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Comment by tjr225 | Hacker News Reader

The Tiny Home trend and the "Van Life" trend are slightly unsettling to me - I wonder which forces are at play who intend to convince us that lowering our standards of living is cool?

No judgement from me if you do choose to do these things, though. I do see the appeal. Maybe there is no conspiracy, maybe it is a coping mechanism.

Edited "deeply" to "slightly" upon further reflection.

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It's interesting how your view of these trends is exactly the opposite of mine.

To me, tiny homes and "van life" are about raising our standards of living. To me, living in a van with the freedom to go wherever you want, whenever you want, sounds amazing. If you lived in the midwest in your van last week, you could have simply driven away from the polar vortex.

I hate the idea of living in a large house. I don't want to spend my weekends doing chores like sweeping floors or mowing the lawn.

There are practical obstacles to overcome with these alternate living styles, but it works really well for some people.

I lived in a van for four months this past summer but I have a hard time explaining why I loved it so much. The experience was visceral.

During the day I'd run my company. Cell service is so great now that I could be tethered to my phone doing video calls while camping out on BLM land.

Then in the evening I'd go do an outdoor adventure, usually a short one. And then I'd devote my weekends to being active, like a two day backpacking trip.

The result was that I felt like I was using my full self for the first time. I'd be completely exhausted mentally by Friday and physically by Sunday.

That sounds amazing! I hiked the PCT a couple years ago and I'd love to be able to go back to that kind of lifestyle while still making money and being relatively connected to the rest of the world.

Fingers crossed, I should be making more progress towards that in the next year after my fiancee finishes grad school.

I’ll venture to say that “standards of living” are largely subjective, beyond some basics like access to food and shelter from the elements. Nothing wrong with wanting a big house with a big yard. Nothing wrong with wanting a tiny house or living in a van.

> I wonder which forces are at play who intend to convince us that lowering our standards of living is cool?

I wonder which forces are at play who intend to convince us that continuing living with our current standards is sustainable.

No judgement from me if you do choose to do these things, though. I do see the appeal. Maybe there is no conspiracy, maybe it is a coping mechanism.

When did we consciously decided that :

- having thousands of cars running around us constantly while emitting toxic gases

- wrapping everything in multiple layer of plastic packaging

- eating meat at every meal

- same day delivery / drone delivery

- getting food delivered by people getting paid sub minimum wage

- crypto currencies consuming ridiculous amount of energy for basically nothing

- spending 8 hours a day sitting in front of a computer developing solutions for mega corps exploiting human behaviours to make money

&c. were good things ?

"Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We've been using them not because we needed them but because we had them."

I'm sorry but I fail to see how most of the items on your list have anything to do with living in a tiny home or a van. I suspect you have made assumptions about my lifestyle and priorities based on my comment and if I am correct you'd be wrong.

It wasn't against your lifestyle or even about van life or tiny houses, but more about the fact that what we perceive as "improved standards of living" have no logical foundations and aren't actually improving our lives.

If you watch interviews of people who went the tiny house route, a lot of them started with "why do I need to be in debt (mortgage) for 30-40 years of my life?". There is a growing movement of people rejecting being in debt for decades and that is really a good thing. And if moving into a tiny house is carefully done, then it doesn't need to be lower standards of living.

>debt

The concept of "tiny house" romanticizes a small budget. Poorer people get smaller houses.

This isn't true. Poorer people have fewer assets. You can live in a smaller space and still be wealthy in terms of assets.

>This isn't true. //

In general wealth doesn't correlate with van/trailer/home size?

> why do I need to be in debt (mortgage) for 30-40 years of my life

Because you're (hopefully) going to come out of the other side of those 30-40 years, regardless. In one case, you can have a house you own free and clear. In the other case, you're still paying rent to someone else.

And 30-40 years is the extreme. Paying just a little extra principal every month you can have the loan paid in well under 30 years.

Those are some big ifs in there that you didn't mention. There are a lot of people who take our home equity loans every time their value goes up. A coworker of mine bought a house for 250k, the previous owners had bought it for 90k 20 years ago, and 6 months before selling refinanced for 200k. Each loan is carefully recorded in the title for all time. (I probably have the numbers wrong, but they they are close enough)

If you pay off your loan you are debt free in 30 years or less. However many people don't: they see their house go up in value and take out a bigger loan to spend now.

People make lots of poor financial decisions. Some are a product of unfortunate circumstances. Others of basically greed.

Buying a house isn't for everyone. And is harder in some areas than others. But buying something within your budget can also provide a lot of stability over time. (Which, of course, may or may not be something you care about.)

In the other case, you're still paying rent to someone else.

Not really, if you buy a small piece of land and make a tiny house for yourself (or find a parking space for little rent). Depending on where you are, it is possible to build one for as little as 20-30K USD, vs probably 200K USD or more for a big house. Instead of paying interest for 30 years, you could invest it somewhere else.

I am not saying getting normal houses is wrong, just that it is not for everyone. There are people who despise being in debt, in any shape or form (me included), no matter how well it is dressed up ("but you are building wealth, your house would be worth 3x in 20 years!!"). Whichever feeling is bigger (not being in debit vs living in a normal house with debt) wins, and it is different for each person.

Obviously these options aren't available in big cities like NY. There are multiple good things from this movement though - people are less in debt, people don't buy junk (or buy less) because they don't have space to put it, people likely to spend more time outdoors etc.

It seems to me that the core ethos is upping our standards of living. Sort of like a whole-life kon-mari tidying method. Tiny houses help focus specifically on things like:

1. Owning high quality and purpose built possessions

2. Becoming debt free and allowing yourself to take on tasks of great risk (regular world travel, start your own business, etc)

3. Removing things from your life that aren't useful or clutter your life

I agree with all of these points, but also believe this is a reactive response to a culture younger generations can’t afford (as well as overloaded consumerism/materialism).

I know plenty of 25-40 year olds who would love a detached single family home with a two car garage and a yard near their work, but it’s out of their financial grasp, as is other components of “The American Dream”, hence embracing experiences and minimalism over material possessions. You make do when you feel you can’t thrive.

Where do they work though? Is it still out of their grasp in Sacramento, Philadelphia, Portland, Reno, Columbus, etc?

... and why not celebrate that as a healthy development? Living small and mindfully doesn't mean living poorly.

"Embracing experiences and minimalism over material possessions" is precisely what philosophers and spiritual teachers have been advocating for millennia. The material excesses of our parents' generation are a historical anomaly. Earth Overshoot Day is on August 1st – we shouldn't be able to afford that culture in the first place.

It’s easy to celebrate when it’s not your desires and quality of life.

I would not celebrate everyone living on a dollar a day as most of the developing world does. To me, that wouldn’t be a win. Conversely, US resource consumption per capita needs to decline to European levels to be sustainable, which I think is possible with renewables and electrified transportation, along with an aging population.

Land is not the problem in the US. It’s jobs near inexpensive land, which you can incentivize with public policy.

@beamatronic- the median SFH in Reno is now over $380,000, and median household income is $58k. According to a quick housing affordability calculator, $58k will get you to a $280,000 house if you really stretch it under normal conditions.

The affordability issue has impacted the entire west coast, possibly most of the western US depending on how you measure. Of the cities you listed, I think Columbus is the only actual option for someone of average means.

People in the desert learn to worship thirst

I actually really resent the McMansion obsession in housing design for the last 40 years. Houses are not built to be functional or comfortable. They're built to be a status symbol. A shoddily built, poorly insulated, overpriced status symbol.

I would already own a house if there were reasonably sized houses on the market that were well built. But there aren't. There are acres of McMansions springing up everywhere, but no sensible, functional houses.

McMansions are actually quite functional and comfortable for the way upper-middle class Americans live today (at least those who can afford the utility bills and to pay others for cleaning and maintenance). The major real estate developers hire sociologists to study the lifestyles of real families and then incorporate the results into architecture. For example by putting a large window with a clear view of the entire back yard above the kitchen sink so that a parent can simultaneously cook dinner and supervise small children playing outside.

> A shoddily built, poorly insulated, overpriced status symbol.

Got a new, half million dollar house. (not sure if this counts)

Got the upgrade on insulation(got it in the attic/garage area). Got the upgrade on the triple pane glass. Nothing, has broken in 2 years.

Since, I've used it to rent out AirBnB, rent for friends, and soon house many children.

It would have been nice to save 100k and get a smaller home, but builders make nice new homes, not smaller lower cost homes.

You can actually build the house you want. There are empty lots on the market most places. That's what we did. Our house is so well insulated and passive-solar heated that here in Iowa, even with the -20+ temperatures we've just had, the furnace doesn't run all day.

The financing required to buy the land and build a new house is more difficult than buying an existing house.

Building a new house typically requires more collateral because the bank is wary of loaning the money and then the project falling apart before its finished. When that happens, all they can reposes is parts of a house that aren't even worth (on the open market) the cost of the building materials and work already put into it.

It's not a huge deal if you go with an existing builder with lots of experience, especially if they already have a relationship with the bank... but if you want to save money by being your own general contractor or do any work yourself, that's when you encounter the most problems.

I mostly agree and think there are a number of points to be made.

1. There is nothing wrong with living small, but there is a point when every square meter/feet makes a lot of difference.

2. We really should be getting better standards of living over time as manufacturing gets easier. Most people should be having even modest vacation homes bigger than this.

3. Even if you don't believe in these things, it is to some extent at least an ideal. Maybe especially in the US giving up this ideal is a significant decrease in prosperity.

Ultimately one has to ask themselves "for what?". I can in many ways see the appeal and I am interested in things like house construction. But ultimately it is also a result of the absurd situation where we aren't producing new opportunities anymore. And you can't really compensate for the changes in the bigger picture.

I think it's more that our standards of living were artificially inflated for the past 100 - 150 years.

A person doesn't actually need that much room to live comfortably. Particularly if you make use of public spaces and the outdoors.

> I think it's more that our standards of living were artificially inflated for the past 100 - 150 years.

This kind of perhaps excessively long historical horizon reminds me of the old joke (http://www.challzine.net/23/23scientist.html):

> [King's College] had gotten a large bequest to the College and were trying to decide how to invest it. The bursar said, “Certainly we ought to invest it in property, real property. That has stood the college very well for the last thousand years.” But the oldest senior fellow in the room shook his head and said, “Well, that is true enough. But the last thousand years have been atypical.”

The small home with only the essentials is deeply American. Recall Henry David Thoreau's cabin: https://www.simplesolarhomesteading.com/thoreaucabin.htm

Most parts of the world look at McMansions and feel unsettled, particularly when they are marketed as "aspirational": sell your soul in order to get the biggest place you can get a mortgage for on your salary, so you can never leave your job.

I have the same unsettling feeling as you. The conspiracy theorist in me is definitely on high alert and sees it as an attempt at conditioning this generation towards accepting a lower quality of life than their parents had. If we can be made to actually believe we want to live in tiny cramped homes and apartments, then when it comes to pass we won’t get out the pitchforks and torches and riot.

Eating bread and plain water is healthy, and good for the soul!

Bicycling instead of driving is good for the environment and keeps you fit!

Living in a van is freedom and ultra mobile!

Note that none of these statements is wrong, but they are arguably propaganda aiming to get people accustomed to living with less.

Curious, I'd say many of us younger folks see it in reverse: our parents got roped in the propaganda of "consume now and pay later, you'll certainly be earning more", and then the lie was exposed, and they're left unemployable and with a crippling mortgage. Under this perspective, by giving up on superfluous crap, we're just keeping our eyes wide open, because we're fully aware that we'll get fucked sooner or later.

Then again, that may be fully the intention of the current propaganda: it's harder to fight when everyone is just trying to protect themselves.

Yet mobilization, like tiny houses, is itself rather fashionable nowadays. Are we sure that's not propaganda?

Yea, there are pros and cons to bigger and smaller homes. It’s just that the marketing of the Tiny House “Movement” and the constant pushing for us to be happy with small apartments instead of houses reminds me of Huxley. “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard.”

I don't see that kind of sentiment in people I know who like tiny houses. If anything it's the opposite: they work a lot harder to save up to buy a tiny house (it's like 200k) vs continuing to rent. It's also harder to go against the grain than it is to flow with what society tells you to do.

you could live in a smaller home. 1500sq ft is plenty enough for a family of four. How I know? I grew up in one. If your mortgage banker tells you you could buy 600K house, don't ever fall for that trap.

Look at the flip side - if a big chunk of people go for those memes, it takes pressure off the price of houses. I would love for houses to become unfashionable. Then I could buy more house for less dollars.

I don't know if its necessary to lower your standard of living by downsizing (tiny homes). Careful planning and compromise can seriously cut down on the interior space you need. A nomadic lifestyle (van life), while unconventional today, satisfies a different set of priorities and while most people in the US would see it as a reduction in their standard of living some people actually find it liberating and exciting.

From my own point of view I would love to build a tiny house on a large plot of forested land after my children are raised and on their own (not before), perhaps with a travel van for the summers.

> lowering our standards of living

Why is living in a smaller home a lower standard of living? Wasted space is a higher standard?

I like having a separate bedroom. It has nice carpeting, a big bed, a clothing closet and blinds that make the room pitch black. The walls are isolated for heat and noise and the only window is facing the garden, not the busy street on the other side. No electronics to distract me, nothing to look at. The temperature is lower than the rest of the house (on purpose). It's really magical for me to sleep there and I have the best sleep. I used to sleep in the living room and it was terrible. Fan noise from the central ventilation system, lights from various electronic devices, noise from the street-side window, noise from the dishwasher and it was way too warm in the winter.

So yes. Having a bit more space in your home can raise your standard of living.

You do realise that this is the epitome of first world problems though ?

I wonder what will be next when most people will have reached that level of quality of life.

I am not sure it is. At least not in a bad way. Things like sleeping, eating and showering are universal. There is a quite defined line, in terms of space, where things gets fundamentally worse. Even in terms of pure functionality, as in e.g. functionalism, you just can't make things smaller at some point without significant downsides.

Why would you need a large home for that? You can have a small home with multiple rooms.

But that's a small home, not a tiny home. But even small homes (if they exist at all) cost at least 500k in many cities.

You can easily have it with 600-800ft

That is correct, but have noticed that a tiny home, RV or an apartment under 400 square feet usually doesn't have a (properly) separated bedroom.

I've seen a couple of tiny homes that had a bedroom in the form of a mezzanine above the living space. With all the heat rising upwards I wouldn't be able to sleep with all the heat trapped in the sleeping area.

Tiny home = Small trailer in a trailer park... but marketed to the middle classes = Low-quality housing for those in poverty, marketed to the middle classes = sign of people believing in very poor prospects for the middle classes.

The problem with your question is that we haven't defined what "wasted space" is.

If I want to have a couple of children is wanting one or two extra bedrooms really wasting space? And if it is, wouldn't you still call it a loss of quality of life compared to the alternative?

It can be a way to have an otherwise impractical lifestyle for some people. I have a friend that lives in a large pickup with a tall canopy/camper he built. Big enough for a smallish mattress, stove/cookware, table, and outdoor equipment including a kayak. The whole thing is just incredibly clever in how it utilizes space.

He works remotely, usually using library wifi. Then he just drives around to wherever the best climbing/skiing/kayaking is at any given time of year. Not quite the lifestyle I'd want to lead, but it certainly works for him.

Maybe a bit of both? Housing has been systematically blocked in some areas of the country, leaving a severe shortage, and this is one way to cope. For others, bigger is not better. More maintenance, more cleaning, more bother comes with more house. Different people trade off in different ways.

I have more than i need because i have space, not the other way around.

While i don't wanna have a 'Van Life' (its not possible in my country anyway to weather), i do not want a lot of space inside. I wanna have a lot of space outside.

The American dream of just getting by ;) [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbdKuDNIqGI

Lowering our standards of living in the interests of better quality of life is cool. I would sooner wonder what forces were at play in the previous generation that convinced people to work themselves half to death so that they could have a big house to get home late to and a fast car to sit in traffic in.

Its also a side effect of property taxes. Why pay 10-20k a year in property taxes when you can live in a mobile home.

Same here. I'm afraid that we're being sold a compact, minimalist lifestyle that's a way of downsizing our dreams about living places. IKEA is guilty of this, advertising mini/micro flats where you usually sleep on a mezzanine and cook in the corridor.

Van Life is mostly fake marketing bullshit. Ever wonder why so many "how 2 van lyfe" videos feature brand new Mercedes Sprinters? Hmmm... I wonder who's footing the bills.

This is a channel by an actual van dweller, and a lot of his videos are about exposing how ridiculously fake a lot of the van life people are on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp6T83rUNCt_iqtDelwSHNA/vid...

Even without watching his videos, it's pretty easy to tell that a lot of van life videos follow the same pattern:

- Ridiculously attractive white or "not-too-dark" interracial couples. Bonus points if the boyfriend has an ambiguous European or Latin accent.

- Scantily clad women who somehow have the time and the ability to do their hair, apply makeup perfectly, and have their nails done, despite how actual van dwelling would take the piss out of them.

- If they've got a camera person following them around in every episode, they're definitely living out of hotels, if not their own homes at the end of the day.

- Absurdly expensive vans that most young people couldn't afford without massive debt. I suppose they could bank on paying it off with YouTube adsense dollars, but that's a big gamble.

- Vans with interiors better than a nice apartment, but no mention of how they built it nor how long it actually took to construct. (Sorry, but I don't think noodle-arms there could manage a table saw)

- Living out of a van means pissing in buckets, taking shits at McDonalds, and showering at gyms. So many van life people don't ever talk about this, but spend their time filming all the vacation spots they visit. (you too can see the world... just fork over $35k for a van)

- Never talking about how dwelling in parking lots exposes one to encounters with crazy people, criminals, and hoodlums. How'd you like to wake up at 2am to the sound of boys pissing on the pavement right next to your van? Maybe you'd prefer crackheads screaming about how they're gonna kill the guy who stole their stash? Anyone who has spent a modest time living in a car will know what I'm talking about.

- Never mentioning how it's a pain in the ass to find semi-legal parking. You might be able to park your car out in the middle of nowhere, which is scary as fuck, or you can park in the city and expect to regularly hear a cop tap their night stick against your window.

It's mostly a big crock, and I suppose a lot of Tiny Homes are too, seeing as it's generally a pain in the ass to build one, find a place to put it, and comply with all the state and local ordinances. I know a lot of people have to build their tiny homes on trailer beds because if their shack has wheels then they can technically skirt building codes in certain areas, but then they might as well own an RV in that case.

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