Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
10-12 years ago, I got seriously involved in the tiny house on wheels community, and spent a lot of time seriously thinking about house design and the ramifications of the THoW movement.
My ultimate design settled on an 8' x 16 ' floorplan, with a 4' screenable front porch/greenhouse extension.
This, I judged, was the bare minimum size that could support 2 adults and 1 small child.
It would sleep 2 in the loft and fit a standard 52" crib mattress on the main level.
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
The reason people fail to understand this is because they think of Feudalism as a political system, not an economic system.
But, politics and economics are merely two sides of the same coin. Feudal power derives from the ownership of Nature, and it is that power over land which makes feudal lords their own governments—monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a territory is the very definition of "government".
The American Revolution did not destroy Feudalism, it only gave us new masters.
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
America has become overwhelmed by what Ray Delahanty (City Nerd) calls "Rural Cosplay".
This falsely manufactured sense of rural identity politics has completely skewed most Americans' perceptions of our nation, our history, and our selves.
In reality, the so-called "American Dream" as most of us understand it, is a marketing project of the 1950s, not "deeply embedded in our nation's history and traditions", nor is it "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty".
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
These design choices are not caused by any real constraints of land area in cities, but by the land area constraints placed upon communities by our prevailing systems of private land ownership, which confine development into discrete parcels and make coordination of development virtually impossible, if not merely extremely impracticable.
These are not physical constraints or even economic constraints, they are political constraints only, that do not implicate human rights; they can be altered.
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
The great problem that the left in our society fails to comprehend, and therefore fails to address, is the fact that virtually every evil they ascribe to "capitalism" has nothing whatsoever to do with capital, but with land.
That is, the real problem is not "capitalism", the real problem is "feudalism"—the economic system whose basis is the private ownership of Nature.
Land is not capital, in Economics.
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
But when you look at the land area of cities all over the world, what you see is that the vast majority of the land area of nearly every city in the world is given over to low density structures.
The biggest problem we face in the US is the logistics of how our system of land ownership intersects with and destroys the ability of communities to intentionally plan for density while mantaining human dignity.
A centralized planning system or "socialism" is not necessarily the right response.
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
What deters many people from wanting to live in a multiunit structure is the lack of privacy and lack of control over propriety that has historically been missing from apartment buildings.
However, this is not a necessary consequence of multiunit building design, it is a choice made by landowners to offer the absolute bare minimum of accommodation in order to maximize their profits.
We can mandate architecture and design that respects human dignity and human frailties.
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
But it needs to be understood that tiny, individual dwelling structures are literally the most inefficient type of structure that can possibly be imagined or built, because they have a comparatively high ratio of external building envelope to enclosed volume, and a comparatively low possible density of occupancy, compared with multiunit residences, making them the least efficient possible use of valuable land.
They absolutely should never be used for housing the poor or unhoused.
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
As a native of NYC during the bad old days, I well understand that our social experiments with public housing in the US have ended almost entirely in disaster, and that is precisely because those developments were built with efficiency as the only goal, not human dignity and community.
This does not mean we should not build apartment buildings, it means we need to build apartment buildings with human dignity and community as our foremost concerns. #urbanism #architecture #design #housing
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
Where land is dear (that means expensive and in short supply), tiny houses should not be permitted, except possibly as temporary or accessory dwelling units.
Many cities are waking up to this problem, and getting rid of single family occupancy zoning.
The answer to the housing crisis is always and only "build more apartments". Only by flooding the market with supply can we control the cost of living.
The only way we can sustainably achieve this is by making it more expensive to not build.
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
Yes, not everyone wants to live in an apartment, but that doesn't imply that most people don't want to live an an apartment, when it means being able to live affordably in close proximity to jobs, shopping, schools, cultural events, public transportation, and infrastructure.
Cities everywhere have testified to this truth for over 7000 years of the history of human civilization. That's why cities are cities, why they have high populations.
No one is trying to force you to live in a city.
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
#Cities are cities precisely because—demonstrably—more people want to live in urban environments than those who abhor the idea altogether, for all the advantages that cities have to offer.
Only in America and other places where land and fossil fuels have been historically cheap and abundant, have people developed the idea of #suburbia and glorify and idealize #ruralism supported by private motor vehicles.
#urbanism #architecture #planning #design #housing #policy #economics #politics
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
Many people in the tiny house community wanted tiny houses to be the answer for everything, but I am here to tell you that tiny houses are a generally terrible idea that really is only suitable for certain types of people in certain extenuating circumstances.
Tiny houses, especially those on wheels, have very few advantages and very many disadvantages, compared with good #urbanism that allows people to live in dignity with humanscaled spaces and fixtures.
However, there will always be some…
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐
people who have difficulties—whether internally or externally imposed—that make it difficult for them to live in urban environments.
I realized this very early on in my investigations, and concluded that there are a lot of people, like me, who are often subject to extreme, undue discrimination, and for those people, tiny houses on wheels can be a boon.
One benefit of THoWs is that they impose very little burden on the landscape and are not permanent structures.
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