Where the Heart Is

I think a lot about housing these days, but it isn't something I've always been interested in. I've attempted to bootstrap several ventures, and run the numbers on dozens more, and when working out projected cash flows, estimated revenues and committed expenses, I kept coming back to the fact that housing accounts for at least 2/3rds of what I have to spend each month, regardless of where I am (unless I want to move back to Angleton, Texas and live with my parents.) I know how to eat decently on $20 a week, my car is long paid for and gets good milage, all my other costs can be dropped to near nothing, but not housing. Even living with roommates, my cost of a warm, clean place to sleep and shower has run between $20 and $35 dollars per day, every day, since the day I left college and started paying my own rent.

That kind of money adds up fast when you're trying to build something out of nothing but your own time and skills. I'm willing to work hard for other people, but it's not something I want to do for the rest of my life. I have too many interesting ideas of my own to spend my life working on someone else's.

The upshot is that I've spent a lot of time over the last 8 years or so trying to find creative ways out of that trap. It's something I expect to blog about a lot, but I want to start with some ground-level principles that have come to inform my thinking.

1) Small is beautiful.

Small is beautiful because small is cheap, and because small forces you to be creative due to the built-in limits. (Much like the best thing that ever happened to my writing skills was taking Don Becker's Social Contract Theory at UT lo these many years ago. My jaw nearly hit the desk when he explained that the first paper was a three page paper. Three pages maximum.) I love the small living space displays at Ikea for the same reason.

I wasn't always enamored of small spaces, minimalist design or owning few things. I was an instinctual packrat for most of my life. I'm a historian by temperament and training. I love books. I love old, well-crafted things (the Western Electric 500, for instance), and I collected them with a near-religious passion for most of by boyhood. I was on a mission to save them from people who didn't appreciate them and would happily pitch them in the trash without looking back. My personal archives and library were sources of pride and backaches every time I had to move.

So what changed? Well, my life took several unexpected turns in rapid succession and I ended up moving to California with nothing more than would fit in my car. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. My sense of self-identification was forced to reform without reference to any particular geography -- I'm a 7th Generation Texan, I'm never going to define myself by the fact that I live anywhere else, sure as hell not California -- or any particular set of possessions. My books didn't fit in the car, so they didn't come with me. After the shock wore off, I began to place more value on the freedom that came with traveling light than I did on the possessions that had previously weighed me down.

2) Permanence is an illusion

In Earthship Volume 2, Mike Reynolds makes the very valid point that most people buy a house, spend 30 years paying for it, then die. That observation brings up several interesting questions. Is it possible to design a house doesn't cost half a lifetime's wages to build and maintain, but that performs as well and lasts as long as one that does? Can you build a house that can be disassembled when you're done with it, and the parts used to build something else (in the spirit of William McDonough and Michael Braungart's Cradle to Cradle theory)?

3) Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty

You'll spend literally half of the hours of your life in your home, and it will be your biggest committed expense. It can be your greatest source of stress or well-being, according to how you interact with it. Design, fund, and build accordingly. Focus on what makes you happy. I love to cook and take long showers. If I was building a house tomorrow, 4/5s of it would be bathroom and kitchen.

That's the basics for now. I'm sure I'll talk more about this in the future.