The Climate Action Lab: Earth Overshoot Day + Conversation with Maria Sexton
GUEST POST: Kaja Kühl is an Urban Designer and Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia GSAPP. She originally developed the Climate Action Lab as a week-long workshop to take place at Wally Farms. COVID-19 may have changed the format of this workshop, but it has also highlighted its relevance. Fundamental to climate action is the urgent need to rethink how humans build their homes and communities.
Earlier this spring, I attended a webinar titled “Small and Tiny House Movement: 1995 to Now.” One of the speakers had a pretty discouraging view on tiny homes. Underlying most of his critique is the lack of a universal legal framework, that allows tiny houses. To get around minimum sizes that most zoning laws require, the majority of tiny homes are built on wheels and are registered as RVs. So while this allows them to skirt zoning laws of minimum dwelling sizes, it in turn means that you cannot legally live in it full-time except in an RV park, although this law is usually only enforced, when someone complains. You also have to build your tiny home narrow enough to fit on the road.
Even in places, where you are legally allowed to build a tiny dwelling on a foundation, you will likely find out that the actual cost of the building is only a small part of the project. Cost of land, site preparation, infrastructure costs are the reasons. “The smaller things are, the more expensive things get.” As a result, he reminded the audience, New York has more people in a single zip code than the entire tiny home community in the world.
“New York has more people in a single zip code than the entire tiny home community in the world.”
A lot of valid points and reasons to be skeptical. As I was listening to the presenters, I was wondering whether the “branding” – calling them “Tiny Houses”, actually hurt or help the cause. It shoehorns the desire to live in a smaller home into a really weird typology and rather than working to eliminate or change some of the outdated or nimby laws that prevent them, it creates an entire new set of complex laws around them. And the lowest hanging fruit for legalizing small dwellings is to call them Tiny Houses, because then regulators can look towards examples of other municipalities, who have already created a framework and so the hideous rules to circumvent the rules spread.
But rather than thinking more about zoning laws, I called up Maria Saxton, an architect, who received her Ph.D. in Environmental Design & Planning with a concentration on Bio-Inspired Buildings from Virginia Tech. She measured the ecological footprints of tiny home downsizers for her doctoral research.
So what is Earth Overshoot Day? Maria described the Global Footprint Network’s calculator as her basis for measuring her subjects’ ecological footprint. It’s the amount of ecological resources measured in global hectares of land that is needed to support our lifestyle based on responses in five categories: Food, Transportation, Housing, Goods and Services. August 22 is the day when we humans on earth have used up our resources for this year. To support ourselves currently, we need an Earth 1.6 times the size of what we have. We need to reduce that amount to what we have or as the Global Footprint Network suggests: #MoveTheDate to December 31st, to not consume more than we have. Building smaller homes can, as Maria’s research suggests, contribute to reducing our footprint in all five categories -not just our electricity bills.
More Resources on Tiny Houses:
American Tiny House Association
Tiny House Movement on Wikipedia
Book: Tiny Houses in the City by Mimi Zeiger
Book: Micro Living: 40 Innovative Tiny Houses Equipped for Full-Time Living, in 400 Square Feet or Less by Derek “Deek” Diedricksen