These days, I have been searching for alternatives to buying an expensive house. The prices of property in Canada are increasing and becoming difficult to afford for many. The only way to afford them is to either move to a very small town where the price of a house is still cheap, or else get a job that most of the time, does not really makes society better and only serves to create more technology to concentrate wealth into the hands of the elite.
One possibility is a tiny house: tiny houses are typically smaller than regular houses and you can also outfit them with off-grid options such as solar power and composting toilets, which are much more ecologically sound that regular flush toilets. The only problem is that it’s not always easy to find a place to put a tiny house. The problem is regulations: often, neighbourhoods and municipalities don’t like tiny houses, unless they are hidden away or secondary buildings on an existing property that has a regular house.
I think the reason for this dislike of tiny houses is clear. Of course, there are the superficial reasons. Some people claim that tiny houses make neighbourhoods look weird. Others don’t want their neighbourhood to become a trailer park. But I think there is a deeper, underlying psychological reason for the dislike of tiny houses: they give a hint to an alternative lifestyle that does not require working endless hours to pay off an expensive house. In fact, I would argue that the entire reason trailer parks are legally segregated with zoning is because then they cannot evolve into alternative communities that could demonstrate living to be much cheaper than it really is. Of course, some of the pressures against alternative communities are via direct and conscious actions from the rich and some are just mechanistic emergent phenomena from our techno-industrial system.
Ultimately, if tiny houses became easy to place in regular parcels of land and prevalent, then the housing market would likely collapse. Of course, it would not just be due to an increase in tiny houses but a drastic change in lifestyles as well. For example, communities with many tiny houses might get interested in sharing skills and trading instead of functioning within the regular economy. They might also be interested in building a tiny house community on a large plot of land and using part of it to grow food. If such communities were continually expanding due to easy entry into them, then surely both the housing market and the economy would be in trouble. Just imagine of 40% of highly intelligent people realized that they could just work for a few years and not contribute much to technological development. The techno-industrial system would not be happy and that is precisely the reason why such alternative living is not common.
The truth is, many people in today’s society, if they only had a bit of help, could easily try alternative lifestyles that don’t involve working at corporations or governments for many years. And these lifestyles would not necessarily have to be very extreme in the traditional sense of “roughing it” in the woods. In fact, paradoxically, modern technology could provide living structures like advanced tiny houses that last for decades and require minimal maintenance. With all of our scientific knowledge, we could create very sustainable communities and leave traditional working culture in the dust.
And that’s why there are so many regulations in the way for tiny houses. But the regulations cover more than just tiny houses. Functioning in traditional society also requires an address, which is another shackle that keeps most people locked into traditional real estate and renting. Getting a small loan requires “credit history”, which is only made good by taking out lots of loans and buying things on credit. Now, many basic parts of infrastructure require owning a mobile phone, and even a smartphone in the case of some banks, which makes it so that one must have an even higher income to keep buying phones that don’t last long and must be disposed of.
In short, many alternative and safe lifestyles are possible that require earning much less than people typically earn. However, governments and rich people are heavily against them and use laws to prevent the majority from pursuing such lifestyles. If they did not, then their empire would be worth much less and they would no longer be in the upper strata of society.