelf has to be something that matters.
READ MORE: Vancouver company hopes to kickstart micro home revolution with $25,000 units
Tiny home living has turned Jozef Karpathy into a philosopher.
He struggled for a long time with the need to throw stuff away, to subtract things from his life. Then came the epiphany.
Yes, that’s it. Except for the popcorn popper. That takes up about 64 square inches on a shelf over the kitchen sink. He couldn’t bear to part with his favourite snack maker. His wife Anna tells him that “statistically,” he doesn’t use it often enough to warrant all that precious shelf space. But he fought for it and, so far, he’s winning.
Jozef and his wife Anna live in Toronto’s smallest house. Just a little over 300 square feet, it sits wedged between two large duplexes in the city’s west end. From the outside, it seems more like an afterthought than a dwelling. An urban sight gag—mocking all the growth around it.
It cost Josef and Anna $173,000. He calls it a bargain, because he has two gardens, front and back. And because he’s never more than half a dozen steps away from the outside, he feels closer to nature, and the city.
Some people find Tiny Houses visually, environmentally and even spiritually appealing. They leave a much smaller ecological footprint, they are uncommonly cute, and most of them cost between $25,000 and $50,000—about the same as our parents paid for that aluminum-sided ranch-style two-car bungalow 40 years ago.
They’re also a poke in the eye of the home-building industry and the energy companies and the banks. And a snub to regular-sized furniture and appliance-makers. “Freedom” is the word you hear over and over again when you talk to tiny home owners.
Jay Shafer, a pioneer of the movement who lives in California’s Sonoma County, says we live in an economy that’s “totalitarian” in its insistence on over-sized housing.
“Eighteen tons worth of greenhouse gases a year come out of the average North American house. It just seems criminal to me that laws are dictating this.”
It must be said, however, that for all the arguments in their favour, the tiny homes and their adherents are a long way from threatening the construction industry and transforming our residential neighborhoods. Fewer than one per cent of the population lives in homes smaller than 1000 square feet, and that’s not likely to change soon, even though families are getting smaller.
And you don’t have to look far to find a jeering section. Here’s a selection from one “bigger is better” web site.
“It is what America is coming to . . . a land of portable jail cells.”
“Maybe we should all just live in trailer homes.”
“They are great until the tornado or hurricane comes.”
And how about this for wacky science:
“Down-sizing a home is actually less energy efficient . . . The more stuff you have in a home, the more mass you have which tends to regulate heat far more efficiently, making it (the big house) FAR more energy efficient. That’s basic thermodynamics.”
Well no, it isn’t. But it shows that the tiny homes movement faces an uphill fight against the mindset of the status quo. In a culture of big cars, Big Macs, and monster mansions, they’re still little more than a promising curiosity.
Don’t miss “Tiny Homes” this Saturday at 7pm on 16X9.
Comments