Screw Your Tiny House And The Tiny Horse It Rode In On

Yeah, I said it.  Tiny houses suck.  I don’t mean if you want a cute little cabin you have bad taste, I’m talking about as a solution to homelessness. The whole idea sucks.  It’s horrible, rotten, terrible. It’s an idea that needs to die, and quickly, at least in terms of being an applied solution to American homelessness. It’s quite literally worse than useless, and by orders of magnitude.

Now that I have your attention:  I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings who might be among that growing group of folks who are advocating for tiny houses and building and engineering them to be ever more tiny. 

I understand that once you get below a very high ceiling within the entire housing-construction-real estate complex, most of you engaged here are earnest and well-meaning, hard-working, diligent, and really truly trying your best to do a good thing in the world, and I don’t want to discourage you from doing that.

But I’d like you to give me a few minutes to explain, from the perspective of a person who has frequently been homeless and is currently housing insecure, why you may find, after consideration, that your talents and energy to do good things might be better spent on other angles for addressing homelessness.

I’m going to break this up into a couple of sections. In the original context I’d planned to go through the whole establishing of credibility thing by pointing to all the various work I’ve done out there over the years related to the topic, but then I realized the only reason I feel the need to do that is that this started out with some schmoe responding to a social media comment, and basically telling me I have no idea what homeless people think, want, or need, and screw that guy. My work is out there and easy to find and my arguments are well-formulated and not in need of further validation by character reference anyway.

This article started as a social media comment – as they often do – on a post about a local tiny house initiative and their latest step forward and maybe there’s a shipping issue and so forth. That post was a local news report updating the current status of a tiny house project here, mentioning that 14 acres had been purchased to place these new tiny houses on. My comment was thus:

I wonder how many full-sized real-human-being apartments could be built on 14 acres for what they’re paying for glorified boxes.

in https://www.facebook.com/wwmtnews/posts/10158698570231452?comment_id=10158698689221452

And naturally, here comes the schmoe brigade to tell me what I got wrong:

With that introductory flourish out of the way, let’s talk about the meat of the matter. In part 2 we’ll discuss why the social, political, and psychological implications and impacts of the entire “tiny house narrative” are extraordinarily problematic. Then we’ll talk about why the very suggestion of “tiny houses” as a solution to homelessness in this country is, ultimately, an arrogant insult built on an entire group of industries trapped in a loop of aspirational delusion that’s going to collapse like a house of cards, and their absolute refusal to accept that you only need so many housing units for so many people before building more is a gigantic waste of resources benefiting no one. Before we wrap it up I’ll show you the numbers I think support that prediction.

First up: the personal perspective. Then the data, numbers, analysis, and conclusions that we will hopefully all agree support my core thesis, as difficult and maybe even painful as it may be for those of us who have really gone all-in on this in the hopes that it would be an effective solution to homelessness.