Step into an alleyway in the Northeast Washington neighborhood known as Stronghold, and you will see a vegetable patch, a campfire, a view of the Capitol and a cluster of what neighbors call “those tiny people, building their tiny houses.”
The people aren’t really tiny, but their homes are — 150 to 200 square feet of living space, some with gabled roofs, others with bright cedar walls, compact bathrooms and cozy sleeping lofts that add up to living spaces that are smaller than the walk-in closets in a suburban McMansion.
“This is the dream,” says Rin Westcott, 28, who lives in Columbia and came out on a wintry Saturday afternoon bundled in a flower hat to help her friend Lee Pera with a tiny-house raising.
If these affordable homes — which maximize every inch of interior space and look a little like well-constructed playhouses — are the dream, they represent a radically fresh version of what it takes to make Americans happy.
I like the use of the phrase "radically fresh" by the Washington Post; it makes it seem as if the media approves of a Brave New World where we live in closet-sized shacks, heated by wood, underneath the imposing artifices of The State.
Which of course, they do:
The small homes, some on wheels, don’t warrant many trips to the Container Store. There are no kitchen islands, three-car garages or living rooms that are never lived in. In fact, their increasing popularity could be seen as a denunciation of conspicuous consumption and a rejection of the idea that more is, well, more.
In the future, what the middle-class once called a shed will now be called "home"...
Guess those chumps gainfully employed at the Container Store will soon learn the joys of living on the dole. A feature, not a bug, to the WaPo, who apparently so approves of this human regression that they resort to racist name-calling to defend it:
Still, some of the neighbors in Stronghold — where 1,800-square-foot renovated rowhouses sell for half a million dollars — are befuddled by the tiny-house movement, largely because they spent their lives trying to upsize.
“A midget could catch the devil in one of them teeny, tiny little houses. I just don’t understand the point,” says James Harris, 70, who worked for 40 years in the maintenance department for the Smithsonian Institution and, with his wife, Patricia Harris, 65, a longtime D.C. school administrator, saved to pay off the spacious rowhouse they bought 38 years ago.
“It’s our little piece of Washington,” Patricia Harris says.
Her family is descended from freed slaves; they moved here from the South with a dream to own land and a house big enough to raise children and entertain guests. “These tiny houses feels like we are going backwards,” she says.
Calling a black man and woman "befuddled" by what the WaPo claims is "progress" sure sounds like racial stereotyping to me. Are Mr. and Mrs. Harris just two stupid minorities, unable to determine what is best for them and their community? Or is the slur necessary in order to discredit the observations of two people who fail to see the world through enviorn-lefty glasses?
Sorry, Harris family, that you got abused by the MSM. Can you imagine what it's like to be conservative, and to be call a name every time you point out that up is not down?
Welcome to American under Obama II - where backward is, ahem, "forward", where regression is progression, and where intimidation and humiliation by the state-slaved media is the price you pay for daring to think outside the party's line....
