Junk

by Alison Stewart

  Too comfortable perhaps, comfortable enough to question the price? What was her take on the hagglers?

  “I don’t let them win, do I?”

  The Annie Haul mission statement is “Haulers with a conscience,” and it is written across the truck. It is something Kate believes in, and Annie wouldn’t sell her the business until she was sure of Kate’s commitment. Kate will take extra time to sort out items that could be used by someone else and will make extra runs to make sure the donations happen. She only has one truck, so it isn’t always in her best interest. “I waste labor doing that, but I don’t care.” She could load the truck differently and more effectively time wise, but that would impinge upon her donating ability. She sees it as playing the long game.

  “We get so many references,” she tells me as she hauls a chair with a broken leg over to an area across from the giant dump heap, “because they see that we take the time to go through and separate.” She won’t name names, but she says a lot of the haulers who say they donate just dump. “I want to go put my head on the pillow at night and know that I tried to do no harm. And I feel good about it. So, that is that. And then, yeah, if I tell people I’m going to donate, then that’s just really important to me that I uphold that promise.”

  In a three-day period she makes three stops at Goodwill, a trip to the scrap metal yard, and a run to the hazardous waste chemical depot. She will only go to the dump after she has exhausted all other options. Even then she and her team take the time to pull out items that could be used by local artists. There’s a special area to put those things.

  The last donation stop Kate takes me to is a place where she frequently brings items she gets from clean outs that don’t fit in any particular category. It is called Dignity Village. It is a city-sanctioned homeless encampment, a transitional campground. From afar it looks like a whimsical series of playhouses, but its history is rooted in a very serious issue.

  Years ago a group of homeless people under the banner Dignity Village were setting up tent cities around Portland, and ultimately they took to living under the Fremont Bridge, the one Kate’s father help build. But Portland had an anticamping ordinance. It was a crime to be in a sleeping bag, on bedding, or using a stove in the open while sitting or lying. A person could not sleep in a car, tent, or any makeshift structure. In 2000 a judge ruled it was basically unfair to punish someone displaced because he or she had to engage in acts of homelessness, especially if the city’s shelters were full. His ruling read:

  The court finds it impossible to separate the fact of being homeless from the necessary “acts” that go with it, such as sleeping. The act of sleeping or eating in a shelter away from the elements cannot be considered intentional, avoidable conduct. This conduct is ordinary activity required to sustain life. Due to the fact that they are homeless, persons seek out shelter to perform these daily routines. Yet the City considers this location to be a campsite if the homeless person maintains any bedding. The homeless are being punished for behavior indistinguishable from the mere fact that they are homeless. Therefore, those without homes are being punished for the status of being homeless. . . . This court does not accept the notion that the life decisions of an individual, albeit seemingly voluntary decisions, necessarily deprive that person of the status of being homeless.2

  Judge Gallagher championed looking for alternatives.

  The ruling opened the door for homeless advocates to push for creative solutions. In August 2001, the Larson Legacy Foundation negotiated a deal with the mayor of Portland to allow the Dignity Village homeless group to develop its own campground community on a 1.3-acre piece of land owned by the city. Dignity Village has been on the site ever since.

  Mark Lakeman was one the architects involved in the early planning of Dignity Village. He is a huge believer in creating these kinds of spaces. “This is what we actually said to the city council. Legalize this and within ten years—repeating the same settlement pattern cultural evolution that we’ve watched in the last ten thousand years.—we will watch people go from being nomadic in shopping carts, like they were before, looking for their promise land. These people arrive at their place and they will generate a physical fabric that reflects their needs and who they are. It will prove people are hardwired place-makers.”

  It is located about seven miles outside of downtown Portland within walking distance of one bus stop. The drive to the area known as Sunderland is along the Columbia River. It feels like you are on the road to nowhere. The area is open and flat and near the airport. After cruising down an industrial stretch, the houses come into view on the horizon. As we pull into a wide driveway we check in at the security booth. They know Kate and why she is here. We are directed to pull up to a shedlike structure to unload the donations. As she opens the back of the truck, people suddenly appear and swarm the trucks. There’s a pregnant woman in a tight T-shirt interested in some of the hair care products and an older woman with a few of her original teeth interested in it all. Someone appears, voices are slightly raised, and order is quickly restored by the manager who will oversee the intake of the donations.

  “Dignity Village, they’ll take half-open bottles of shampoo. They’ll take cat food. They’ll take dog food. They’ll take any kind of nontoxic household products—shampoo, soaps, candles, any kind of camping gear, propane. They’ll resell wood if it’s usable. They have a firewood business.” She’ll often put things aside during a clean out that she knows Dignity Village could use. Once the donations are accounted for, residents will be able to have access to things they need. Kate once brought plastic tiaras she found and they were a big hit.

  A tall, slim, white-haired fellow named Mitch, a community leader, offers to show me around. If you took him out of his board shorts and floral shirt and put him in a cashmere sweater and jeans combo and presented him as the fraternal twin brother of Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, I’d believe you. He explains the layout. “There are forty-two homes; about sixty people can be here.” The homes are tiny structures built on platforms that are ten by twelve feet. “A local high school built this house,” Mitch says, pointing to a newer looking structure. Local artists created beautiful murals on the exteriors of some of the original houses. They have nicknames like The Barn or The Castle. The small size of the structures and their colorful paint jobs make the place seem playful. It is a little cognitively confusing given the reason most of these people live here.

  The houses are for sleeping and keeping a few personal items safe. Everything else is communal. Dignity Village is now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with its own internal leadership and set of rules. It operates much like a cooperative apartment does in many cities. It has its own set of regulations:

  1) No violence to yourself and others.

  2) No theft.

  3) No alcohol or drugs or drug paraphernalia on site or within a one-block radius.

  4) No constant disruptive behavior.

  5) Everyone must contribute to the operation and maintenance of the village.

  Contributions include mandatory work hours and a membership fee, currently twenty-five dollars a month. Dignity Village has to pay for water and the little bit of electricity used in common areas. Security logs are kept and infractions are not tolerated. Breaking any of these rules means you have to go, and there’s a waiting list of people who want in.

  In helping design Dignity Village, the idea was to get down to the way humans interact with each other and their environments. Lakeman said in designing the village they kept in mind the goal of the project and the history of how functional communities evolve. “In more generative earlier societies people would create what they needed to meet their needs. They would create their physical infrastructure in a way that met not only their physical needs but their spiritual and their community needs. So not only would they create something that would facilitate gathering or storage of grains—it’s not only storage for their grain; it would actually become symbolic because they did it together. That’s what you s
ee in Dignity. There’s a design of an environment that is car-free. It’s walkable. It is lined with places people live but also social edges, like porches. It is a very complete diagram of functional social commons, a full range of community infrastructure of commons from indoor meeting spaces to office spaces, workshops, creative spaces.”

  Mitch takes us to a room with three computers. It enables residents to look for jobs, apply for services, or keep in contact with family members. He points to a fairly discreet-looking shed and says, “Here’s where we take showers.” There are garden beds for decoration and produce. They also provide shade and cooling. The ground is blacktop, like a parking lot. Mitch points to big blue containers. “Those are rainwater barrels to collect water for the plants, although the mosquitoes are pretty bad.” While the land is free, it is right by an area that will flood. Mitch shows us where the water will sometimes rush in after a storm. “Sometimes it floods up under the blocks. Also we have rat issues.” The kind of serious rat issues that make the downtown Portland Private Ryan rats look like pets. The houses are all on eighteen-inch stilts for protection.

  Because it is technically a campground, the zoning rules are different. The fire inspectors do show up, and at one point on a few houses the small porches had to be cut back and their wires contained for safety. Originally meant to be a temporary place for people to, as Mitch put it, “get it together,” some people began to stay for years. In 2012, when Dignity Village renewed its contract with the city as it does every three years, a stipulation was included that no one can stay more than two years.

  Mitch is nervous about the city or state intervening. There are citizens who are opposed to Dignity Village, citing the residents as non-taxpayers and freeloaders. And most recently there was a bit of bad publicity—four people who used Dignity Village as their residence were caught taking part in a luggage theft operation at the nearby Portland airport. But for all the people who have a roof over their heads and are able to hold a job, it is has been a godsend. Mitch says it is viable solution. “The system is broken. This works.”

  After we leave Dignity Village, Kate invites me up to her place on the farm for the evening. It is a beautiful drive into the lush, green forests of Oregon. The interesting thing is the little log cabin Kate calls home is not that much bigger than some of the Dignity Village houses. She has a small kitchen, a bed, and an overstuffed reading chair. It is maybe four hundred square feet. She likes it this way. It is enough room for her, her puppy, and her girlfriend to cozy up to the wood-burning fireplace that heats the place.

  Kate is someone who doesn’t want stuff in her life and tries to separate herself from all the things she sees and touches during the day. She follows a superstition when she works, always wearing a cap on the job. “One thing I learned is you keep a hat on. And you either wear a hat or you just keep your hat on because it protects you from—you just remember who you are all day. And you don’t go down that road of sucking up their stuff, if that makes any sense.” She doesn’t buy anything. If she needs something she says it usually appears in one of the clean-outs. And she has basically decided at this point in her life she doesn’t need that much. “What I find interesting about myself is that when I do come home, and you do say you can walk away from it, I do walk away from whatever happens. And I think that I’m not who I used to be either, because I’ve purged so much.” She likes living free of stuff in a small house. And she is not alone.

  11

  ALL YOU NEED IS LESS

  * * *

  TINY HOUSES ARE BIG right now. The tiny house movement is made up of people who chose to live in homes that are sometimes as teeny as eighty square feet, while others call home a more manageable three-hundred-square-foot domicile. People who opt for this life want to lower their personal consumption to preserve natural resources and/or do not want to go into debt to own a home. It is a social, personal, and sometimes financial statement.

  In 2002 the Small House Society was formed to support those who chose to live simply by simply living in miniscule spaces. One of the society’s founders, Gregory Johnson of Iowa City, believes this lifestyle can improve one’s existence: “It is the process of getting rid of things that aren’t important to you. Most people say it is a better way of living because you are left with what matters.”1 He speaks from experience, having lived in a ten-by-seven-foot home from 2003 to 2009. There are some people in the tiny house movement who keep seasonal items or educational or hobby-related goods in storage so that they can achieve what Johnson calls “simple, uncluttered daily surroundings.” However, Johnson says there are many people who “literally have everything they own and use inside of a tiny house.”

  A fellow society founder, Jay Shafer, shacked up in a bitty abode before getting married and having children. When his family expanded, he bumped it up to a spacious five-hundred-square-foot pad. He has become a tiny home designer and supplier of prebuilt small house units. He envisions and designs spaces where every inch is utilized. This can mean a clothes closet is adjacent to the kitchen and a ladder is how you reach your bed in a sleeping loft. Shafer describes the uberefficiency that can sometimes border on the nutty: “It’s kind of like Lego meets Ikea and they make a porn movie together.”2

  The wacky nature of some of the homes has led to a good deal of skepticism and even parody. The television show Portlandia satirized small living by showing a couple sharing a twee, wee house where the tub/shower stall doubled as the TV room and the girlfriend had to use her boyfriend’s back as a cutting board to slice some toast.

  Some small-space advocates are trying to mainstream the movement with homes that look less like dollhouses and more like dream dorm rooms. Brian Levy doesn’t refer to his house as a tiny house or small house. He calls his a minimhome. He stresses minimalism as opposed to shrunken functionality. He believes the best chance for acceptance is to aim for realistic living spaces, not the unconventional. “I think that some of the misconceptions are actually correct perceptions in some cases. That’s one of the problems with the micro house movement, [it’s] that people say these places are too small to live comfortably and I would say, Yes, that is correct. Many are. If you are a person living in one hundred square feet, that might be too small, but three hundred square feet per person is what Americans did before in the 1950s.”

  Brian is referring the National Association of Home Builders statistics that put today’s average home around twenty-three hundred square feet. In the 1950s the average size of a home was 983 square feet.3 For a family of three, that’s just over three hundred square feet per person. He was amazed at how the scale has changed. “Now we are at nine hundred square feet per person. We’ve tripled in sixty years. I don’t know if we’ve gotten three times as happy?” Brian asks rhetorically. “So what have we gotten? More space to clean. More to maintain. More to fill up with stuff.”

  Brian Levy owns a small piece of property at 21 Evarts Street in northeast Washington, DC. It is a triangular lot behind some row houses that once was littered with garbage, had pools of fetid water, and provided a home to an abandoned car. Now there are cherry trees in a garden area, an eight-hundred-gallon water cistern, and an elegant little house.

  The house is just about eleven feet wide by twenty-two feet long. The interior is close to 210 square feet and the ceilings are nine feet eight inches high at the center. “It was sort of a New Year’s resolution for 2012—I was going to build a tiny house.” He purchased the land, made peace with the neighbors, and hired Will Couch of Foundry Architects to design the house he had in mind.

  “I didn’t want any lofts to climb up into; that’s popular in the tiny house world. I wanted a little more functionality. I wanted to be able to have a dinner party for six, which I can do easily. I wanted a full-sized kitchen with a full-sized sink and full, big range. I wanted a little more closet space. I wanted a full audio-visual system, so I have a projector screen that doubles as a shade. I also wanted a full-sized keyboard for my computer. My archi
tect rolled his eyes and said we aren’t going to do all that. Yes, we are going to do all that.”

  When you walk in the front door, there you are. You are in the house and that’s it. Brian gently asks that I remove my boots before entering. The wood floors are really nice and it is immediately noticeable that all the finishes are high end. There are stainless steel appliances and ceramic heating units. With a smaller space, Brian said he could spend more money on durable, high-quality materials. There are solar panels on the roof and foot pedals to pump water to the sinks.

  The space is essentially a rectangle. As you enter the house, to your immediate right is a ten-foot full galley kitchen that spans the short end of the house. There’s a small fridge, convection oven/microwave, and wall storage for food. Looking out the window above the sink you see a wood-burning oven in the yard. It was the one thing that couldn’t fit in the kitchen. The top of a long sofa hinges open to reveal a space for water tanks. Across from the couch, on the other long side of the house, is a wall of windows. The other short end has a full bed, trundle style, which slides underneath a raised office area. Next to the office area is a five-foot closet, and on the other side is a tiny bathroom with a silver commode. “That’s the incinerator toilet—a stainless steel shrine,” jokes Brian. It is the only part of the house where his enthusiasm wanes when describing it. Incinerator toilets burn the waste and have a reputation for being stinky. “It’s fine,” he says, not that convincingly. “You have to baby it a little bit.”

  At six foot one, Brian is a lanky fellow with a beard and penetrating brown eyes, who speaks with conviction about the appeal of living with less—a lot less. “It is something that is culturally difficult. And sometimes it is a process. It can take years to pare down things. What I’ve learned is it is very doable. Humans are adaptable creatures. Psychologists have this thing called the adaptation principle. . . . We are amazingly flexible. We can reconfigure to adapt to situations. Most things, particularly the size space we live in, what kind of environment we live in. We adapt pretty well, generally.”