thebibliosphere:
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Every time you look at a tiny house, ask yourself: “can a wheelchair fit in there? Can someone with limited mobility live there? Why not? Could they go up and down the stairs to that loft bed? Could they pull down the folding bed?”
If your answer is “it shouldn’t have to, this isn’t for everybody,” then what you’re really saying is “this new world I want to build doesn’t have room for disabled people in it.”
Admit that to yourself. At least be honest about your ableism.
What the fuck
how does this relate? when you build them you can make them accessable for disabilities I’ve seen it done?get off your high horse? it all depends on how you want it built calm
In case you’re wondering what defensive, non-apologetic ableism looks like, I found one!
Edited to add: seriously, if I start out with ‘ask yourself’ and follow up with ‘if your answer is that this isn’t for you’ then maybe you should #notallabledpeople yourself right out the fucking door if you decide you want to come fuck with me right now.
Today is not a day where I have patience.
The whole fad seems to be catered to young abled hipsters. The ones I’ve seen don’t seem to be built for people who need room to cook for large families, can buy their own property, don’t need to live in a big city (or have their own transportation to commute/ move their new home easily), and the ones I’ve seen where kids ARE involved never seem to capture the ‘STOP TOUCHING ME’ that young kids in the back seats of cars develop, or anyone with claustrophobia. I also haven’t seen that come with physical basements, for people in areas likely to get hit by tornadoes. Mind you, I don’t follow the show very well – my parents like the idea, so I usually see some when I’m home – but that seems to cut out an awful lot of people, right off the bat.
What has fascinated me about the response to this post the most is that a large number of responses to it have come in the form of IT’S MY HOUSE DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO or CLEARLY WHEELCHAIR COMPANIES HATE PEOPLE WHO CAN WALK, THEY’RE NOT BUILT TO USAIN BOLT or whatever.
And all that this tells me is that people jumped as fast as they could to what would allow them to be pissy, and didn’t actually follow the things I said. And that’s cool, I guess. But what I was actually explicitly addressing was the idea that small houses (which are touted as the new, environmentally-awesome, space-okay, cost-efficient, way to live) don’t need to be accessible, because tiny houses are, by definition are just not “meant for you.”
That, yes, is ableist. If the “new way of building” and so on - if this movement actually gets off the ground - is explicitly exclusive of disabled persons, that’s a problem. And if saying ‘trololol this isn’t for you, why are you making my house about you’ is your response, yeah, that’s pretty ableist, guys!
And this isn’t theoretical in its long-term effects. There’s a pretty predominant house type that was faddish a while ago near where I live – a tall, skinny rowhouse that’s really, really not accessible at all. If you want to buy a house near where I live (and no, “just move” isn’t an answer), the affordable houses are all these tall, narrow rowhouses. The difference between buying one of these homes and a house which either is already accessible or can be made accessible is an order of magnitude. The ranchers or potentially-accessible homes cost literally twice as much.
These buildings have narrow doors; narrow, turning stairs which are not even easy to install a chair lift on – even if your insurance company will pay for you to get a chair if you live in one, which, guess what, that’s why my wheelchair was declined; they usually have multiple sets of stairs leading up to the front door, making installing a wheelchair ramp nearly-impossible.
These houses were built more than a generation ago, and cannot easily be modified to become accessible. (I know, because we’re currently trying to find a way to make it so that I can get my wheelchair into and out of my house without someone else doing it for me. That’s kind of the opposite of accessible, if an able-bodied person literally has to fold up my wheelchair and carry it down two sets of stairs for me to take my wheelchair out of the house.) They also form the entirety of affordable housing where I live.
“Just rent an apartment” isn’t an option either. Not only is that a blindingly ableist response in and of itself, because inherent in it is “you don’t get to/need to have the stability of a mortgage payment, or the ability to built equity or eventually have a house that’s paid off” but rent for an accessible apartment around here actually costs more than my mortgage. I could absolutely not afford an accessible apartment where I live – the last time I checked, a ground-floor, wheelchair-accessible apartment in a neighborhood similar to mine cost half-again as much as my mortgage payment.
Which is kind of my point. Housing movements and trends matter across generations & if you dismiss the entire thing as “well this is my house, it’s not about you, why should this movement have to think about you?” then, yeah, that’s exactly the ableist mindset I’m saying is pretty bullshit.
come to think of it, even from a purely selfish perspective, it’s fantastically absurd for abled people to be designing these small houses with the notion that they will never get sick or injured, never want a family, never need to care for a friend or parent or partner. or, that when the unthinkable happens and they’re dealing with limited mobility or new dietary restrictions or chronic pain or all of the above, they will never have lost all their fucking money to an american hospital bill, and this never be unable to ‘just move out’. tiny houses aren’t forever homes for more than one in a dozen people, whether or not any of them will admit it, and these guys all expect to ‘just move out’ once it’s not fun anymore.
i think this defensiveness comes not quite from the fact that the participants are all somehow convinced they’ll be healthy and single for their entire life, but from the fact that tiny houses are about conspicuous non-consumption. it’s about the mental and physical strength involved in self-denial, in efficiency, in being greenwashed to hell and back. in a tiny house you have to be meticulous. you have to be intelligent enough to organize everything. you have to do away with most of your stuff. you have to live right on the edge: one set of dishes, one small computer, no toys, no extensive wardrobe, five minute showers. and this kind of self-denial has to come from moral self-discipline, not physical or economic inability. if tiny houses were more accessible, there’d be less social cachet in having one.
I’m not totally sold on the idea that it’s inherently-ableist to design a product for people who don’t have specific disabilities. Because designing a specific product doesn’t imply “this new world I want to build”, it implies “this thing I would like to see in the world”.
Consider paint software; does making paint programs imply that the world you want to build has no blind people? Of course not.
Houses that only work for some people are not an inherently-horrible thing. The problem comes from the pitch that “everyone” should want to live in things like that.
The problem comes in, of course, and this has come up many and many a time already, in that Tiny Houses are being touted as The Solution To Our Affordable Housing Crisis, Don’t You Want One? You Too Could Have A Tiny House And This Will Solve Our Affordable Housing Crisis.
So when you design something with the intention of it being a housing movement, if that movement excludes a class of people by design, and if those people say ‘hey, we are being excluded from this,’ and you say ‘fuck you, this isn’t for you, this is for people who can climb stairs,’ then yes that is ableist.
Comparing paint software to housing is just silly. Paint software isn’t an essential requirement for continued living; housing is.
Houses that only work for some people are not an inherently horrible thing. Housing trends which are hugely inaccessible and do not take accessibility into account and cannot be modified for accessibility are really problematic because disabled people are the largest minority in the US, for one thing, and because everybody either dies or gets old, and when you get old, your house needs to be more accessible. These are just facts.
Hmm. I agree that, as a “housing movement”, it becomes a much more serious problem. Because if there’s a ton of “affordable housing” that only some people can use, then that is likely to result in hugely disparate housing costs for the other people.
I don’t think the comparison to paint software is entirely silly. I mean, you’re right about the “requirement for life” thing, but okay, how about peanut butter? Food is a requirement for life, but food that some people can’t eat isn’t a problem… Unless it’s promoted as The Universal Solution.
(Me, even apart from physical mobility type things, I couldn’t do a tiny house because I don’t think I could function at all like that.)
And that was basically the entire point, yes. I got annoyed because I got in a conversation with someone who was singing the praises of tiny houses as the Holy Savior Of Our Housing Crisis… but in that same breath went ‘ehhh, this just isn’t for you, why you always whinin’?
I think that if we’re talking about something required for life, then yes, let’s talk about another thing required for life. Food is a good one. Clothing would be another.
You want to make a more realistic comparison, food-wise, you make that comparison to gluten.
Then ask a celiac like me (which is an ADA disability) how easy it is to eat in modern life, and how easy it is to eat even what’s labeled ‘gluten-free’ without getting sick, because the FDA requirements for labeling on food are just as bad, and just as poorly-followed, as the ADA requirements for building. And then add on to that how much people mock and laugh the idea that you might even actually need truly gluten-free food. We’re a punchline for NPR shows and car ads.
The reason I feel this is a more appropriate comparison is that while peanut butter or peanuts are not pervasive (though cross-processing can sometimes be an issue) in modern food, gluten is. It’s so pervasive that I got sick after drinking frozen lemonade at a movie theatre because a barley sweetener was used instead of sugar, and I didn’t figure that out until I got sick. The reason that gluten is so pervasive, of course, is that wheat and barley are cheap, especially in the US, due to farm subsidies, and so they are used as fillers in everything. EVERYTHING. I’ve found gluten in canned chicken. In ketchup. In foods marked as gluten free, though in those it’s just in quantities low enough to pass the 20ppm mark, but celiacs get sick, some of us, down to 3ppm.
And just like it’s been really hard to get people to take it seriously that gluten being everywhere is a problem, it’s really hard to get people to take it seriously that building accessibility design and ADA requirements for apartments, that this crap about this being a ‘revolution’ is bad if your revolution doesn’t take everybody into consideration.
If tiny houses are someone’s activism, and that activism explicitly discludes disabled people, that activism is ableist. I’ve said that several times, though I think not in threads on this you were following.
Okay, that makes more sense. I think what I was missing in the original part was the jump from “excited about tiny houses”, which I think are adorable, to “promoting them as a kind of general activism”. Thanks for the clarifying, and for the interesting thoughts.
at the beginning of this thread i was thinking “oh god another sjw tantrum” but by the end of it i’ve pretty much come around to agreeing with the OP, albeit not so stridently.
tiny houses are great. i love them. i could not live in one.
i’m not a wheelchair user, but i do have mobility issues, so a loft reached by a ladder is right out, and i can’t live in a space tight enough that i have to twist sideways to move through it. my chronic pain goes through the roof if i sit with my back straight (weight on my hips) so i need a recliner for working in; that would take up the whole floor space of many of these tiny houses. and if i sleep on anything less than high-quality memory foam, i start losing ground on healing. the bed areas in most of the tiny houses i see wouldn’t accomodate a mattress 14 inches thick.
it never occurred to me that anyone but a few overenthusiastic goofballs believed itty bitty houses are a solution for the general public. you can’t have pets in them, you can’t have kids in them, you can’t even live as a couple unless you never need privacy from each other. they’re incredibly impractical for ordinary life.
i just thought of them as kind of a playhouse for grownups. a retreat for writing your first novel or playing thoreau.
the real answer to the housing crisis is going to be economic, not architectural. it’s going to involve our culture moving past the just-world fallacy, and giving up the emphasis on gatekeeping and making people jump through hoops for not-quite-enough-help.
So, about these tiny houses for single wealthy people. Whatever was seen that started this (a tv show?) is advertising those houses for those people. So yeah, it isn’t meant for you or for me, its meant for single wealthy people because that is their market. Welcome to American television, everything is an advertisement. Instead of getting on a soap box about it how about do anything else? If you want to help people find a way to volunteer at a charity. And don’t tell me you can’t because there is *always* something for everyone to do.
#THIS IS GOING TO END BADLY#I NEVER FUCKING RESPOND TO THESE#WHY
You tagged this that “this is going to end badly”, but probably not for the reasons that you think.
This is going to end badly because you either didn’t read, didn’t comprehend, or chose to ignore the entire course of discussion to which you are traipsing in to respond, in which I explicitly said that I was responding to a conversation with a Tiny House Advocate. In which I was in a conversation with someone who was expressly advocating this as a solution to the housing crisis, as sustainable, affordable housing, and who responded to my concerns that tiny houses are, off-the-rack, largely NOT accessible, by saying “well, this just isn’t FOR you. You can’t expect to be included in this planning, this just isn’t for you.“
This is going to end badly because you invoked the False Boolean informal logical fallacy, as well as the Relative Privation local fallacy. “If you’re complaining on Tumblr, you’re not involved in real advocacy, that would make you feel better!” “Why are you complaining about this, there are real problems?“
This is going to end badly because funny thing is, I’m involved deeply in a number of local charities and causes, including the local LGBT community, local Trans resources, disability advocacy & fundraising, local food bank, autism self-advocacy & autism activism, #illgowithyou, dog fostering and rescue, and on top of that have done a lot of online mentoring, suicide prevention, and ‘adopted’ kids whose folks disowned them. I’m involved in Your Holiday Mom and was from its first year. I organize spoonie meet ups and gift exchanges. I volunteer as the Social Media Director for @anomalycon.
This is going to end badly because you chose to talk down to me after assuming, and not reading, the many times in this thread, that I was responding to a direct interaction with a Tiny House Advocate. You didn’t read, or chose to discard, the fact that I said many many times that this was something said directly to me, and then you chose to toddle on in here and tell me I was responding to a commercial!
This is going to end badly for you because you. Are. Wrong. Because we’re talking about the problems of Tiny Houses being presented as a panacea for the housing crisis, specifically for the problem of housing being overpriced and unavailable, as the grand savior for these problems, while being largely inaccessible to a group of people overwhelmingly inclined to live in extreme poverty. And MORE, that when this is brought up as a problem, the direct response was “this isn’t for you! It doesn’t need to be!”
(Since this thread was started, one poster has supplied a link with accessible Tiny Houses. That’s great - and proof that people CAN think of these things, if they choose to do so.)
This is going to end badly because an appropriate response to someone saying “if your revolution doesn’t include everyone, even the cripples, then your revolution doesn’t work and is ableist,” does not include, “do anything else but remind us of how shitty and ableist the world is and call out that it needs to change.”
I mean, if you want to sit there and publicly be a condescending shit who’s wrong on every count along the way & engaging in the most amazing ‘sit down and shut up, you inconvenient cripple, I don’t want to engage the truth of what you said,’ welllll…
… I guess that’s your right.
You can be as wrong as you like. You can roll around in a pile of logical fallacies if you want to do so.
But this is the last time you get a response from me. I like this soapbox. It’s mine.
And guess what? I can volunteer and raise kids and aaaaaalso call out ableism.
So I’m gonna keep doing just that.
[Caption: Pearl from Steven Universe, a tall, slender pale-skinned humanoid with short blonde hair, extends her right hand and drops a microphone onto the stage she is standing on. Steven, looking on, gasps in surprise. Pearl smiles with satisfaction.]
YOOOooooOOOOooooooooOOoooo
I feel like I’ve arrived on the Internet, someone using that in response to my post. :D
It mimics my reaction to your reply perfectly. I went from being “uuugh another one of these reblogs I wonder who is being asinine now and do I have a pissed enough gif to respond with”, to choking on my water because I tried to yell “YES WRECK ‘EM”, with a mouthful of water. I never pretended to be smart.