[Music]
[Applause]
thank you Kevin okay so most of you guys
in the audience here are from the City
of Toronto and as Kevin suggested you
already know how expensive it is to buy
a home here if you are looking to buy a
home now you’re faced with an egregious
cost of real estate where $1,000,000 in
the city will get you something like
this very tiny Shack if you’re lucky if
you’re a renter in the city you’ve
probably had to aggressively lower your
expectations while looking for
apartments maybe you start out you want
two bedrooms a nice view and by the end
of it you’re willing to settle for a
windowless basement as long as you can
pay under $1,500 a month if you’re
someone in the city who needs to use
social housing you’re facing five to
10-year wait lists just to even get an
apartment and in the mean time the
city’s prime real estate is being eaten
up by luxury condominium developments so
as we can see affordable housing is an
issue that affects people from all walks
of life in Toronto and it’s actually an
issue that faces people in major
metropolitan cities around the world so
there have been a variety of different
responses to this crisis and today I
want to talk about one very small effort
that’s coming out of the United States
and quickly gaining popularity in Canada
so when I say small I do literally mean
small I’m talking about as Kevin
suggested the tiny housing movement so
the tiny housing movement describes
itself as a social movement that’s about
living simply in a small home and
normally it’s a home that you’ve
actually built yourself so if you guys
have spent any amount of time on
Instagram or Pinterest in the last five
years you’ve probably come across these
sort of cutesy Hobbit like interiors of
tiny homes and I will admit they are
very aesthetically pleasing and very
cute but for all of its Instagram about
koala
I don’t actually think that the the tiny
housing movement presents a sustainable
long-term solution to our problem of
housing and I’ll explain why
so one thing you should know about the
tiny living movement is that it presents
itself as a very progressive and
paradigm shifting change so the idea is
you no longer have to mark the start of
your adulthood by moving out buying a
home in the suburbs and starting your
family you don’t need a house with four
bedrooms two bathrooms more than one
pair of shoes if you want to feel
sustained and happy but for all of this
anti-consumerist language I think the
tiny housing movement actually thinks
very conventionally about ownership so
we tend to think about ownership as an
economic transaction so it’s about you
as a buyer going in to the marketplace
to meet a seller and your relationship
is mediated by your purchasing power in
the marketplace what how much money you
have determines what you’re gonna be
able to get it what we don’t actually do
is think about housing as a social right
and for me this is an issue because
access to housing actually mediates our
access to so many other basic rights
running water a safe place to store your
objects a safe place for your person a
place to rest a comfortable temperature
and so on so one thing I look at in my
dissertation is the various ways we
could think about the idea of a housing
crisis so it has the material component
it has an economic component but I also
think it has an imaginative component
we’re overly invested I think in
narratives of ownership that privileged
individual autonomy that’s determined by
the marketplace rather than thinking
about housing as a social right or a
social responsibility in my mind the
tiny living movement only really offers
an individualized and market-based
solution to housing and for me
that’s a problem so and then explain to
you why let’s go back and talk a little
bit more about tiny houses so one of the
reasons that the tiny living movement
first caught my attention wasn’t because
it was new
or different in fact it seemed to me
very familiar and very old so one of the
writers I work on in my dissertation is
Henry David Thoreau on the screen up
there the original hipster for my for
English people in the audience today and
Henry David Thoreau was a 19th century
writer he lived in Concord Massachusetts
which is sort of a was at the time a
popular urban area and he moved out of
Concord into the woods like literally
the woods the forest and he built
himself a small cabin which is pictured
there on the shore of Walden Pond and he
lived there for about two years and
that’s just the Front’s piece to walden
up there the book that kind of details
this experience so on the other side
here we have Ryan Mitchell and Ryan
Mitchell is the founder of the tiny life
which is a company that now actually
builds tiny homes they also create a lot
of cultural production around tiny
houses so they have a website they have
conferences blogs magazines like all of
the stuff you could possibly imagine so
there’s a lot of interesting
similarities I think between Mitchell
and Ryan for the first parts they begin
their process of sort of thinking about
living small during times of economic
crisis so Mitchell starts this built of
this some company of four living small
in about 2008 when the housing crisis is
really thinking its teeth into the
marketplace and for both the ROE and
Mitchell the idea of economic
self-determination is absolutely crucial
to their idea of freedom right you need
to be able to own something free and
clear doesn’t matter how small it is but
you have to have it in general the idea
of affordability is crucial to thinking
about tiny living it’s one of its
central tenants so this is an image I
pulled off of the website of one of the
various tiny living web pages and it’s
kind of an in spa framing that she will
frequently see when you visit these web
sites go to their conferences go down
the rabbit hole as I have done you
weren’t born to pay bills and died you
weren’t born to
off debt and I I mean I agree with the
sentiment of course and I’m sure many of
us in the audience also do as well if
you don’t I mean it’s like wait for me
outside I’ll explain to you why you
should but for the most but for the most
part right for all the talk of you know
economic freedom we need to ask how
affordable is a tiny house really so if
you were to actually go and build a tiny
house yourself you’re looking at about
twenty seven to thirty seven thousand
dollars if you had to get someone to
build your tiny house for you the cost
could be upwards of eighty thousand
dollars and that’s assuming you know I
guess how Instagram abour you want the
interior to be but still thirty thousand
dollars eighty thousand dollars these
price points made me ask who is the
imagined consumer of a tiny home when I
think about it to me it seems like it’s
being geared towards a middle-class
person you have thirty thousand dollars
in savings or access to credit and
you’re gonna either put it down towards
of down payment on a home or you’re
gonna buy a tiny house free and clear
but what do we do about people who don’t
have access to this kind of credit or
these kinds of savings not to mention
that if you were to build your tiny home
yourself you need about nine to twelve
months of full-time building this tiny
house to be able to even accomplish the
project so it’s also imagining a person
who can take this much time off of work
in my mind this is a very middle-class
solution to an issue which is not
necessarily a problem but what do we do
with vulnerable communities what do we
do with people who can’t imagine saving
this amount of money for for living or
within a reasonable timeframe to me I
think the tiny living movement presents
a somewhat limited and narrow response
to idea of housing it’s not affordable
enough to be a universal solution so you
might be thinking well tiny living can’t
solve everybody’s problems so what or
you might be thinking well we live in a
capitalist society we live in a
market-based society everything’s a
commodity
I mean right what so what so this is
where I think humanities or English
approach might be useful for us in
thinking about the problem of housing so
I’m about to hit you guys with some
classical political philosophy right now
so don’t fall asleep don’t check out
it’s very important stay with me okay so
one of the key ideas governing our
Liberal Democratic Society which is the
kind of society that we live in now is
the idea of Justin Trudeau no the idea
of the social contract so the social
contract is essentially an arrangement
between us as citizens and you and the
state where we basically say okay we as
citizens agree to abide by the
government’s laws in exchange for
protection of our persons and our
property right so what this means it’s
not necessarily an explicit arrangement
you won’t sit down with Justin Trudeau
and say okay I’ll obey your rules if
nobody steals my car he’d be down for it
but that’s not actually what is gonna
happen it’s more of an implicit
assumption that governs how we organize
our civic life so the idea of protection
here right the state’s gonna protect you
it’s very important how this has been
interpreted depends on your context but
in North America this usually means that
you already own something maybe it’s a
house or a car and you have access to
the state’s monopoly on violence or
force to protect it so someone takes
your stuff you can go to the police you
can go to the law and they can try and
address this issue that might sound like
a perfectly fair arrangement and in some
ways it actually is however what we saw
during the housing crisis in the United
States I think was a total breakdown of
this arrangement so we saw tens of
thousands of people lose their homes
lose their investments go underwater on
their mortgages and nothing was done
really on the part of the state to
redress this we did see the state offer
huge bailouts for banks for investors
for private capital so the state and the
market their interests I guess we could
say we’re simpatico in this moment but
everybody else their relationship in the
social contract
kind of got pushed off to the side a
little bit so in my mind this amounts to
a total breakdown of the promise of the
social contract and I think that people
who are interested in tiny living would
actually agree with me they would say
yes the social contract is in jeopardy I
we can’t trust the state to protect our
interests their solution however remains
an economically oriented one let’s still
go into the market find a solution
that’s affordable for just you and then
leave the state out of it
that might seem appealing in some ways
but I think this arrangement which tries
to remove the state’s interest from you
and the marketplace is what got us into
this mess in the first place so now you
might be thinking okay so what can we
offer in its stead what could we do
instead of thinking about housing solely
as the commodity or only as a commodity
logic so one thing I’ve been suggesting
throughout this presentation is that we
could think about housing as a social
right now I’m an English PhD student but
I’m definitely not naive I know that a
transformation like this would not
happen overnight right real estate is
unbelievably lucrative there’s a lot of
money to be made from it and an investor
or a banker they’re not just gonna say
well housing was a right we didn’t know
houses for all right that’s not actually
gonna happen so nonetheless though I do
actually think that there are some
immediate practical implementations that
we could do by using this idea of
thinking of housing as a right and it
could take many different forms it could
take the form of earmarking funds for
housing as part of a basic income
program and as you guys know that’s
something the province of Ontario is
actually thinking about right now it
could look like new municipal zoning
laws that place housing in proximity to
affordable amenities like grocery stores
or good schools libraries whatever it
could look like subsidies for people who
live in densely populated urban areas my
list of ideas could go on and on
and I’m sure you guys have a lot of
really good ideas too about what this
how we could address the issue of
housing in a way that’s fair and
equitable but I don’t think we can even
begin to have this conversation unless
we have a robust rights-based language
to talk about housing so some last
thoughts that I’m gonna leave you with
before we go off and eat snacks together
so if you were someone who lives in a
tiny house already or you were thinking
of buying a tiny house yes you should do
it there’s absolutely nothing wrong with
wanting to live in a tiny home I think
it’s just as valid a personal choice as
living in a regular house or renting an
apartment but just like renting an
apartment is not a socially
transformative act purchasing a tiny
home is also not sufficient to solve our
crisis of housing as I’ve suggested in
this presentation I think we need to
think socially structurally and
politically about the problem of housing
we need to think bigger than tiny homes
thank you
[Applause]
thank you Kevin okay so most of you guys
in the audience here are from the City
of Toronto and as Kevin suggested you
already know how expensive it is to buy
a home here if you are looking to buy a
home now you’re faced with an egregious
cost of real estate where $1,000,000 in
the city will get you something like
this very tiny Shack if you’re lucky if
you’re a renter in the city you’ve
probably had to aggressively lower your
expectations while looking for
apartments maybe you start out you want
two bedrooms a nice view and by the end
of it you’re willing to settle for a
windowless basement as long as you can
pay under $1,500 a month if you’re
someone in the city who needs to use
social housing you’re facing five to
10-year wait lists just to even get an
apartment and in the mean time the
city’s prime real estate is being eaten
up by luxury condominium developments so
as we can see affordable housing is an
issue that affects people from all walks
of life in Toronto and it’s actually an
issue that faces people in major
metropolitan cities around the world so
there have been a variety of different
responses to this crisis and today I
want to talk about one very small effort
that’s coming out of the United States
and quickly gaining popularity in Canada
so when I say small I do literally mean
small I’m talking about as Kevin
suggested the tiny housing movement so
the tiny housing movement describes
itself as a social movement that’s about
living simply in a small home and
normally it’s a home that you’ve
actually built yourself so if you guys
have spent any amount of time on
Instagram or Pinterest in the last five
years you’ve probably come across these
sort of cutesy Hobbit like interiors of
tiny homes and I will admit they are
very aesthetically pleasing and very
cute but for all of its Instagram about
koala
I don’t actually think that the the tiny
housing movement presents a sustainable
long-term solution to our problem of
housing and I’ll explain why
so one thing you should know about the
tiny living movement is that it presents
itself as a very progressive and
paradigm shifting change so the idea is
you no longer have to mark the start of
your adulthood by moving out buying a
home in the suburbs and starting your
family you don’t need a house with four
bedrooms two bathrooms more than one
pair of shoes if you want to feel
sustained and happy but for all of this
anti-consumerist language I think the
tiny housing movement actually thinks
very conventionally about ownership so
we tend to think about ownership as an
economic transaction so it’s about you
as a buyer going in to the marketplace
to meet a seller and your relationship
is mediated by your purchasing power in
the marketplace what how much money you
have determines what you’re gonna be
able to get it what we don’t actually do
is think about housing as a social right
and for me this is an issue because
access to housing actually mediates our
access to so many other basic rights
running water a safe place to store your
objects a safe place for your person a
place to rest a comfortable temperature
and so on so one thing I look at in my
dissertation is the various ways we
could think about the idea of a housing
crisis so it has the material component
it has an economic component but I also
think it has an imaginative component
we’re overly invested I think in
narratives of ownership that privileged
individual autonomy that’s determined by
the marketplace rather than thinking
about housing as a social right or a
social responsibility in my mind the
tiny living movement only really offers
an individualized and market-based
solution to housing and for me
that’s a problem so and then explain to
you why let’s go back and talk a little
bit more about tiny houses so one of the
reasons that the tiny living movement
first caught my attention wasn’t because
it was new
or different in fact it seemed to me
very familiar and very old so one of the
writers I work on in my dissertation is
Henry David Thoreau on the screen up
there the original hipster for my for
English people in the audience today and
Henry David Thoreau was a 19th century
writer he lived in Concord Massachusetts
which is sort of a was at the time a
popular urban area and he moved out of
Concord into the woods like literally
the woods the forest and he built
himself a small cabin which is pictured
there on the shore of Walden Pond and he
lived there for about two years and
that’s just the Front’s piece to walden
up there the book that kind of details
this experience so on the other side
here we have Ryan Mitchell and Ryan
Mitchell is the founder of the tiny life
which is a company that now actually
builds tiny homes they also create a lot
of cultural production around tiny
houses so they have a website they have
conferences blogs magazines like all of
the stuff you could possibly imagine so
there’s a lot of interesting
similarities I think between Mitchell
and Ryan for the first parts they begin
their process of sort of thinking about
living small during times of economic
crisis so Mitchell starts this built of
this some company of four living small
in about 2008 when the housing crisis is
really thinking its teeth into the
marketplace and for both the ROE and
Mitchell the idea of economic
self-determination is absolutely crucial
to their idea of freedom right you need
to be able to own something free and
clear doesn’t matter how small it is but
you have to have it in general the idea
of affordability is crucial to thinking
about tiny living it’s one of its
central tenants so this is an image I
pulled off of the website of one of the
various tiny living web pages and it’s
kind of an in spa framing that she will
frequently see when you visit these web
sites go to their conferences go down
the rabbit hole as I have done you
weren’t born to pay bills and died you
weren’t born to
off debt and I I mean I agree with the
sentiment of course and I’m sure many of
us in the audience also do as well if
you don’t I mean it’s like wait for me
outside I’ll explain to you why you
should but for the most but for the most
part right for all the talk of you know
economic freedom we need to ask how
affordable is a tiny house really so if
you were to actually go and build a tiny
house yourself you’re looking at about
twenty seven to thirty seven thousand
dollars if you had to get someone to
build your tiny house for you the cost
could be upwards of eighty thousand
dollars and that’s assuming you know I
guess how Instagram abour you want the
interior to be but still thirty thousand
dollars eighty thousand dollars these
price points made me ask who is the
imagined consumer of a tiny home when I
think about it to me it seems like it’s
being geared towards a middle-class
person you have thirty thousand dollars
in savings or access to credit and
you’re gonna either put it down towards
of down payment on a home or you’re
gonna buy a tiny house free and clear
but what do we do about people who don’t
have access to this kind of credit or
these kinds of savings not to mention
that if you were to build your tiny home
yourself you need about nine to twelve
months of full-time building this tiny
house to be able to even accomplish the
project so it’s also imagining a person
who can take this much time off of work
in my mind this is a very middle-class
solution to an issue which is not
necessarily a problem but what do we do
with vulnerable communities what do we
do with people who can’t imagine saving
this amount of money for for living or
within a reasonable timeframe to me I
think the tiny living movement presents
a somewhat limited and narrow response
to idea of housing it’s not affordable
enough to be a universal solution so you
might be thinking well tiny living can’t
solve everybody’s problems so what or
you might be thinking well we live in a
capitalist society we live in a
market-based society everything’s a
commodity
I mean right what so what so this is
where I think humanities or English
approach might be useful for us in
thinking about the problem of housing so
I’m about to hit you guys with some
classical political philosophy right now
so don’t fall asleep don’t check out
it’s very important stay with me okay so
one of the key ideas governing our
Liberal Democratic Society which is the
kind of society that we live in now is
the idea of Justin Trudeau no the idea
of the social contract so the social
contract is essentially an arrangement
between us as citizens and you and the
state where we basically say okay we as
citizens agree to abide by the
government’s laws in exchange for
protection of our persons and our
property right so what this means it’s
not necessarily an explicit arrangement
you won’t sit down with Justin Trudeau
and say okay I’ll obey your rules if
nobody steals my car he’d be down for it
but that’s not actually what is gonna
happen it’s more of an implicit
assumption that governs how we organize
our civic life so the idea of protection
here right the state’s gonna protect you
it’s very important how this has been
interpreted depends on your context but
in North America this usually means that
you already own something maybe it’s a
house or a car and you have access to
the state’s monopoly on violence or
force to protect it so someone takes
your stuff you can go to the police you
can go to the law and they can try and
address this issue that might sound like
a perfectly fair arrangement and in some
ways it actually is however what we saw
during the housing crisis in the United
States I think was a total breakdown of
this arrangement so we saw tens of
thousands of people lose their homes
lose their investments go underwater on
their mortgages and nothing was done
really on the part of the state to
redress this we did see the state offer
huge bailouts for banks for investors
for private capital so the state and the
market their interests I guess we could
say we’re simpatico in this moment but
everybody else their relationship in the
social contract
kind of got pushed off to the side a
little bit so in my mind this amounts to
a total breakdown of the promise of the
social contract and I think that people
who are interested in tiny living would
actually agree with me they would say
yes the social contract is in jeopardy I
we can’t trust the state to protect our
interests their solution however remains
an economically oriented one let’s still
go into the market find a solution
that’s affordable for just you and then
leave the state out of it
that might seem appealing in some ways
but I think this arrangement which tries
to remove the state’s interest from you
and the marketplace is what got us into
this mess in the first place so now you
might be thinking okay so what can we
offer in its stead what could we do
instead of thinking about housing solely
as the commodity or only as a commodity
logic so one thing I’ve been suggesting
throughout this presentation is that we
could think about housing as a social
right now I’m an English PhD student but
I’m definitely not naive I know that a
transformation like this would not
happen overnight right real estate is
unbelievably lucrative there’s a lot of
money to be made from it and an investor
or a banker they’re not just gonna say
well housing was a right we didn’t know
houses for all right that’s not actually
gonna happen so nonetheless though I do
actually think that there are some
immediate practical implementations that
we could do by using this idea of
thinking of housing as a right and it
could take many different forms it could
take the form of earmarking funds for
housing as part of a basic income
program and as you guys know that’s
something the province of Ontario is
actually thinking about right now it
could look like new municipal zoning
laws that place housing in proximity to
affordable amenities like grocery stores
or good schools libraries whatever it
could look like subsidies for people who
live in densely populated urban areas my
list of ideas could go on and on
and I’m sure you guys have a lot of
really good ideas too about what this
how we could address the issue of
housing in a way that’s fair and
equitable but I don’t think we can even
begin to have this conversation unless
we have a robust rights-based language
to talk about housing so some last
thoughts that I’m gonna leave you with
before we go off and eat snacks together
so if you were someone who lives in a
tiny house already or you were thinking
of buying a tiny house yes you should do
it there’s absolutely nothing wrong with
wanting to live in a tiny home I think
it’s just as valid a personal choice as
living in a regular house or renting an
apartment but just like renting an
apartment is not a socially
transformative act purchasing a tiny
home is also not sufficient to solve our
crisis of housing as I’ve suggested in
this presentation I think we need to
think socially structurally and
politically about the problem of housing
we need to think bigger than tiny homes
thank you
Please follow and like us: