LONG LIVE THE TINY HOUSE REVOLUTION
Spur, Texas is a shriveling dry western plains town of 1,000 seventy miles east of Lubbock, given to rearing beef and raising cotton. Until recently its fortunes matched those of hundreds of other small prairie communities in decline across America’s mid-lands. Now, however, little Spur is at the epicenter of an unlikely but burgeoning revolution. People who have decided to give up on the bigger-is-better American Dream have descended on Spur by the dozens of late to build from scratch their own micro-homes or park ones hand built on used mobile trailers. They pull into town to kiss mortgages and high real estate taxes goodbye forever.
A good-size lot sells for $500 in the dead flat rangeland of Spur. A prime acre fetches just $5,000. A 250-square foot micro-home can be built for under $25,000. Such numbers are an order of magnitude less than the going price for the McMansions of America, bloated abodes that are 60 percent larger in square feet than new homes built in 1970, but which actually shelter fewer inidividuals per household than homes did a generation ago. The median home price in the United States in the suburbs ringing the nation’s cities has topped $270,000, and down payments run $40k to $50,000. Urbanites and their suburban counterparts bemoan that they work two full days a week just to pay for the luxury of enjoying five waking hours at home during the work week. Add taxes, utilities, and maintenance on top of that, and it’s little wonder that the tiny house revolution exploding across the nation now looks very inviting to the stressed-out legions of America’s cash-strapped Middle Class.
So Spur, Texas residents purposely put out the welcome mat for micro-homesteaders to try to tap into the tiny home tsunami in an attempt to reverse the slow wasting of their community. They offered high speed internet service and dirt cheap land prices in the hopes that those few benefits and immense clear prairie skies might attract educated and creative types who would bring with them fresh ideas and their own online businesses or who would start new digital enterprises out on the grasslands at the edge of town. The strategy worked faster than the town’s old guard could have envisioned, maybe too fast. There has been some friction between the locals and the newcomers. Cultural differences must make for interesting talk around steaming coffee cups each morning. But the consensus seems to be that it is better to attract new residents to town than to dig a solitary grave with a wooden cross headstone for Spur a generation down the road.
At Flat Rock, North Carolina, a quiet, elderly visionary named Gil Gilman founded a pastoral tiny-home community on 26 acres complete with large vegetable gardens, a community center building open to all residents, walking paths, ponds, forests, and recreation space. Gilman envisioned creating a true community, where residents live close together, interact often, share common spaces, and become, well, neighborly. He named his experiment The Village of Wildflowers. It is brimming with new residents who purchase pre-built tiny homes rather than build their own.
Spur and the Wildflower experiment may be windows onto a future that looks little like futurists, technocrats, free marketeers, and Beltway bureaucrats envision for America. Something primal is underway among the tiny homesteaders and it runs counter to the progress-is-everything mythology that we in the States force feed ourselves as we age.
What the tiny dwellers are seeking in essence is an intimate, human-scale existence within a small community of like pioneers, in a place where the excesses of survival-of-the-fittest capitalism are blunted and the hawkers and hucksters of Gotham Americana are far removed. Most of the tiny lifestyle experimenters are adamant about living debt free and carrying on their lives with a minimum of possessions. They talk about growing their own food, shedding excess cars, building innovative storage cabinets and closets, about how to maximize floor space in a micro-structure, and what each will bring to the pot luck supper at the communal community center on Saturday night.
They wrangle over politics but find that, right or left, they have more in common than they thought, and they can talk through their differences because they live in such close proximity that they find they have the time and the desire to do so. Because they live in such small spaces, they spend copious amounts of time outdoors, which means they bump into their neighbors often across the yard or along the walking paths and trails. Most seem to relish this side effect of living small.
These micro-minions are trying and succeeding to a degree in falling through the cracks in the foundations of global capitalism. What our hyper-consumer western culture succeeds at is isolating the individual so he or she must buy and own every last damn single-serve thing. I dub this the Lonely Extension Ladder Principle. Where one extension ladder could easily serve the needs of residents of an entire suburban neighborhood, Americans are conditioned not to accept that arrangement. Property should not be held communally, the thinking goes; that would be un-American. Therefore every single homeowner on his or her own turf on any city block buys an extension ladder and lets it sit on pegs on the garage wall for 364 days a year.
The micro-homesteaders have discovered they want less landfill fodder and more interaction with their neighbors, more community picnics, more acoustic jam sessions, more conversations over the backyard fence, more sharing of tools, recipes, cars, stories, and, yes, that extension ladder. They don’t want to eat fast food away from home very other meal, as harried Americans do today, or sit doggedly in front of the TV with a single-serve TV dinner. They want more pot luck suppers, the entrees whipped up in tiny kitchens.
Simply by living in a tiny house, these pioneers are forced to consume less. There is no room for lots of stuff, so stuff is dispensed with. Tiny houses are cheap to heat, cool and maintain, so there is less energy to buy and consume to keep the dwellings comfortable. Some of the upstart tiny home communities even incorporate food production into their mission so residents have access to or can grow their own fresh food. Habitats Tiny Homes in San Diego boasts an edible landscape and an on-site farmers market. The tiny home community of Green Bridge Farm in Georgia is built around a working four-acre truck farm. Most of these new communities encourage gardening or already have acreage devoted to community plots accessible to all.
Rather than feel cramped in their tiny abodes, homeowners report feeling liberated. Peter Matheson, an architect outside of Vancouver, Canada who built 40 houses before settling on living within 125 square feet reported “I am irrationally happy in my new house.” Nantalie Woodburn-Heron, living on the other side of that vast northern neighbor nation of ours, said she “designed my life while designing my own tiny house.”
It must be fairly easy to get one’s house in order, so to speak, when there is no mortgage to contend with whatsoever. Some 68 percent of tiny home owners cough up no mortgage payments to any financial colossus. The remainder fork over a pittance compared to the typical strapped American mortgage holder. Financial freedom rings loudly in the ears of the micro dwellers. Tens of thousands have heard that chime and want that freedom, too.
The tiny home trickle has become a flood, the first cautious steps a stampede. The revolution is underway, hammers and saws in hand. May it sweep across every state in the Union.
