Just a short post this time around, sharing three reads related to tiny houses:
- “The Bastard Child of Two Dreams,” my quick musings on how our house is a confused byproduct of two goals and two lifestyles.
- “The Tiny House Fantasy,” a longread at Jacobin on the tiny house-as-homestead fantasy and the wider tiny house movement as an impractical solution to larger housing issues.
- “The Troubling Trendiness of Poverty Appropriation,” a piece at The Establishment on the problem of pastoral nostalgia and “returning to a simple life,” and privilege and choice.
Tiny Notes. 
The TH Fantasy article/post was a great read, the attraction besides being more affordable and somehow a feeling of being nostalgic (back when my great-grandparents arrived in the USA and lived in a tiny place) is the feeling that huge houses “…were filled with too much space and not enough substance”. This is the start of the fantasy for me ~ but your notes on the reality as well as the simple thought of ‘where to park it’ breaks the spell of fantasy in a good way.
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Brilliant reads, all three. The ‘Tiny House Fantasy’ puts into words so eloquently what up until now had only been a vaguely icky feeling I’d had about these issues. It is a response to a failing system. I agree that tiny houses won’t solve many of those problems, but neither will buying a house in the suburbs like everyone else.
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Fascinating, how we can romanticize living poor and turn it into something endearing, as a choice for some, to reduce and simplify whereas for many, it’s a normal way of life. My wife has often said, want to feel a slave to money? Try being poor. It’s funny to me how much our lifestyle, the whole balance we try to strike, is wrapped up in that box we sleep in. I used to look at it, backing out of my driveway each morning, and not know quite what to think — still don’t.
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