McMansions are a two-to-three story pox that appeared on the Californian arm of United States suburbia in the early 1980s, and spread at an alarming infection rate, one that has yet to be quelled. The term McMansion is a derogatory one, to connote the exploitative, fast-food like production line that enables the rapid build of cheap, cookie-cutter houses designed to imitate luxury, one next to the other like they are waiting to be shot. They are characterised largely by the unnecessary space they take up, with enormous entrance halls and a sliver of backyard. Just as the British Empire was guilty of contaminating entire nations with small pox through colonisation, the US has brought this blight down on developed countries through economic allegiance, the UK and Australia being among those most severely impacted.
This might sound like I’m embellishing for effect, but a direct line can be drawn between the advent of the McMansion and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, which saw over 100 million people pushed into poverty. McMansions were marketed in the 80s to a very specific type of consumer, a so-called “middle-class” suburbanite with an aspirational (if not delusional) sense of economic value. These mostly white, and mostly white collar workers had burgeoning families and mid-level careers with promising prospects. They were living in Reagan’s America, a time when Wall Street crooks were lauded as legends, and three story mansions were symbols of societal worth. Mansions were intentionally out of reach for middle-income earners, but here was an opportunity for the layperson to take out a mortgage on success.
As the disease spread, the targeted demography of this consumer broadened, partially helped by a post-9/11 housing boom caused by the US Government dropping federal interest rates to encourage borrowing. Developers, estate-agents, banks and lenders all collaborated to infect low-income earners, offering lower credit-score thresholds to take out higher interest mortgages (also known as “subprime mortgages”), leaving those unable to afford repayments with far more to repay. I won’t go into the details of how they profited from this fucked up enterprise (I highly recommend reading or watching The Big Short), but at its most basic, lenders would bundle these mortgages into a large package, and sell them off. Alone, one mortgage is high risk, but several mortgages with high interest rates clumped together can lead to a tidy profit — or so they assumed. What these dickheads didn’t account for was the “higher than expected” foreclosure rates, leading to an oversaturated market, and the shocking decline in value of these ugly, unsustainable, poorly maintained monstrosities. Soon, the housing market crashed, followed by the US economy, and then markets around the world, with developers, banks and lenders bailed out by governments, and bankrupt former homeowners left out on the street.
The tiny house movement didn’t begin in 2008, but it did experience a type of spiritual awakening during this financial downfall, especially in the US. The movement might be considered a direct critique of the McMansion. It stems from an opposite ideology, where autonomous builds are encouraged and developers are rendered almost obsolete. A tiny house is defined by its smallness. It doesn’t encroach on the land, it takes up only as much space as it needs and no more (and sometimes less). There’s an emphasis in the movement on environmentalism, sustainability, and scaling down the so-called “carbon footprint”, and a romanticisation of self-sustaining communities and living off the land. If McMansions are predatory and invasive, tiny homes are timid and sedate.
But mostly, they were cheap. In 2008, millions of people who’d been promised a five bedroom, white-picket-fence lifestyle were now experiencing true poverty for the first time. Tiny houses aren’t to be confused with caravans, motorhomes, small apartments, or even smaller-than-average houses. They are meticulously crafted to accomodate bourgeois expectations, with built-in widescreen TVs, ergonomic mattresses, cedar wood furnishings, and custom appliances. They can cost anywhere between $20,000 and $150,000 to build, a price tag that doesn’t include council fees and land rentals. In 2008, a tiny house offered exactly what a McMansion did back in the 80s; a luxury aesthetic at a lower price tag, and this time the aesthetic came with a bonus sense of community and ethical superiority. And just like with the McMansion, the tiny house “movement” was marketed directly to white people, despite white people being the least impacted demographic during the GFC (according to Pew research, in 2009, the net worth of white American households was 20 times greater than Black households, as compared to 11 times greater in 2005).
The takeaway here, according to July Westhale, is that the tiny house movement was (and remains) a form of “poverty appropriation”, dominated by a demographic of people who have the luxury of “choice”. I think this is a somewhat misleading analysis, hinged on the presumption that this “choice” is between owning a tiny house and owning an average sized house, when it is more often a choice between ownership and renting, between having an autonomous relationship with one’s own home, and being beholden to landlords and lenders (I also feel compelled to point out that living small, sustainably, and nomadically is not the exclusive condition of being poor, and is rather culturally linked to the Romani, and Indigenous populations around the world - here is a great analysis). It was a movement marketed to younger white people on the cusp, those who’d grown up in an era of unprecedented homeownership, and who now faced a future of extreme financial debt even at the thought of buying a house.
The tiny home presented itself as a status symbol, and a seat of power, encoded with racist ideology that elevates American whiteness as a form of gatekeeping. Just as billboards plastered with images of white nuclear families with even whiter teeth loomed over mass housing developments in early 1950s American suburbia, blogs and vlogs sprung up across the internet in the late 2000s, with young, attractive white couples proposing a “lighter lifestyle”. Living in a tiny home was a choice just as contrived as the McMansion, and sometimes equally as insecure. Tiny houses were a promise, made especially to young white people, that even as the economy collapsed around them, they could still have it all.
This lockdown I’ve been obsessed with watching tiny house content, and somewhat swept up in the fantasy of owning a Polly Pocket sized home with a loft bed that would have me smack my head on the ceiling each morning at the sound of my alarm. Tiny homes are often characterised by their ‘charm’, which happens to be a coded real-estate term for ‘a tight squeeze’, suitable for a hobbit or a Santa’s workshop elf. You don’t want to be Gandalf in one of these things. Part of the allure of a tiny home is their transportability, which means the dimensions and weight of these buildings usually have to meet road regulations. Depending on what country you’re in, you might find yourself living in a space the width of a Hyundai Tuscon, and the height of a great dane standing precariously on its hind-legs.
Beyond their meagre volume, there are plenty of other inconveniences to living in a tiny home. In Australia, for example, the tiny house movement is tethered to sustainable living the way a horse is tethered to a plough. It’s rare to find city councils that will zone for tiny house builds, which pushes these builds into rural, isolated areas, away from basic modern day infrastructure such as electricity and plumbing, and into ‘off-grid’ living. As much as sustainability proponents might romanticise a compost toilet, the labour of maintenance is an exceptional commitment, one that involves a lot of staring at one’s own shit.
And then, of course, there’s the great philosophical quandary of where a person might store their “stuff”? The movement encourages downsizing, which is a fancy word for throwing shit away. The irony of this is that tiny homes are rarely permanent residences, and as a person decides to upgrade, perhaps due to a growing family or a personal growth spurt, they will likely end up replacing all the shit that they just threw out. Cut to: a baby turtle weeping at the sight of its mother strangled by the cord of a desk lamp from Bed, Bath & Table.
As you can probably tell by now, I researched tiny houses extensively. I even dedicated an entire week online trawling for a shipping container, commonly cited as a cheap, sustainable and aesthetically pleasing frame for a tiny home, only to discover that most are contaminated with rust or literal poison, and that even if I might be lucky enough to find a clean, usable one, they conduct heat like a motherfucker, creating serious condensation issues for insulated homes, such as mould and rot. There are unfortunately few vlogs highlighting this problem.
I considered myself a reasonable person, until I saw that I’d written four pages of notes about washing machines, their size, weight, functionality, price and sexiness, all listed by how well they’d match my hypothetical tiny home dreams. It was a list a tween might make about their crushes based on who they’d want to marry most (not that I ever did that, ahem). I needed an intervention, and so I put down my sparkly pink pen with the fluffy feathers at the end and asked myself ‘why?’ Why did I want to live in a tiny house?
I’m 5’9” and susceptible to weight gain at the mere sight of a strawberry glazed donut. I love big beds, big dogs, and big baths. I value space and exploration (not to be confused with space exploration, which doesn’t really phase me either way). My dream as a child was to grow old in a gothic mansion by the sea, with wine filled cellars, haunted attics, and libraries with ladders. I’d even concocted a steamy love affair with a groundskeeper named Jones (I never knew their first name, and they didn’t care). This dream has changed over the years, but I never lost that lust for becoming an old woman on the street the neighbourhood kids think is a witch. As someone with considerable mental health problems, I’ve spent a lot of my life inside, even without the help of a pandemic, and I consider interior space precious, if not necessary for my own wellbeing.
All of this is to say that I never truly aspired to live in a tiny house. When it comes to home ownership, like many people in my generation, I simply have limited options. Like, almost zero options. I can’t even afford a tiny house right now, if I’m honest. And, as a single, mentally ill woman in my thirties, I’m staring down the barrel of a life that statistically leads to homelessness, isolation and early death.
For similar reasons (although under truly, unfathomably more difficult circumstances), in the mid-2010s, in the face of racist gatekeeping, small communities of single Black women in America embraced the tiny house movement. Out of all Americans, this demographic arguably suffered most during the 2008 recession. Already victims of predatory lenders and high interest rates for decades, the problem only became worse during and after the recession, when, in the absence of criminal lenders, compensation and support was nowhere to be found. Criminally high rates of housing and job insecurity among the community fuelled a desire for these women to become homeowners, and the tiny house movement presented itself as their best bet.
Jewel D. Pearson details her journey into tiny house living in her article ‘Where are all the Black People in the Tiny House Movement?’ It’s a harrowing read (that I highly recommend), and yet, it is somehow far more encouraging than my own personal findings here in Australia. According to Pearson, most of the problems in the movement stem from the socio-political. Land regulations make it difficult to find a legal place to park or build near ammenities. The prevalence of racism in the community (whether explicit or not) is both frightening, and prevents many from accessing materials, equipment and assistance in their builds. Another roadblock Pearson highlights is the stigma, as internalised capitalism has us trapped in the mindset that taking up space is success, that consuming less makes us worthless. Her site, Tiny House Trailblazers, works to educate people on how to build their own homes, with an eye to resolving these issues — both practical and systemic — in the movement.
Pearson makes a strong case for the tiny house as a good idea in the right hands (unlike the McMansion, which is an inherently stupid idea full stop). As American architect Buckminster Fuller once wrote; “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Incidentally, Fuller, perhaps best known nowadays for inspiring the design of Disney’s dark ride, Spaceship Earth, led a life that was largely dedicated to developing the first truly sustainable family dwelling, with an ethos of creating “more with less”. Unfortunately, his elevated, hexagonal Dymaxion house isn’t the design that stuck, but for some, his design philosophies did.
Tiny houses were historically designed as an answer to many of America’s most fundamental problems; poverty, overpopulation, housing insecurity, depletion of resources, and waste. In giving these homes a bit more consideration, I find that, just as the world around me has changed, my personal values have shifted against it, like sandpaper. In a country that openly fights effective climate change policy, I would love to live sustainably (yes, even if it meant having an up close relationship with my own faeces). Having my own personal library isn’t as important to me as looking out my window and seeing trees. As long as I have a warm, comfy reading nook and enough space for my dog to stretch his glutes, I’m set. And having autonomy in this space, for my dog, and for me, after almost a decade and a half of renting, is, well, beyond words. Mind you, I still can’t afford to buy a tiny house, but the dream hasn’t totally died.
Which is wild, considering that the movement’s more recent surge in popularity has only led to an extreme shift in ideology, one that can only be comfortably blamed on capitalism.
In a 2012 study in unethical behaviour and its correlation with class, researchers divided a group of volunteers by socio-economic status, one representing people considered ‘working class’ (determined by the study’s parameters), and the other, ‘upper class’. A bowl of individually wrapped candy was placed in a room with each group, and they were told the candy was for later, to be distributed to an incoming group of young children. The findings were, frankly, revelatory. The upper class group took over 50% more candy from the bowl than those in the working class group. The conclusion drawn by multiple headlines across the world was that rich people are more likely to steal candy from babies. A conclusion substantiated by the 6 other tests conducted in this study that determined wealth was an extremely potent contributing factor in unethical decision making, including the decision to run a red light, which is pretty fucked.
There is a tonne of research that supports the claim that wealth has a negative impact on crime, and that wealthy people are more likely to commit serious, white-collar crimes that are far more impactful on society than those petty crimes committed by the poor. Some psychologists hypothesise that this is a condition of self-interest, that those who grow up with extreme privilege are also more likely to be cultured as individuals rather than as part of a community, and therefore the needs of the community are thought of as secondary, if they are thought of at all.
What happens, then, if people who were born into privilege fall from grace? Well, for one thing, homicide rates go up. In times of increasing inequality, people have been found to defend their “class status” at all cost, including gunning down a workplace after being fired, or killing a parent for cutting them off (it cannot be stressed enough that there is no found correlation between being born into poverty and violent crime). This phenomena suggests that our childhood conditioning trumps our current condition.
I detail this to explain, in part, how the tiny house movement grew from an environmental and artistic endeavour in the 70s where people would learn to “live with less”, into a new development strategy for companies looking to make a quick buck. Sure these companies are called ‘Nature Escape’ or ‘Sunflower Meadow’, but they are just as much selling (or renting) production line houses at marked up prices as their McMansion counterparts. And yes, these houses are still technically cheaper than an average sized home, but over the past decade they have increased exponentially in cost, and currently sit at 62% more expensive than an average home per square foot.
Tiny homes are also now a desirable opportunity to become a landlord for those Gen-Xers and millennials who might’ve thought this lordly lifestyle an antiquated pipe-dream. Owners will park their tiny house on a luxurious landscape and airbnb it to Zoomer vacationers, sold as an “alternative lifestyle experience”, available for the low price of $400 per night. Those young white people on the cusp of losing their wealth privilege back in 2008 found a way to profiteer from the hippie ethos they were sold. And by plonking these jacked up shipping containers in the middle of nowhere, they undermine the values they once subscribed to, as one of the most effective ways to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to live in a dense urban area, rather than in isolation, which requires resources to travel (also, it should be noted that the suburban sprawl encouraged by McMansion developments has had in alarmingly negative impact on the climate).
Perhaps the most unconscionable outcome of the tiny house movement is the development of tiny house villages for people who are homeless in the US, despite the fact that homelessness isn’t caused by a lack of homes, rather by a lack of accessible infrastructure for vulnerable people, such as healthcare (including mental health care), welfare, education, clean water, nutritious food and potential work. To put this into perspective, there are approximately 600 thousand people experiencing homelessness on any given night in the US, and over 17 million vacant homes.
These designated tiny house communities push people experiencing homelessness further away from urban areas and the support they so desperately need, confining them sometimes to coffin-sized accomodations on cheap land and telling them to call it home (when I say coffin sized, I mean coffin-sized). Data shows that many of these villages do not provide even the most basic of amenities, like electricity, heat, and plumbing. And there are some proposals to gate these villages, promoting exclusion and segregation, when study after study shows us that people who are homeless benefit greatly from social integration. Here, tiny houses begin to look less like luxury accomodations and more like a cheaper and more dangerous alternative to imprisonment.
(This isn’t to say that all of these tiny house villages are inherently ineffective, or were set up with bad intentions. And it’s difficult, anyway, to assess their effectiveness in such a short time-span. But it’s clear that at least some of these ventures were rushed, and designed in purposeful ignorance of expert advice and community experience.)
In the right hands, tiny homes become an opportunity for self-possessed freedom in a world that strives to rob marginalised people of their autonomy. In the wrong hands, these cheaply produced accomodations become a trendy opportunity for population control.
In Australia, we didn’t experience the Global Financial Crisis as the rest of the world did. The Rudd Government’s rapid and decisive response to stimulate the economy with no-strings-attached grants to banks, businesses and individuals helped to avert the worst of it. This, alongside our slightly more restrictive lender regulations, might explain why the McMansion never went out of vogue here, with pastiche developments still creeping their way out of city limits like tendrils from a noxious weed.*
My family home is set for demolishment within the next decade, zoned without my parents’ approval for a “luxury estate build”. If you climb a hill and look around their suburb in outer Sydney, you can see a sprawl of dark grey roofs moving in like a storm. Once the seat of Sydney’s market gardeners, this was a community of immigrants and refugees who bought up the bog-lands and turned the mud into a living. The area has now become dotted with ‘For Sale’ signs haphazardly fixed to slanted gates and obscured by overgrown grass. It is, in a word, heartbreaking.
I’ve been waiting for the outrage, but it hasn’t come. No doubt because the land in this country is often valued not by what it can give us, but by what we can take from it. It’s a sentiment etched in Australia’s colonial history, with invaders labouring to erase the great work done by generations of Aboriginal custodians who seemed to understand that the destruction of nature is a destruction of ourselves.
The tiny house movement is growing in this country, but very slowly. We do have an overinflated housing market, especially in Sydney and Melbourne, and home ownership has been steadily declining here for a decade. But there are a number of reasons why a tiny house might not attract us. We have a lower density population, which gives us the illusion of plenty of space (as long as we don’t think too hard about our rapidly depleting resources). Thanks to a sturdier healthcare and welfare system, our rate of homelessness is smaller here than in America and a lot less visible, with people more inclined to couch surf, source temporary accomodation, or move back home (if they are able). Our zoning regulations are even more restrictive here than in the US, making it almost impossible to build in or near a city, and illegal to build in some states. And we have a high immigrant population, many of whom have come from countries where small living is normalised, if not required, but for the extremely wealthy.** Australia can represent an opportunity for people to finally stretch out.
But there is still a small boom. Just as the GFC forced Americans to reassess the value of their overgrown planter-wart, the pandemic has driven Australians to reconnect with nature, and desire more outdoor space. Enormous foyers are no longer considered more valuable than a backyard. But there are only two ways to own and preserve natural land in Australia; be extremely wealthy, or build small (and up, which is another, arguably more effective method of sustainable living deeply under-utilised in this country). And, just as in America, developers have seized this attitude shift as an opportunity to profit, petitioning states to legalise developments, with experts openly advising them to rebrand as an affordable luxury housing option, distanced from the stigma of poverty.
I’m not here to say that this is necessarily a bad thing, only to point out the parallels between what is happening in Australia right now, and what happened in the US in the 2010s, including the unbearable whiteness of it all.
But there is another movement in Australia that I think we should all be paying more attention to. Communities across the country are growing weary of overdevelopment, and pushing back, saying the environmental impacts coupled with the social segregation it promotes isn’t worth the space. Just like America, we are overwhelmed with vacant houses, with over 69 thousand so-called “ghost homes” found in Melbourne just last year. These vacant properties are just sitting there, usually hoarded by investors, untended and wasting way. This problem has only been exacerbated by a mass exodus from the inner cities during the pandemic.
It might not have the same whimsical, nomadic spirit as a tiny house, but there is a growing demand to re-open these homes for affordable housing — to take them back, renovate and occupy. It is better for the environment to live in densely populated areas, and we have many areas already waiting to be populated, if only the state and federal governments would make it illegal to hoard property, or at least put a cap on how many properties an investor can own.
Some architects are even using principles developed through tiny house living to help re-assess how these spaces can be future-proofed, accounting for a population boom by accomodating more people comfortably, or even luxuriously. Melbourne not-for-profit, Nightingale Housing, for example, often builds atop already existing foundations, re-purposing already existing materials and creating a more accessible, affordable, sustainable and communal living space. This isn’t a movement preoccupied with constricting desire. It doesn’t promote “more with less”, rather, it asks for “more with what we have”.
Personally, this makes sense to me. I’m sure there are pitfalls, but I think that there is something wonderful and emotionally vital in using what we already have, rather than throwing everything away and starting again.
*It’s interesting too, that China, whose economy is somewhat detached from the US, has only just begun to embrace McMansion style housing developments.
**I want to make a note down here that I didn’t go into how tiny house culture in the US contrasts to the horrifying realities of impoverished people in other countries, because I didn’t have enough space to dive into it adequately, but I think this pictorial investigation into coffin apartments in Hong Kong is a good place to start, if you’re interested.
Like a trailer-park home, but:
• up to half the space!
• at least double the price!
• less physical security!
• greater health risks!
Increased peril, same great stigma.
Great story, well told. Thank-you also for sharing
your own story with wit and admirable frankness. I I hope that one day, when we emerge from the pandemic fog, you find a special place of
your own - with functional plumbing.
Stay brave -Andy