I used to think I was fine with tiny living, because my entire childhood home was 20 sqr meters, but I now live alone in such a space and it's too small. I have huge windows, but the walls are closing in. The space is too small to furnish in a way which wouldn't hinder an aspect of everyday life. I'm so tired of algorithm trying to convince me tiny living is fine when it shows even worse conditions than mine. I wish I lived in 30 sqr meters or so. 40 sqr meters are way too burgoise for me, but I could use extra 10 sqr meters solely for the purpose of farting.
If you're working 80 hours a week, a house is just a place to sleep, shower, and get ready for work.
Hence, the huge push for tiny homes.
Even if you're not working the whole time, all other spaces are so ruthlessly monetized that you'll be spending money just to exist.
I used to think living out in rural Iowa was terrible because there "is nothing to do"
Then I grew up and realized I'm surrounded by forests, rivers, wetlands, hilly plains, and endless dirt roads 😌
They have nature in cities too. Santa Monica Mountains >>> anything in Iowa.
The Driftless Area is intensely beautiful, don't dismiss that! Rolling forested hills and not a cornfield in sight.
Regardless, the point is that I don't have to pay money to enjoy these things. I can just go outside. They haven't totally commodified nature, not in Iowa nor California.
It's the housing equivalent of Tesla Tunnels and Hyperloop pods instead of building a God damn train. The answer is already there: build an apartment building with reasonably sized units, connect it to a grid of good transit so people don't need cars, make sure there are shops and businesses nearby so people can walk places.
But no, live in a single stacked shipping container in the woods. That's the key to the future.
Best you might be able to do is take the shipping container and build a more standard construction around it, cause holy carp! a those things become ovens in the summer and fridges in the winter.
The smart thing with shipping containers is that they're easy to move so it would make sense to use them for temporary housing, like if you're renovating a housing block or if you need a somewhere to house the visitors for a huge festival. But for permanent structures? Just build a normal building.
Container homes can either be temporary and cheap and therefore literal Hoovervilles, or properly refitted and expensive, aka a waste of money. If you need a Pod then just buy the prefab Chinese ones.
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Yeah for like the past 10+ years I had lived with my partner in some tiny (and shit) urban apartments, but recently moved further to the edge of town and I gotta be real the extra space is full on invigorating after being cramped for so long. We've got a yard, driveway, no shared walls with neighbors it's fucking sweet. Probably helps that I'm still in the city ish and not some recently developed corporate suburb
yeah I mean I think its really interesting how people adapt and creatively use space more efficiently in really small living spaces, or I guess adapt to spending most of their time out and about and in 3rd places, if their budget and ability allows, but it shouldn't be widely glamorized just because profits devoured the money that should be paying for people to have a reasonable place to live. Does one solo person need 700+ sq ft (65 m2)? No probably not But 20m2 is really small
I was pretty happy with a 1910-1920s era US apartment that was about 30 sq. m, and especially with a lofted bed it felt downright spacious in some ways, but going much smaller than that, or with multiple people in it, would have been pretty tough. Now I live in a larger place and it does feel pretty bourgeois lol. Its easier to get other suburb-brained americans to come over to this place, since its larger and easier to park in the neighborhood, but I was actually more comfortable in the smaller space in many ways...
You mention farting though and yeah, I just remembered how bad my cat used to gas me out in that smaller apartment
I currently tiny-live in my tiny-ass jail cell-sized bedroom at my parents' home and despite the coziness, it sucks ass.
Honestly I think it's the privacy more than the space. I'm more comfy living in my own studio than in a bedroom in my parents' big house, because at least the former is mine alone.
My bike is tucked behind my couch (love seat). I can see my bed, my stove, and my desk from my couch. Somehow I have the most seating and best hosting ability of my friends. I don't understand. My apartment is a postage stamp. Just got goated with the interior decorating sauce idk.
Hoping I can get a house soon. One of the scant virtues of the rust belt is not the entire housing market is fucked.
There's such a thing as making the best of what you've got. That is what it is. There's nothing wrong with trying to furnish and decorate your home to be as comfortable and nice as you can, even if the capitalist housing market has given you an undersized living space.
But then there's glorifying living in a broom closet. It very much feels like a way of gaslighting the proles into accepting worse material conditions. You will own nothing and you will be told to be happy.
The solution to the housing crisis is not to allow parasitical landlords and developers to construct substandard and undersized housing. The solution is to use land in a rational way, construct public housing and put an end to housing being abused for speculative purposes.
In the area where I live there has been a big trend in the last few years in making very small apartments in the name of environmentalism and to supposedly provide housing for all/affordable housing. At the same time not a kilometer away is an area where huge petty bourge houses with big yards and seven rooms are getting built.
Nobody wants these or can access these apartments because they are very expensive compared to the Soviet style housing that the same area has. The old units have lots of space to live in.
In these new apartments the kitchen is just a wall of appliances that is in both your living room and vestibule at once. Bedroom can only fit a bed, with just enough space around it to get in and out of it.
We used to have a law stating that kitchen has to be a different room separated by a door for fire protection, but now they have put the stove basically to where your shoes are.
With remote work and study these also don't work at all unless you live alone, there is no space or doors or even walls for any kind of privacy, it's just a glorified one room box with a small alcove marketed as a modern loft style compact living space or whatever.
One of these tiny apartments has a rent several hundred euros higher than what me and my partner are paying for our two rooms & kitchen & small yard social housing setup from the Soviet style era.
I have a relative obsessed with tiny homes. Not because he's interested in solving homelessness and dropping the price of housing, but because he can't afford to buy a 2nd house and he desperately wants to become a landlord.
My spouse will occasionally binge watch some flavor of home improvement/renovation show and last year it was some tiny home themed show they were watching and it was ... bizarre.
The first thing I notice was that the "tiny" homes were rarely being sold for less than a "regular" sized home. So, like, what the fuck is going on with that?
The second thing I notice (which I have to keep reminding myself that these shows are "reality TV" so there's fake drama all over the place) is that the people buying/renovating/looking for a "tiny" home... don't actually want or need a tiny home. They typically were younger than 40, wanted to entertain guests, have family/friends be able to eat and sleep there, AND it was like 50/50 whether the family in the show would have VERY young children. None of these things are conducive to "tiny" home living.
So like... its all just house flipping with a tiny home aesthetic.
My room growing up was 8x8 ft and it felt like a jail cell a lot of the time. I could do that again but not without some secondary space to be alive in
this is him (okay not really but basically)
