What no one ever tells you about tiny homes
New York Times
By Gene Tempest
02 June 2017

My husband and I share a 492-square-foot apartment in Cambridge, Mass. We inhabit a “micro apartment,” or what is sometimes called a tiny house. This label is usually proudly applied to dwellings under 500 square feet, according to Wikipedia. We are unwittingly on a very small bandwagon, part of a growing international movement.

But deep inside the expensive custom closets and under the New Age Murphy beds, the pro-petite propaganda has hidden some unseemly truths about how the other half lives. No one writes about the little white lies that help sell this new, very small American dream.

Here, on the inside, we have found small not so beautiful after all. Like the silent majority of other middling or poor urban dwellers in expensive cities, we are residents of tiny homes not by design, but because it is all our money can rent.

Tiny houses are booming. The movement, whose origins fans often link in spirit all the way to Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, became increasingly popular after the 2008 housing crash. Living small has come to signal environmental mindfulness and restrained consumerism.

A tiny home is a state of mind, if not a religion. It is in vogue, and it is in Dwell. The tiny house pairs well with other contemporary cultural currents. It is cut from the same cloth as the Marie Kondo craze of 2014, and suits this year’s hygge, too. (The recently imported cult of hygge-ness — or coziness, from Denmark — often entails the burning of candles, wearing of chunky sweaters and a pursuit of togetherness facilitated by small spaces.) Micro living plugs into the age of Apple minimalism, too. In real estate listings, “cozy” is no longer an unconvincing euphemism, but a coveted catchphrase.

Our apartment in Cambridge was built in 1961, part of an earlier wave of utopian interest in tiny affordable housing. Our space occupies most of the lower third of a two-unit, three-story building. There is a contiguous row of nine such pairings — pint-size below, family-size above — on our street. The original developer’s vision was that income from renting the lower units could help cover the mortgage for the owners’ homes above.

The most striking feature of our small lives is the unavoidable, domineering presence of the plastic laundry hamper originally bought from Target in 2007. Embarrassing, ordinary objects like the hamper are empowered in small spaces; they become tyrants. In a larger home, this perfectly functional item might recede quietly into a closet or laundry room.

Our unattractive $10 centerpiece occupies approximately 0.4 percent of our home’s surface area, but visually, it seems much larger. In an otherwise horizontal bedroom landscape (a queen-size mattress on the floor), the hamper looms high and white above the rest of the room. It often reminds me of the Capitol in Lincoln, Neb. — a piece of monumental architecture designed to dominate the prairie, to force man’s will over nature.

Glossy photo spreads on popular blogs like Tiny House Swoon make the small life look disproportionately good. Small houses have spawned a decent-size media subindustry. Browse Amazon for helpful tomes such as “Tiny House Living: Ideas for Building and Living Well in Less than 400 Square Feet” and “The How To Guide to Building a Tiny House.” The big screen features small houses. You may try documentaries like “Tiny: A Story About Living Small” or “Small Is Beautiful: A Tiny House Documentary.” Or “Tiny House, Big Living,” the small-screen series, which is in its fifth season on HGTV.

Tickets for the Tiny House Conference (“tiny houses, big conference”) in Portland, Ore., in April cost $349. The event featured inspirational talks like “Downsize Your Space and Life” and “Future of the Movement.” In Charlotte, N.C., you can hire a tiny house life coach to help with your transition.

There have been some skeptics. In December 2013, The Atlantic ran an article headlined “The Health Risks of Small Apartments.” The results the magazine reported were inconclusive. Small spaces may pose psychological risks to some populations, but not to others. Some of the experts interviewed by The Atlantic argued that age might matter. Micro apartments could be good for young people, like my husband and me.

Life in our tiny home is characterized above all by shabbiness. Like the apartment’s pervasive, undomesticateable dust bunnies, the threadbare feeling grows and grows simply because it already exists.

No one warns you that everything is more concentrated in a tiny house, that the natural life cycle of objects accelerates.

Our things are aging faster than they did in their previous homes. We sit on our lone couch more hours a day than in any previous dwelling. The cushions are fading, the springs sagging, the corners fraying. Our rug is balding along our daily paths, starkly revealing repetitive routines: back and forth to the coffee machine, to the couch, to the sink, to the couch. The denudations look like cow paths cut through sage brush — invasive affronts on the landscape. Everything in our tiny house is worked over more, used harder.

Here, even smells take up space. We once made a meal that called for caramelizing three pounds of onions. For hours the onions melted in their pan. Technically they were taking up less and less space, but somehow they intruded more. In a tiny house, the smell of slowly sweated onions is an inescapable, cloyingly rich aroma; a scent to drive men — and women — mad.

The eau de onion spread to everything. It clung especially to the moist bathroom towels, and to the laundry drying in the bedroom. We were never clean again. Fresh from the shower, we immediately smelled of onions — of tiny house. For weeks, smelling like old onions became one of our micro lives’ certainties. The scent’s preferred repository, I eventually learned, was my New Age, polyester sports bra.

“It smells like onion,” my husband had certified weeks later. “That doesn’t seem like a good thing to wear.” I said, “I can’t not wear it.” And that was true. I did wear it, but the bra’s coolly advertised moisture-wicking technology seemed designed to activate the old onions. I carried the smell with me deep into the city. You can never really leave a tiny house; it goes with you everywhere.

For generations, writers have warned about romanticizing the lives of the poor. Beware the nostalgie de la boue. Small can be a bad fit.

So we daydream big. Dreams of unfashionable, politically incorrect, old American aspirations that our generation isn’t supposed to believe in anymore. Dreams of design features so vast that they sound like foreign countries. I dream of kitchen islands. I dream outside this box.


Comments
Kristin   Boston
Bed Bath & Beyond now sells a collapsible laundry basket. IT IS MY EVERYTHING. Buy one and rejoice!

leeserannie   Woodstock
As someone who grew up in a tiny house better known as a trailer, I really identified with and enjoyed this funny and well written essay. Favorite line: "You can never really leave a tiny house; it goes with you everywhere." This is true not only in the physical sense of the onion scent trapped in the sports bra but also in the metaphorical sense of how being poor shapes your worldview and goes with you everywhere.

Tom   Pittsburgh
I would think if you live in a "tiny house" then most of your life needs to be lived in common areas such as parks, libraries, coffee shops, sitting on the stoop with your neighbors, and the house is used mainly to sleep and eat. Maybe if everyone lived in "tiny houses" there would be more interaction between people in the community.

dobes
While I think there are probably ways for you to make your small space more comfortable, your point is taken: small spaces are for the poor, and more and more of us are poor. If we can be convinced they are also chic, we will mind less - just as the attractiveness of credit cards made us pay less attention to our increasingly inadequate salaries.

Ronna Reed   Mill Valley, CA
Very sly and really funny. The onions and the bra...hilarious.

Tiny houses are really a plot against architecture and design, as if the visions of designed space can be condensed into 3 tiny rooms. They can't. We need air and greenery and openness. There are reasons why people pay more for view properties (other than the living above and feeling protected from the riffraff). Our bodies and minds crave space and visual peace and changing panoramas. We can and should live more simply and with much less stuff, but cramming people into small boxes without regard for these larger needs is a terrible idea.

Reader   In Wash, DC Washington, DC
I have lived in several small studios and you have to be careful about what you cook. Really the author could not figure out what caramelizing three pounds of onions would smell like?

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