Adaptation level theory suggests that a person’s idea of what is normal slides and changes based on the conditions at the time. Psychologist Harry Helson suggested we base our “normal” position on what we have experienced in the past, and as our experience changes, so does our definition of neutral. You’ve heard of people who have moved from cold climates, say Minnesota, to hot ones, Arizona, who now need a sweater when it goes down to sixty degrees at night because that’s the new norm. In his or her Minnesota days that person would have been running around in shorts if the temperature hit sixty.
Brian, like many small space converts, embraces this highly curated life. In his minimhome are books, family photos, and one box of important papers. He scans and digitizes everything he can. Laundry is done off-site. There’s storage for just enough food. He knows this is not living for a family of five and concedes that downsizing was not simple. “Books were an issue. They are nice to look at and give some comfort, but I pared it down.” He still has quite a few in the small space. “I had to pare down my alcohol collection. I have my six or seven drinks and I don’t need thirty bottles of alcohol.” That said, he does have a sweet bar setup.
Why would a thirtysomething man with a degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who has a full-time job with an energy efficiency company spend his free time focused on small homes? For him it is about alternative urban planning. It is about infill and energizing unused space. It is about consuming less. It is also about a potential business.
He is getting into the small home design/build game. He has sold the plans for this house to at least forty people for $495 and is branching out to sell the actual completed units. He holds open houses regularly. He reports that they have become increasingly crowded, with empty nesters and millennials who see this as a real option, especially in places such as DC where housing costs are astronomical. “It is more diverse than you might think. I was surprised. I am surprised.” The cost of his minimhome is, on the high end, $77,000 top to bottom. There are companies that offer teeny tiny design/build homes for as little as $18,000 if you are willing to build it yourself and to live in really collapsed space.
In some progressive cities there are areas being designated specifically for tiny house communities for people interested in collaborative living. The idea is that while your personal living space is small, you might share a larger open common space for socializing or for utilities. That’s how Brian’s house project started out, but it ended up with hurt feelings and two other tiny homeowners leaving Evarts Street on bad terms. Right now the law is working against Brian. He can’t officially call the minimhouse his permanent residence because of a specific zoning law.4 He is working with others to get some basic restrictions changed. So for now, he technically uses his minihome as a “showcase” house.
Like many organic grassroots movements, the people are far ahead of the policy. Building and zoning laws don’t really apply to houses with this small of a footprint. In some places it isn’t legal to live in a structure under a certain square footage. Many tiny homes are put on trailers but you can’t park one indefinitely unless it is on land you already own. Certain RV parks won’t accept tiny houses on trailers. A smart design build firm is going by the recreational vehicle book and makes tiny homes that are actually classified as RVs and recognized by zoning department codes as such because they have all the traditional utility hookups.
While there hasn’t been a central spokesperson for “Tiny House Power,” the news media has a fascination with people of means who make the choice to live small. They often get the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous treatment in the reverse. News networks used words like “crazy” and “unbelievable” when describing the choice of a major league baseball player to make his tiny home in his van. At just twenty-one years old, pitcher Daniel Norris—then of the Toronto Blue Jays—earned a $2 million signing bonus and an endorsement deal with Nike. Instead of buying a McMansion or investing in a condo in Tulum, he lives in a 1978 Volkswagen camper van that he parks wherever he can. He has told reporters he keeps his personal life low stress so he can do his best on the field. The man pitches at ninety-two miles per hour. He performs at a high level while living low-fi.
On the other end, the pared down spectrum is the sleek, tricked-out micro apartment of Internet pioneer Graham Hill, who founded Treehuger.com in 2004, a website dedicated to sustainability. It was acquired by Discovery Communications four years later for $10 million. Hill now lives in a 420-square-foot apartment with over-the-top architectural wizardry, including moveable walls and beds that retract into shelving. Hill says he now owns six shirts and has digitized all the papers in his life. Hill speaks publicly about design and has started a site called Lifeedited.org. His TED talk titled “Less Stuff, More Happiness” has been viewed 2.6 million times on YouTube.
Hill is not an outlier. Major cities including Seattle and Boston have embraced building micro apartments, spaces three hundred square feet and smaller. In the summer of 2015, New York City welcomed its first prefabricated micro apartment complex of fifty-five units ranging in size from 260 square feet to 360 square feet.5 While the individual spaces are small, there will be large common spaces and even storage available.
Tiny houses and minimalism are having a moment. Maybe these folks have hit on the one surefire way to keep stuff under control: to change your environment. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the adaptation level theory tilted toward humans’ ability to obtain and keep more stuff in big houses and plentiful storage units. The first decades of the twenty-first century seem to be leaning the other way. One reason could be the generational influence hovering around the small space movement. Millenials don’t have boxes of record albums, stacks of books, and photo albums. “It’s all here. My address book. My music,” said a young woman attending a tiny house meet up as she pointed to her phone.
Johnson of the Small House Society sees this shift as well. “I think everyone can relate to how technology is allowing us to live with less clutter because things that once filled up physical space now fill up a hard drive, such as movies, books, photos, magazines, music CDs, etc. People are needing less space now.”
A 2015 article in the Washington Post titled, “Stuff It: Millennials Nix Their Parents’ Treasures,” found a stark contrast between how parents and their freshly adult children feel about things like old Christmas cards and grandma’s rocking chair. A downsizing consultant interviewed for the article described it this way: “Eight times out of ten, kids don’t want the parents’ furniture or boxes of letters or scrapbooks. . . . It can create hurt feelings. But it’s not that they don’t love you. They don’t love your furniture.”
A 2014 Neilsen report, “Millenials: Breaking Myths,” offers a few clues as to why tiny homes may be more than a passing fad due to cultural and demographic shifts. According to the report, “The American Dream no longer means a comfortable home in the suburbs. Millennials aspire to stay in the cities rather than moving to the suburbs or rural areas, presenting a potential problem for Boomers who will eventually want to downsize and sell their large suburban McMansions.” More young Americans are moving to cities, forgoing the four-bedroom colonial and garage.6 According to the report, 62 percent of millennials want to live in mixed-use communities and in urban centers, and 50 percent say when they next move, they want a smaller home. And if the market is determined by the demand, the numbers are on the side of millennials (1977–1995) and their successors, generation Z (1995–present). Together they make up 48 percent of the US population. And perhaps the true harbinger that living with little is here to stay? You can now watch the shows Tiny House Nation and Tiny House Hunters.
But for those who have been in the tiny trenches for years, they believe it’s less about the design of it all, or the trendiness, or even the environmental aspect. Jay Shafer thinks, “If there’s anything very constant about that movement, it’s not the form of the houses, nay specific square footage, it’s the lifestyl
e behind the tiny house idea. That you don’t need a lot of stuff to be happy. In fact, a lot of stuff that you are not using that you’re having to maintain and pay for initially? If it is not working for you it is working against you. If you can just streamline and get rid of all of that, it is easier to see where your happiness lies and follow that bliss. It’s hard to know where your bliss is if you can’t see it through all the crap.”7
12
FREE JUNK
Q&A WITH DERON BEAL,
FOUNDER OF FREECYCLE
* * *
“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
—ACTS 20:35
THE WORD FREECYCLE is a portmanteau. It is a linguistic blend of two words to create a new original term like infotainment, brunch, or shopaholic. The fusion of free and recycle led to a nonprofit group that helps connect people who would like to either find a specific item (free) or put that item out into the universe for another owner to reuse (recycle) rather than let the item end up in the trash.
It is called the Freecycle Network, and it can be found at Freecycle.org. It is so straightforward that it seems like there should be a catch. You join a user group in your neighborhood and you will receive daily emails showing what’s available. Or you can post an item you would happily give away for free. It can be fun to lurk and see what people will put out there. For example, on a random Saturday the Metro Little Rock, Arkansas, freecycle.org page had these items up for grabs:
OFFER: L Shaped Desk—Wooden office desk with 5 drawers and cabinet
OFFER: Pilates Performer—This is an OLD piece of exercise equipment, not the new Reformer. That being said, it still has a LOT of life. Does need new two small rollers for ease but works as is. Let me know when you can pick up and why you want this equipment.
Thanks for freecycling!!
Dianna
WANTED: Record Player—Would like to find a small record player with RCA audio inputs (red and white)
The process relies on an honor code that you actually have the item you claim and you will hand it over for free, or if you want an item that you will show up to get it. There’s a pretty straightforward disclaimer that relieves the Freecycle Network from any liability. It is just a conduit. There are a few loose rules. When it comes to what you cannot offer, it is not a shocker that listings cannot include porn, booze, tobacco, drugs of any kind, or weapons.
What started as a small neighborhood posting in 2003 has grown to include 5,225 groups in 120 countries (and counting) with approximately 8.8 million members (and counting). So what’s the catch? While its reach is big, its home base is small. There’s not some huge staff in Silicon Valley controlling the Freecycle Network as it expands internationally. Local volunteers who moderate the different online groups support it almost entirely. According to its 2014 tax return, there are seven thousand volunteers who keep it alive. The only real central organization consists of a couple of individuals who maintain the website and keep the servers running, plus founder Deron Beal. They are the only people paid, not handsomely, to do this work. It is a nonprofit that relies on donations and grants.
The feeling of community and sense of volunteer ownership led to tensions between the founder and some of the more independent-minded operators. They didn’t approve of some of the choices Beal made, including a few corporate alliances over the years and how he chose to maintain quality control of the groups. While the debate got a lot of traction online and at the grassroots level, it didn’t destroy or hurt freecycle.org in any profound way. The harder hit came from a judge who ruled against Beal in his attempt to trademark the word freecycle. Instead, he had to settle for “The Freecycle Network.” And on the TFN website there are very specific and detailed guidelines for moderators (and journalists) on what language to use. What detractors perceive as Beal’s desire for control, his supporters characterize as his dedication to the organic nature of the premise.
Beal does not come across as some megalomaniac sitting in a boardroom counting corporate dollars. His office is a small, shared space at a renovated historic Y building in a college town. The complex is home to other environmental groups like the Sierra Club, a massage therapist, and a photographer.
Now in his mid-forties, his office attire consists of T-shirts, hiking shorts, and rugged soled sandals. He has a long face, sometimes scruff, and wears wire-frame glasses. At six foot four, he has to fold himself into a small chair behind his desk. On a nearby table sits a stack of books that clue you into his driving motivation. There’s Waste and Want; Go Green, Spend Less, Live Better; Trash; Garbology; The Overspent American; Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage.
He is a long way from his post-MBA life working for a Fortune 500 company in Europe. He enjoyed the finance work but did not find it fulfilling. He decided to move back to the United States and either teach German or get into environmental work. He moved to Tucson and started volunteering. He didn’t suspect all this would happen when he started working for a local recycling company in Arizona that employed people who were transitioning from halfway houses to homes and who could use some free stuff to reboot their lives.
Deron Beal: I was the guy who kept the recycling program going. And so I did that for two and a half years. Like a year, year and a half in, we got known for taking just about anything. We also had an old beat-up pickup truck that we would drive around.
Q: You started changing to de facto junk removal?
Beal: Junk removal, yeah, exactly. That’s what we did within that. So, these businesses were like, well, we have an old desk. We have an old computer. We just always said yes, because these guys are moving into apartments, right? And they could use most of that stuff. But we kept getting more stuff than I could give away. So, you can see where this is headed, right? So, well, we’ve got to figure out a way to get rid of this stuff. I filled up an old warehouse. So, I filled up, basically, a warehouse full of junk. And my boss said, OK, figure out a way to get rid of this stuff. So, I set up a Yahoo group.
Q: What in you made you say, yes, I can take this? Why didn’t you just say, you know, we’re recycling people?
Beal: Well, I lived for ten years in Germany. There’s a strong recycling sort of impetus there, right? Everyone’s totally into it. Then you come here. When I first moved here there was no recycling. And then they just had the little bins. I’m also the kind of person who, you find something on the sidewalk, you pick it up.
Q: You couldn’t turn down a desk?
Beal: It’s just a compulsion of mine. There are obsessive compulsives. I’m a, what would you say, an impulsive compulsive. No, an impulsive obsessive or something. . . . I see garbage, I just need to pick it up. And, yeah, so that’s where the environmental bend of things [comes from].
Q: You just wouldn’t, if somebody said, hey, I need you to take this filing cabinet, . . . have easily said no.
Beal: Well, yeah. No. It was just good stuff. . . . My house is the same way. It’s got a used sofa. Someone gave me the table. And, these cabinets are used, and this is from someone else who was here before.
Q: Every junk guy’s house is filled with stuff they’ve picked up. Every one I’ve been on, they all have it.
Beal: Yeah. And I’m not earning a lot of money, so there’s also the impetus just to make do with what you can, right? So, why not? And neither my wife nor I are like, you know, we don’t need the newest, latest, greatest stuff. It’s like, OK, we’ll just score a new sofa or whatever.
Q: So, you have this warehouse; you decide to start this Yahoo group. Why did you think that would work?
Beal: Well, I had been a member of the neighborhood association LISTSERV, and I knew it was easy enough to set up. And I knew it didn’t take many people to succeed. There’s, like, thirty or forty people chatting back and forth and communicating and stuff. And, I knew I had a ton of stuff to give away, so I knew that wouldn’t be a problem. I knew plenty of people wanted the stuff because I’d been driving it around in our sort of Sanford & So
n pickup truck before that going to nonprofit A, B, C, seeing who could take it. So, I knew that there was a demand. I knew there was an easy way of doing it. So, it seemed like a no-brainer just to set that up, and it truly was. And so, then I just decided do I want to call it—I was thinking FreeBay.
Q: FreeBay?
Beal: Or Freecycle. And Freecycle had the recycling in it. FreeBay was more consumption sounding. And plus I didn’t want to get sued by eBay.
Q: The consumption thing, I want to talk about that . . .
Beal: Yeah, certainly there’s a whole collaborative consumption aspect of it, too.
Q: It seems to me that this is as much about attitude; there are some people for whom this wouldn’t work.
Beal: Yeah. It’s a much broader base than I ever expected. When we first started off it was totally just the first few that you’re seeing popped up, like Portland and Seattle and San Francisco, New York, Chicago, so sort of progressively minded, environmentally minded people, right?
And, Al Gore had just done his whole thing [An Inconvenient Truth] and so that was sort of big. But then, later, we slid into this recession, right? And we were getting written up by the AARP magazine or Parenting magazine, just all sorts of things we never would have thought of at all. And there were people who had monetary needs, so it wasn’t just the environmentalists, or retirees who were downsizing, or kids that are going off to college. So it was much broader than my own personal environmental desire of keeping this stuff out of landfills.
Junk Page 21