Abstract
Asking how post-crisis countercultural formations compose new means of resisting an unjust economic order, this essay centers the tiny homes movement, which takes the financialization and commodification of housing as a warrant for radically downsized dwellings. As I argue, the campaign to displace (from) big homes and emplace tiny homes relies on coordinating rhetorical modalities: the parrhēsiastic case against dominant but flawed materializations of “good living” and the eudaimonic envisioning of an alternative “good living” less beholden to capital. I conclude by reviewing both problematics and possibilities that emerge from this inventive play for social and economic change.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Susan C. Jarratt for her generosity and guidance throughout the revision process as well as two anonymous reviewers for their extraordinarily helpful feedback.
Notes
1 The size of the average new home hit an all-time high in 2015, representing a 62% increase in just over forty years (see Christie).
2 Tortorello is discussing Quixote Village in Olympia, Washington, a former floating tent city converted to a tiny housing community. See Heben for a more complete list of sanctioned communities. San Jose is among the municipalities to consider tiny housing solutions (Licardo and Herrera).
3 Spokeswoman Elena Stern’s public comments were reported by multiple news outlets.
4 Summers was reportedly able to remove some houses to private land; see Lazare.
5 Benjamin never offers a precise formulation of left melancholy, Brown writes, but the concept emerges in several works, including the 1931 essay “Left-Wing Melancholy.”