Category THE SMALL HOUSE BOOK

Embracing less in a culture founded on the precept of more is counter-cul­tural, but it need not be self-consciously so. To do what we know to be right takes effort enough. There is no need to waste our much-needed energy on actively trying to change this spendthrift society. The tangible happiness of a life well lived is worth a thousand vehement protests.

Magazines, television and billboards incessantly insist that the cure for what ails us will be revealed by earning and spending more and increasing square footage. But the security and connectedness we seek are unobtainable so long as we continue to surround ourselves with these symbols of security and connectedness. Our desire for that which pretends to be success and our fear of not having it bar us from feeling genuinely fulfilled. Happiness lies in understanding what is truly necessary to our happiness and getting the rest out of the way.

Simplicity is the means to understanding our world and ourselves more clear­ly. We are reminded of this every time we pass by a modest little home. Oc­casionally, between the billboards, a tiny structure reveals a life that is unfet­tered by all of the excesses. Such uncomplicated dwellings serve to remind us of what we can be when our striving and fear are abandoned. Each person who chooses to live so simply inadvertently teaches the virtue of simplicity.

In a society as deeply mired in over-consumption as our own, embracing sim­plicity is more than merely countercultural; it can, at times, be downright scary. We are in many ways a herd animal, and to take the path less traveled requires courage. We are living in a system that, if left to its own devices, would have us in debt up to our eyeballs and still clamoring to purchase more things than we could use in a thousand lifetimes. Simplification requires that we consciously resist this system and replace it with a more viable one of our own making. For some of us, it requires that we either break laws or expend the time and mon­ey required to change those laws that currently prohibit an uncomplicated life.

In any case, anyone who sets out to create such a life should know that he or she is not alone. Though our current system discourages (even prohib­its) such freedom, we are all, on some deeper level, familiar with our own need for simplicity. Order is a human concept that expresses an inherent human need. On at least the most intuitive level, we all see the beauty in a well-made, small dwelling because the necessity such a structure ex­presses resonates with the necessity within each of us. The fear that these little places sometimes inspire is not really so much one of lower proper­ty values; it is the fear that these simple dwellings may inadvertently tell us something important about ourselves that we are not ready to face.

Myths about high-density housing abound. It is widely believed, for example, that higher population densities necessarily increase congestion and strain infrastructures. This just simply is not the case. The congestion myth and the fear it inspires stem largely from some very real conditions that exist in our everyday world. Wherever a design does not accommodate for the number of people and the type of activities that occupy it, there will be overcrowding. But, just as with a house, the solution is not necessarily more space; it is usu­ally better design.

The goal of design is the same for neighborhoods as it is for houses. Good community design has to meet our needs without far exceeding them. The suburbs fail on both these counts. People require open space; while the ‘burbs do offer it on an excessive scale, the space is seldom useful. We inhabit outdoor space in specific ways, and the gaps left over between build­ings and roads are seldom sufficient to accommodate our specific activities. The assumption that arbitrary swatches of pavement and bluegrass can well serve our outdoor requirements is mistaken. Such uninspired places rarely get used because they provide no sense of place or purpose.

High-density development is particularly conducive to comfortable outdoor environments. Providing enclosure without confinement is key. Consider ar­chitect Ross Chapin’s Third Street Cottages in Langley, Washington. It is a "pocket neighborhood,” comprised of eight, 975-square foot cottages and a shared workshop, all encircling a community garden. Eleven parking spaces have been provided out back. A footpath connects the houses and frames the common garden at center. A strong sense of enclosure is provided by the surrounding cottages and reinforced by a low, split-cedar fence separating the tiny private garden of each home from the shared one. This idyllic setting seems to hug without squeezing too hard. It is twice as dense as zoning nor­mally allows for the area, and yet, there is not a trace of crowding.

Elfreth’s Alley in Philadelphia offers another example of congestion-free, high-density development. The community was built before zoning laws were enacted. Elfreth’s Alley was, in fact, established over 300 years ago and has been inhabited ever since. At about 20 feet wide with 25-foot-tall houses on either side, this development falls well within the parameters of the recom­mended building height-to-road width ratio. It is host to one-way automobile traffic, the residents of its 38 row houses, and thousands of tourists enjoy­ing the all-too-rare experience of a place designed for people rather than cars. On this narrow, cobbled road flanked by brick, stone and foliage, it is easy to feel at home if only because it all makes perfect sense. There are no strange codes at work and no inexplicable abyss. It is not crowded, and it is not sparse. Like Third Street Cottages, Elfreth’s Alley is exactly what it needs to be and nothing more. In each of these places, thoughtful design with particular attention to proportion and scale has been employed to make an environment where serenity and vitality coexist. Each should be a model for those designers and lawmakers who have a hand in our future.

Zoning as we know it basically began in nineteenth-century Europe. Indus­trialized cities were shrouded in coal smoke, so urban planners rightly sug­gested that factories be separated from residential areas. Life expectancies soared, the planners gloated, and segregation quickly became the new solu­tion to every problem. So, while in the beginning only the incompatible func­tions of a town were kept apart, now everything is. Housing is separated from industry, low-density housing is kept separate from existing, higher-density housing, and all of this is kept far from restaurants, office buildings and shop­ping centers, which are all kept separate from each other.

With the dispersal have come mandatory car ownership and the end of pe­destrian life as we once knew it. Where no worthwhile destinations can be easily reached on foot, there are no pedestrians, and where there are no pedestrians, there is no vitality.

This separation has simultaneously brought about an increase in the per­ceived need for ultra-autonomous houses. The idea that a house should con­tain everything its occupants could ever possibly need and then some is cer­tainly not a new one, but it has achieved unprecedented popularity as houses have become increasingly remote from the services they traditionally relied upon. It now seems that every new residence must contain not only its own washer, dryer, dishwasher, high-speed internet access and big-screen home entertainment center, but enough kitchen, bathroom, dining and living space to serve as a nightclub for forty. The needs fulfilled by the corner grocery and local bar in our older neighborhoods are now assumed by 700 cubic-foot re­frigerators and spacious, walk-in pantries. The resources currently required to support several million personal outposts cannot be sustained.

One of the most readily-apparent products of zoning is the wide, suburban street. Roadways built before zoning emerged typically have 9-foot wide travel lanes. Now, most are required to have lanes no less than 12 feet wide. This allows for what traffic engineers call "unimpeded flow,” a term some crit­ics have aptly interpreted as "speeding”.

Safety concerns have played a no less significant role in the widening of America’s streets. During the Cold War, AASHTO (the American Associa­tion of State Highway Transportation Officials), pushed hard for streets that would be big enough to facilitate evacuation and cleanup during and after a nuclear crisis. Fire departments, too, continue to demand broader streets to accommodate their increasingly large trucks. Streets today are often fifty feet across because standard code after the 1940s has required them to allow for two fire trucks passing in opposite directions at 50 miles per hour.

Sometimes it is not a street’s width but its foliage that presents the problem. Departments of transportation routinely protest that trees [also referred to as FHOs (Fixed and Hazardous Objects)] should not line state roads. Now, cer­tainly safety is important, but the high costs of wide, treeless roads (financial and otherwise) might warrant some kind of cost/benefit analysis. Fortunately, we have several. The most widely published is that of Peter Swift, whose eight-year study in Longmont, Colorado, compared traffic and fire injuries in areas served by narrow and wide streets. He found that, during this period, there were no deaths or injuries caused by fire, while there were 227 injuries and ten deaths resulting from car accidents. A significant number of these were related to street width. The study goes on to show that thirty-six foot­wide streets are about four times as dangerous as those that are twenty-four

feet across. According to Swift’s abstract, "current street design standards are directly contributing to automobile accidents.”

This study and others like it suggest that we should begin to consider the issue of public safety in a broader context. Fire hazards are only part of a much larger picture. The biggest threat to human life is not fire but the count­less accidents caused by America’s enormous roadways.

Suburbs did not grow out of any particular human need or evolve by trial and error as an improvement to preexisting types of urbanism. The ‘burbs, as we know them, were invented shortly after World War Two as a means of dis­persing urban population densities. This invention precluded virtually all les­sons learned from the urban design of years past. Even the most universal principles of good planning, used successfully from 5000 B. C. Mesopotamia to 2005 A. D. Seaside, Florida, were ignored. Perhaps the most startling de­parture from tradition was the omission of contained outdoor space. Human beings have a predilection towards enclosure. We like places with discernible boundaries. To achieve this desired sense of enclosure, a street cannot be too wide. More specifically, its breadth should not far exceed the height of the buildings that flank it. A street that is more than twice as wide as its buildings are tall is unlikely to satisfy our inherent desire for orientation and shelter. Rows of trees can sometimes help to delineate a space and therebyincrease the recommended street-to-building ratio, but generally, anything wider than a proportion of 2:1 will compromise the quality of an urban environment.

America’s suburbs incessantly ignore the 2:1 rule. The distance from a house to the one directly across the street is rarely less than five times the height of either structure, and there are seldom enough well-placed trees around

Sprawl, U. S.A. (pages 48 & 49). Quebec City (opposite)

to compensate. The empty landscape that results is one most of us have become far too familiar with.

To evoke a sense of place, a street, much like a dwelling, must be free of use­less space. When given a choice, pedestrians will almost always choose to follow a narrow street instead of a wide one. That we frequently drive hours from our suburban homes to enjoy a tiny, lakeside cabin or the narrow streets of some old town is nearly as senseless as it is telling. That we then return to toil in our cavernous dwellings on deficient landscapes is more sense­less, yet. The environments we see pictured in travel guides are typically the walkable, little streets of our older cities. The marketing agents who produce these guides are undoubtedly no less aware of our desire for contained, out­door space than were the architects of the streets depicted.

People like places that were designed with people in mind, so it should come as no surprise that property values and street widths appear to share an in­verse relationship. Apparently, we are willing to pay more for less pavement. The funny thing is that the skinny streets we like are actually much cheaper to build and maintain than the wide ones we so often choose to live with.

Over-consumption is reflected not only in the scale of our houses, but in the sizes of our yards and streets as well. Oversized lots on vast roads, miles from any worthwhile destination, have made the American suburb as inhos­pitable as it is vapid.

Like the design of our houses, the form of our neighborhoods is mandated by a long list of governmentally-imposed regulations that reflect our national taste for the enormous. In most U. S. cities it is currently illegal to build places like the older ones pictured in this book. Taos Pueblo, Elfreth’s Alley, and Rue de Petit-Champlain all violate current U. S. zoning ordinances. Narrow, tree-lined streets with little shops and houses sitting at the sidewalk’s edge are against the law. Countless state, federal and private bureaucracies work hard to uphold these restrictions. The Federal Housing Administration, the Department of Transportation, the auto, housing and oil industries and a host of others have a lot at stake in suburban sprawl and the policies that perpetu­ate it. Our government has been championing sprawl ever since the 1920s, when Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, persuaded realtors, builders, bankers, road-building interests and the auto industry to form a lobby that would push for increased development to boost the U. S. economy.

Essentially, zoning laws have been determining the form of our neighbor­hoods since the 1940s. Communities like the older ones pictured on these pages somehow managed without them. Since its inception, zoning has brought us immense, treeless streets, mandatory car ownership, and densi­ties so low that the cost of infrastructures has become nothing short of exor­bitant.

We are in the midst of a housing crisis. The Bureau of the Census has determined that more than for­ty percent of this country’s families cannot afford to buy a house in the U. S. Over 1,500 square miles of ru­ral land are lost to compulsory new housing each year. An immense portion of this will be used for noth­ing more than misguided exhibi­tionism. We clearly need to change our codes and financing structure and, most importantly, our current attitudes about house size.

Minimum-size standards are slowly eroding as common sense gradually makes its way back onto the housing scene. Where negotiation and political pressure have failed to eradicate antiquated codes, lawsuits have generally succeeded. But these measures all take more time, money and patience than many of us can muster. To make things worse, local covenants prohib­iting small homes are being enacted more quickly than the old prohibitions can be dismantled. These restrictions are adopted by entire neighborhoods of people needlessly fearful for their property values and lifestyle.

The process of changing codes and minds is slow, and the situation is dire. As long as law ignores justice and reason, just and reasonable people will ignore the law. Thousands of Americans live outside the law by inhabiting

houses too small to be legal. Some of them cannot afford a larger home, while others simply refuse to pay for and maintain unused, toxic space. These people are invariably good neighbors: they live quietly, in fear of someone’s reporting them to the local building inspector.

I should be clear that, despite the absurdities in their codebooks, our local housing officials are not necessarily absurd people. This is important to re­member if you are about to seek their approval for a project. Building codes are made at the national level, but they are adopted, tailored and enforced at the local level. View your housing department as the helpful resource it wants to be, not as an adversary. Once your local officials are politely informed about the actual consequences of the codes they have been touting, the codes are likely to change. Be sure to provide plenty of evidence about the merits of smaller houses, including documentation of projects similar to the one you intend to build. Codes are generally amended annually by means of a review and hearing process anyone in the community can take part in.

Diplomacy is one way of clearing the way for a small house. Moving is an­other. Some remote areas of the country have no building codes at all, and a few others have a special "owner-builder” zoning category that exempts people who want to build their own homes from all but minimal government oversight. Provisions for alternative construction projects also exist. Section 104.11 of the International Building Code encourages local departments to – weigh the benefits of alternative design, materials and methods in the course of evaluating a project. Several counties permit accessory dwellings. These small outbuildings are also known as "granny flats” because they can be in­habited by a guest, teenager, or elderly member of the family.

Terminology can sometimes provide wiggle-room within the laws. "Temporary housing” is, for example, a term often used by codebooks to describe "any tent, trailer, motor home or other structure used for human shelter and de­signed to be transportable and not attached to the ground, to another struc-

ture or to any utility system on the same premises for more than 30 calendar days.” Such structures are usually exempt from building codes. So, as long as a small home is built to be portable, with its own solar panel, composting toilet, and rain water collection system (or just unplugged once a month), it can sometimes be inhabited on the lot of an existing residence indefinitely.

Most municipalities are eager to endorse a socially-responsible project, but occasionally, a less savvy housing department will dig in its heels. When relocating to an area where smaller homes are legal is not an option, there may still be recourse. Political pressure can be applied on departments to great effect. While an official may have no trouble telling one individual that his plans for an affordable, high-quality, ecologically-sound home will not fly, the same official may have a great deal more trouble letting his objections be known publicly through the media. Newspeople love a good David-and – Goliath story as much as their audiences do.

As mentioned earlier, minimum-size standards have been found to be uncon­stitutional in several U. S. courts. If all else fails, a lawsuit against the local municipality remains a final option. This strategy, and any involving politi­cal pressure through the media, should be reserved only for circumstances where all other avenues have been explored and exhausted. Remember that ridiculous codes do not usually reflect the mind-set of those who have been asked to enforce them. Take it easy on your local officials and they will more than likely make things easy for you.

In his book, How Buildings Learn, Stuart Brand speaks of the difference be­tween "use value” and "market value”:

Economists dating back to Aristotle make a distinction between "use value” and "market value.” If you maximize use value, your home will steadily be­come more idiosyncratic and highly adapted over the years. Maximizing market value means becoming episodically more standard, stylish, and in – spectable in order to meet the imagined desires of a potential buyer. Seek­ing to be anybody’s house it becomes nobody’s5

On the surface, small dwellings may seem to afford greater utility than mar­ketability. These places are typically produced by people who are more con­cerned about how well a house performs as a home than how much it could sell for. The creation of a smart little house has traditionally been a labor of love because, until recently, love of home has been its only apparent re­ward. As a rule, Americans like to buy big things. Like fast food, the standard American house offers more frills for less money. This is achieved primarily by reducing quality for quantity’s sake.

Financiers have been banking on this knowledge for decades. From their perspective, a sound investment is one that corresponds with the dominant market trend. Oversized houses are more readily financed because they are what most Americans are looking for. For a lender, two bedrooms are better than one, because, whether the second room gets used or not, this is what the market calls for. Sometimes a bank will simply refuse to finance a small home because the cost per square foot is too high or the land upon which the house sits is too expensive in proportion to the structure. The design, con­struction or purchase of a small house has thus been further discouraged.

Despite all obstacles, a few relentless claustrophiles do continue to fight for their right to the tiny, and it has finally begun to pay off. Lawsuits concerning the constitutionality of minimum-size standards have recently forced some municipalities to drop the restrictions. Where this is the case, little dwell­ings have begun to pop up, and they are selling fast. Americans looking for smaller, well-built houses are out there, and their needs have been refused for decades. This minority, comprised mostly of singles, may be small, but it is ready to buy. It seems the composition of American households changed some time ago, and the dwellings that house them are just now being al­lowed to catch up.

Some developers on the West Coast have been quick to take advantage of the fresh market potential. In one high-income neighborhood, new houses of just 400 square feet are selling for over $120,000, and some at 800 square feet are going for more than $300,000. That is about 10 percent more per square foot than the cost of 2,000 square-foot houses in the immediate area. Needless to say, post-occupancy reports show that, though less expensive overall, these little homes have not had a negative impact on neighboring property values. In fact, the resale value of American houses of 2,500 square feet or more appreciated 57 percent between 1980 and 2000, while houses of 1,200 or less appreciated 78 percent (Elizabeth Rhodes, Seattle Times, 2001). Small houses appreciated $37 more per square foot.

It is illegal to inhabit a tiny home in most popu­lated areas of the U. S. The housing industry and the banks sustaining it spent much of the 1970s and 1980s pushing for larger houses to produce more profit per structure, and housing authori­ties all cross the country adopted this bias in the form of minimum-size standards. The stated purpose of these codes is to preserve the high quality of living enjoyed in our urban and sub­urban areas by defining how small a house can be. They govern the size of every habitable room and details therein. By aim­ing to eliminate all but the most extravagant housing, size standards have effectively eliminated housing for everyone but the most affluent Americans.

No Problem Too Small

Again, the intention of these limits is to keep unsightly little houses from pop­ping up and lowering property values in America’s communities and, more­over, to ensure that the housing industry is adequately sustained. The actual results of the limits are a greater number of unsightly large houses, inordi­nate construction waste, higher emissions, sprawl and deforestation, and, for those who cannot afford these larger houses, homelessness.

One of the leading causes of homelessness in this country is, in fact, our shortage of low-income housing. After mental illness and substance abuse, minimum-size standards have probably kept more people on the street than any other contributing factor. Countless attempts to design and build efficient

Another Sausalito Houseboat (above)

forms of shelter by and for the homeless have been thwarted by these codes. By demanding all or nothing from our homes, current restrictions ensure that the have-nots have nothing at all. The U. N. Declaration of Universal Human Rights (of which the United States is a signatory) holds shelter to be a fun­damental human right. Yet, in the U. S.. this right is guaranteed only to those with enough money to afford the opulence.

The stated premise of these well-intentioned codes is as profoundly flawed as their results. Little houses have not been shown to lower the values of neigh­boring large residences. In fact, the opposite holds true. When standard­sized housing of standard materials and design goes up next to smaller, less expensive dwellings, for which some of the budget saved on square footage has been invested in quality materials and design, the value of the smaller places invariably plummets while that of the derelict mansions is raised.

Protecting "the health, safety and welfare not only of those persons utilizing a house but the general public as well” is the stated purpose of minimum-size standards. But, by prohibiting the construction of small homes, these codes clearly circumvent their own alleged goal. It would seem far more effective to outlaw the kind of toxic real estate that such codes currently mandate. An even more reasonable and less draconian system would allow individuals to determine the size of their own homes – large or small.

Some of us prefer to devote our time to our children, artistic endeavors, spiri­tual pursuits or relaxing. Others would rather spend their time generating disposable income. Some enjoy living simply, while others like taking risks. Every American should be free to choose a simple or an extravagant lifestyle and a house, to accommodate it.

A good dwelling offers more than shelter and security. A truly good house evokes a sense of home. Our sense of home comes from within us. It emer­ges when we enter an environment with which we can identify. This sense is not exclusive to one’s own house. It can surface whenever we feel safe enough to be completely ourselves — beyond all insecurity and pretension.

A house founded on pretension and insecurity will seldom, if ever, make us feel anything more than pretentious and insecure. For a place to feel safe, it must first earn our trust. It must be honest, and an extra couple of thousand square feet tacked on in a vain attempt to conceal our insecurity is not hon­est.

Home is our defense against what can sometimes seem like a chaotic and demanding world. It is a fortress built from the things and principles that we value most. The inclusion of anything else is like a crack in the fortress wall. Order and tranquility are compromised when things that are extraneous to our happiness surround us. Unnecessary elements in the home dilute the in­tensity of the life within. Only when everything in our immediate environment is essential to our contented survival will home and the life within take on a truly essential quality.

Too many of our houses are not a refuge from chaos but merely extensions of it. The sense that our lives may not be entirely whole results in a desire for something more to fill the perceived void. This can lead to the purchase of an oversized house in which substance is obscured by excess. The happiness we really seek cannot be found by purchasing more space or more stuff. Those who do not recognize what is enough will never have enough.