Better Living through Pods

Every article I read about homeownership tells me it’s a terrible time to buy a house. You idiot, these articles say to me. You absolute moron. Even the Wall Street Journal, the paper of record for America’s business class, recently told would-be homebuyers to keep dreaming: “There’s never been a worse time to buy instead of rent.” It’s not just that it’s currently a bad time to buy a house; according to Atlantic, there will “never be a good time” to do it. The reasons for the housing crisis are complicated and mostly boring: an absence of new housing stock, plus high mortgage rates that are unlikely to sink and salaries that are unlikely to grow sufficiently to cover the difference. Try again in 2030, says the Atlantic, with the implication that only an idiot might hope the housing market will be better in the future. In the meantime my rent keeps going up, just as it has for most people in major cities across the globe. I keep thinking of the lyrics to “London,” a 2023 song by the British band Pynch:

But I still want a house. I have dreams about it. Specifically, I fantasize about the stability of ownership. Two years ago, our landlord ran a gas pipe through my tiny home office; the huge gray meter hangs over my head as I work like a portent of doom. The landlord says he just can’t do anything about that pipe or about the roaches or about the buzzer that’s been broken since we moved in. Find a different apartment, you might say, but many New York landlords are like this, and my husband and I could easily find ourselves living in worse conditions for more money. We’re leftists, so it feels inappropriate to fantasize about ownership, but at the moment, the only way for us to get out from under the tyranny of someone else’s landlordship is to own property ourselves. So I browse Zillow constantly. I read interior design magazines for tips on how to highlight that cathedral ceiling I’ll almost certainly never have. I’m down so bad that I’ve started building miniature rooms and castles from hobbyist kits, as a game of pretend or practice or a kind of sympathetic magic. The pieces in these kits are very tiny, and the miniatures take weeks to assemble with tweezers and glue. After some sweating and swearing, I slot together the fairy-sized furniture and staircases and stick in a humanoid figurine or two, to make the rooms feel lived-in and possible.

At times, my own space feels excessively lived-in and possible. My husband and I have been working out of our 750-square-foot apartment since before the pandemic, and we’ve managed not to kill each other, which is the real test of a marriage, if you ask me. But love requires at least a little distance. We don’t need that much more space, really: just a bigger kitchen with a spot for a microwave and an adjoining dining room table, a second bathroom, maybe a small personal room for each of us. We want a little more space, but more importantly, we want the right to make decisions about that space. Homeownership might be just a bourgeois fantasy it might be the short-order version of the American dream—but if it means being able to have a space from which you can tell authorities to fuck off, then I’m not sure it’s always such a terrible concept.

Still, even if we did find a place to buy, that would be great for us personally and solve absolutely nothing for lots of other people. Leftist approaches to the housing crisis have often been dramatic, large-scale, even utopian. But I’ve been thinking more and more about small tweaks to the existing system and what smallness in general could mean. A few months ago I attended a competition held by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects titled Recipe for a Room, in which twelve architecture students unveiled designs for cubic “rooms of respite,” eight feet on each side, where unhoused or marginalized or just generally exhausted people around the city could take a beat. None of these “rooms of respite” would qualify as anything other than incremental changes to the fabric of New York; none of them represented sweeping utopian designs that would transform the city into a socialist paradise for all. But they were lovely and thoughtful places for tired people to lay their heads for a while; they would improve things, if only in a small way. The students built scaled miniatures to represent their designs, mostly out of cloth and cardboard; each was a wisp of a dream, like the miniature kits I’m so obsessed with. But better something than nothing, I decided: better an effort to help people living right now than one grand program to fix all problems at some point in the seemingly impossible future. Better small houses, small spaces, than no houses and no spaces at all. But what qualifies as something rather than nothing, a real solution rather than a Band-Aid to an existing problem? What is a house, and what can we consider enough?

THE TINY HOUSE MOVEMENT has attempted to answer this question by shrinking both living space and carbon footprints, as well as the public’s assumptions about what defines “enough.” How much room, and how much stuff, do people really need? Not that much, say tiny home proponents, and definitely not as much as most Americans currently have. Houses in the US are infamously huge. Estimates vary, but the median home in this country is somewhere around 2,383 square feet, comparable only to nations such as Australia and Canada. These are all countries with a lot of land, which allows for sprawling housing developments, as long as you’re willing to rip up “unused” territory such as forests and grasslands that perform essential carbon capture functions and are home to rare wildlife. If art and design are always a series of sociopolitical rebellions, then tiny houses are a rebellion against the vulgarity and environmental offense of a tract of McMansions. Tiny houses—usually meaning freestanding structures of 900 square feet or less—are also more energy efficient and sustainable than typically oversized American houses, since they’re cheaper to produce and require less energy to heat and cool. You also just can’t store that much stuff in a tiny house, making it impossible to consume objects at the usual American rate. A 2019 study found that living in a tiny house made most, though not all, of their homeowners more environmentally conscious and less wasteful, lowering their carbon footprint along multiple axes of their lives.

As the human population continues to grow, many global organizations, including the United Nations, have promoted tiny houses as an eco-friendly answer to the global housing crisis. The most familiar incarnation of this trend is probably the reality program Tiny House Nation (2014–2019), which takes viewers around the US showcasing the joys and challenges of living in a shockingly small house. There are also all kinds of popular YouTube channels devoted to life in tiny houses and apartments, and interior design magazines frequently profile the prettiest small houses across the country. Financial publications have gotten in on the action as well, billing the tiniest imaginable spaces as great financial investments and proof of their residents’ ingenuity. Business Insider has run articles with clickbait headlines like “An artist struggling to pay rent turned a dumpster into a tiny home for $4,800” and “I’m a drummer living in a tiny New York City apartment. Here’s how I fit 2 adults, 1 dog, and a drum kit in my 500-square-foot apartment.”

My friends and I have a running gag about the media’s glorification of extremely small spaces: We call it “Better Living through Pods.” Tiny homes and apartments are certainly cute, and also marvelous, in the sense that efficiency is always marvelous. How does that New York drummer live as hyperefficiently as possible? Why, he owns only the barest of necessities, each tucked into a perfectly sized niche, without a single wasted square inch. This hyperefficiency gives the Better Living through Pods trend its cheery sci-fi dystopian quality—only an artificial intelligence (or a person thinking like an artificial intelligence) would dream of a perfectly performing house, an absolutely maximized use of space. Only a machine or machinelike mind could have created something like the 129-square-foot Parasite House in Ecuador, a triangular shack that was reportedly designed “as a minimal structure to focus on creating necessary habitable space for couples.” It sounds more like a science experiment than anything else—a test of just how little distance love needs, how small a dwelling can be before it dissolves a marriage, or else a study of how minimalist and efficient a house can be before its residents run out of air to breathe.

Better Living through Pods is also a kind of maximization through minimization: maximum efficiency in minimal space. It’s an inevitable result of the utilitarianism that permeates so much of contemporary culture—the idea that every individual action must be accounted for and performed in the service of an easily identifiable and quantifiable usefulness. You can find versions of this ideology in the reframing of all leisure as measurable hours of “self-care.” And you can also find it on the fringes of the effective altruism movement. What began with Scottish philosopher William MacAskill’s ethical dilemma in the cereal aisle—if he switched to a cheaper brand for a year, could he put aside enough money to save someone’s life?—has morphed into the justification of basically any behavior as long as it can be rationalized as something that will minimize human suffering and maximize human flourishing over the long term. This has led to huge misuses of money such as the FTX scam, but also to a general view that everything that can’t be immediately quantified is wasteful and unnecessary. (As the Sierra Club has pointed out, many effective altruists have no interest in the environment, unless saving spotted owls can be assigned a value that decreases future human suffering.) In this view, because reducing human suffering is the one value and virtue of being alive on this planet, and since every dollar spent on personal extravagances could go to worthy pro-human causes instead, daily life should be as tidy and empty of unnecessary indulgences as possible. As such, the totally efficient home has no room for errors, exuberance, or that silly novelty mug your best friend sent you as a gag. It has no space for human life.

One of the most extreme versions of Better Living through Pods can be found on the TikTok account @housedesign77, which exhibits ultraefficient interior design plans that often cram bizarrely high numbers of children into very small spaces. I don’t know who needs to house twelve children in a single bedroom, but if this happens to be your problem, then @housedesign77 has a solution: Try slotting two rows of six beds together in an inverted step formation beside a study table with just enough room for twelve narrow seats. And if you need to house eighteen children, a hundred children, a hundred million children, @ housedesign77 has plans for that too—sort of. The hundred million children video shows a prison-like structure with stacked beds and shelves, and also two kids held in literal cages for some reason. The room is clearly not big enough to house a hundred million children—a few hundred, maybe—so the implication is that the structures are meant to be multiplied and stacked on top of each other, kind of like the prison planet in Andor. There’s a fantasy here of a kind of imperial hyperefficiency: enough space to stack all citizens, a hundred million citizens, who are no more than compliant and complacent children. This fantasy, somewhat ironically, runs directly counter to the American dream of homeownership as a space of individualistic freedom. The perfectly space—hacked home is also a prison for its inmates, surveilled from all sides. It affords a version of imaginative freedom only.

The @housedesign77 videos are extremely creepy. The software the channel relies on often spazzes out in strange, hallucinatory glitches—children disappear into walls or eerie faces pop out of the air for a terrifying second. The whole premise is maybe a joke. Or maybe not. The absolute economy of means it promotes is fascinating, and the videos are addictive. Just how small a room will the kids be stuck into next? Why does the secret boxlike compartment in one child’s tiny bedroom contain a wine fridge? The videos feel autogenerated, the creation of an algorithm that doesn’t understand human beings, that thinks of them only as blank-faced automatons happy to march from bed to desk to secret wine fridge, in no need of age-appropriate items or individuality or even a little room to stretch.

These TikTok videos and others like them are really just another kind of miniature-making—like my hobbyist kits, they’re not really meant to depict actual places where real people are supposed to live. But back in reality, the efficiency needs of tiny homes and apartments do require some extreme condensing of rooms, and often the conscious decision to forgo what would normally be considered essential features of a living space. According to the YouTube channel Tokyo Lens, the Sakura apartment building in Japan’s capital was designed around the principle that each studio apartment would allocate most of its tiny space toward a different element there are “kitchen-type” apartments, “bathroom- type” apartments, “living room-types,” etc. In one Tokyo Lens video, the resident of the bathroom-type apartment (which has a big tub in the center of the main room) says that he does most of his home activities, like drinking alcohol and watching movies, from the comfort of his beautiful tub. The apartment doesn’t have a kitchen, but this resident—an architecture student named Ueda—says he doesn’t cook anyway. He thinks his bathroom apartment is cool. It is cool. It’s the kind of thing that only an architecture student could love. And it’s the sort of place that only a student could live in—a single person without children or pets, staying there temporarily before moving on to somewhere else.

The secret of tiny homes isn’t how their residents manage to find a place for all their things, but that few people live in them forever, or even for very long. If you carefully read the descriptions of the tiny homes in design magazines’ best-of lists, you’ll see that most are used as vacation rentals, seasonal cabins, student housing, art installations, or studios, rather than as permanent residences. They’re basically a gimmick, and you can’t live in a gimmick, not forever. Warsaw’s Keret House, often touted as the world’s narrowest house and a tourist attraction in its own right, provides temporary housing for artists-in-residence. At its narrowest point, the interior is just over two feet wide. If that sounds uncomfortable, don’t worry: At its widest point, it’s closer to four feet. Jakub Szczęsny, the architect of Keret House, has explained that while the apartment may be small, “the furnishings are designed to match the scale of the building.” Yes, he says, “the miniature refrigerator is only able to hold a couple of soda cans, but nonetheless, each element is functional. Just like in a dwarf ’s house.” Keret House is essentially a miniature, scaled up just a bit from the sprite-sized structures I keep building. It isn’t meant to house an actual human being, but a mythical creature, or maybe an artist going mad. “It requires a sense of humour,” Szczęsny joked in a Dezeen profile of his tiny masterpiece, “as you cannot stay long in a place like this.”

I don’t recommend watching too many videos of people trying to live in miniature houses like Keret House and its less famous brethren—you’ll really feel like you’re going mad. These videos are often funny, if not always on purpose. YouTube influencers “the Bush Family” admit in a tour of their premade tiny house that their upper storage space is basically impossible to reach and that the short-ceilinged bedroom loft makes it nearly impossible to make the bed. They laugh that, in case of an emergency, it would be difficult to escape the loft without breaking their legs. Why would anyone, you might ask, want to live in a place like this, even temporarily? In the case of YouTube influencers, it makes for great content of a particular kind: selling the dream of homeownership to everyone, regardless of their means. The Bush Family’s video is subtitled “Millennial couple goes tiny and pays off all debt including the house!” You see, they could be you; you too could live without debt, in a real house, if you’re just willing to suffer for it and if you’re willing to open your home to video tours and magazine profiles so that you can make money off the experience of living. You don’t just maximize every square inch of space; you double that maximization again by sharing an profiting from the demonstration of how you make it work. Living in a tiny house is really about showing everybody who’s watching, on the other side of your phone, that it’s possible. It’s not really such a small space after all. When the camera is on, the whole world is in there with you.

After the suffering, after the influencing, after the inconvenience, the promised reward awaits. Most coverage of tiny homes and apartments insists on this particular point: Life in a pod is a temporary sacrifice for a future palace. A young woman named Alaina who is featured in a video about Manhattan’s tiniest apartment boasts that her “space”—a small desk, a child sized kitchenette, a bathroom down the hall, and a loft bed with a ceiling that’s too low to allow for any sex I can imagine—“is truly utilized.” Her desk is for working; her bed is for sleeping; and her miniaturized stovetop is presumably for cooking miniaturized meals. Alaina admits she doesn’t have boys over; her apartment is for grinding, and not the fun kind. She’s there to work, build her brand, and get rich. The apartment only costs $650 per month, which allows her, she says, “to invest, travel—literally do so much, to get me further in life.” It’s not actually a life that she’s carrying on in her apartment, but an investment in a future life to come, at which point she’ll have a set of crazy stories to tell. The video ends with her interviewer extolling how anyone can make it in New York if they have a dream; there’s a shot of him standing in a business suit looking out on Manhattan as if he owns it, or will someday. You can be him if you only hustle hard enough, selling the dream of downsized living to just enough people. If you don’t, if you never make it to the palace of your dreams, then it’s your own fault. Too bad: You’ll always be a fairy-tale dwarf, or an AI’s dream of a child, squeezing into a miniature only a little larger than yourself.

MOST TINY houses and apartments may be, in the end, a gimmick or a lifestyle scam, but the problem they purport to solve is real: Where are people on this earth supposed to live, and how are they supposed to afford it? What decisions are they supposed to make for themselves if housing policy doesn’t change (or at least not at scale) any time soon? A tiny house may be only a small and temporary solution, but it’s at least a solution especially when it comes to housing for people who would otherwise have none. Many tiny houses are really just bougie trailers (sometimes even made out of preexisting trailers), fancy versions of undesirable, stigmatized housing that many poor people have long had no choice but to settle for. As it stands, most advocates of tiny living are young, white, and relatively well-off—it may require less ready capital to buy or build a tiny home than a typical full-size dwelling, but it still requires some capital, and many people don’t have any, or not what it would take to uproot their lives for an uncomfortable and likely impermanent experiment. If offered a choice between a tiny, temporary home and the comfort of a livable, permanent dwelling, most people, I bet, would take the latter.

Location constraints and zoning regulations also make it difficult for many people to participate in the tiny house movement even if they want to. Jewel Pearson, one of relatively few Black advocates of tiny homes, explains in a video walkthrough of her gorgeous, custom-built tiny house that she parks her home outside of her city, Charlotte, North Carolina, because she has to. Most city regulations don’t allow houses below a certain size. (This is also why so many tiny houses, such as Warsaw’s Keret House and the London dumpster house, are classified as art installations: It gets them around their own local size regulations.) And since many people of color don’t feel particularly safe in the rural areas and RV parks where tiny homeownership is allowed, they, Pearson says, remain leery of the movement altogether. Those city regulations do exist for a reason—to keep people from being totally squished, as they were in the days of tenements. But if people of color are effectively prevented from living in tiny houses if they want to, then that means they’re cut off from an opportunity to someday leapfrog from a tiny home to a reasonably sized one—to a better chance at owning their space and not always living at the mercy of shitty landlords.

It may always be a bourgeois fantasy to want to own your own home, but people have this fantasy for a reason. It’s reasonable to want a comfortable and beautiful home—not just to store an excess number of possessions, but to feel cozy, safe, in control, and, above all, sure that no one can force you out. I don’t think there’s an unresolvable contradiction here, even in an age of tightening material conditions and climate anxiety that are the direct result of capitalist industrialization. Future generations shouldn’t have to settle for small, cramped, and uncomfortable housing just because the previous ones were greedy and selfish. As Amitav Ghosh notes in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago, 2016), it’s a brutal coincidence, and an unfair one, that the conveniences of modernity were only found to be deadly to the planet as the so-called global majority countries were industrializing and were therefore finally able to enjoy them. But that unfairness doesn’t change the fact of the climate crisis; it would not be wise or practical to build everyone a McMansion. Human beings—especially in the US—do have to reduce our carbon footprints; we do have to live smaller. Billionaires, of course, ought to downsize the most, but until we expropriate their property, we all need to live somewhere, in some kind of reasonable space.

There must be a middle ground between holding out for the revolution and everybody hustling for themselves; there also must be a middle ground between McMansions and Better Living through Pods. Southern Living recently declared 1,500 square feet the ideal home size—bigger than a tiny house, with some real elbow room, but not nearly as big as a McMansion, or the average US home, for that matter. My husband and I are starting to save up for a house of around that size, someplace outside New York City; we may get lucky, but if that happens it will be nice for us without making much difference to anyone else. The housing market is currently a game of musical chairs; there’s not enough seating for everyone by design, because the wealthy ultimately want to retain the power to optimize their space, and despite their agonizing over how to help the faceless poor, they harbor no real expectations that they themselves will ever be stuck with less. The tiny house movement trots out some little doll chairs and invites people to sit in them for a while, if they can tolerate the experience. But we need real houses for real human beings, where they can feel ownership over their lives, and not like toys knocked about by a careless hand.