Archinect - News

Tiny homes are fitting symbols of economic precarity

2019-02-12T14:38:00-05:00

Tiny houses are promoted as an answer to the affordable housing crisis; a desirable alternative to traditional homes and mortgages. Yet there are many complexities and contradictions that surround these tiny spaces, as I discovered when I began investigating them.

There is something inherently romantic about the nomadic lifestyle cooked up in the 1960's, exemplified by the VW van and the desert campfire. While this relic of America's recent past became, undoubtedly, the inspiration for the Tiny Home movement in recent years, the reasons for its current popularity do not match those of its precedent.

Interior of Elm, by Tumbleweed, Tiny House Company

Megan Carras "toured homes, attended tiny house festivals, stayed in a tiny house community, and interviewed several dozen people who live in them" to reach a discover that there is more to their wide spread use than popularly imagined. Tiny homes are, as Carras makes evident, a sign of economic precarity - one particularly felt by the millennial generation.

"All the tiny-houser millennials that I interviewed wanted to own bigger houses in the future," Carras reports. "They saw tiny living as a means of owning something now and being able to save at the same time. Several young couples planned to ...

For some Uber drivers, their cars double as beds

2017-01-23T14:05:00-05:00

The vast majority of Uber’s full-time drivers return home to their beds at the end of a day’s work. But all over the country, there are many who don’t. These drivers live near, but not in, expensive cities where they can tap higher fares, ferrying wealthier, white-collar workers to their jobs and out to dinner—but where they can’t make enough money to get by, even with longer hours.

To maximize their time, drivers find supermarket parking lots, airports and hostels where they catch several hours of sleep after taking riders home from bars and before starting the morning commute.

Why Do We Expect Artists to Work for Free? Here’s How We Can Change the System

2014-12-02T17:55:00-05:00

Only 10 percent of arts graduates make a living from their creative practice. Artist William Powhida maps the institutional structures that keep most artists broke, and shares strategies for spreading the wealth.

It’s all too clear that artists are willing to sacrifice everything for their art, including self-interest, an unfortunate consequence of an economy that trades in exposure. In our perilously unequal society, most artists are poor, and few understand how we might begin to change the situation. According to a recent report by the artist-activist group BFAMFAPhD, only 10 percent of U.S. arts graduates make a living from their art. Yet the art market is booming; last year it nearly rebounded to its highest-ever level—the 2008 financial crash produced only a temporary dip—with $66 billion in sales. I recently spoke with the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson about artists’ remuneration and made the mistake of saying, “The problem is, there just isn’t enough money.” She corrected me immediately: “There is enough money—it’s just concentrated in the hands of the very few.”

Hunger Crisis in American Universities

2014-08-20T14:12:00-04:00

As low-income populations have gone to college and food insecurity has risen up to swallow the lower rungs of the middle class, hunger has spread across America’s university campuses like never before. In some places, it’s practically a pandemic: At Western Oregon University, 59% of the student body is food insecure [...] 39.2% of the [CUNY's] quarter of a million undergraduates had experienced food insecurity at some time in the past year.

Lack of adequate and steady food is a rampant problem both domestically and internationally. A recent National Geographic article analyzed the problem of food scarcity in the US across the last fifty years. Traditionally concerned with "hunger," since 2006 researchers at the USDA have shifted focus to "food insecurity," a term that refers more to a generalized state of precarity. This is to say, in recent years, the issue has less to do with people being hungry all the time and more with people who can't count on not going hungry in the future. That this condition encompasses such a large percentage of college students is a frightening indictment of both the values and mechanics of the US economic system and its social programs.

A "food desert" is an area where consistent access to nutritious food is difficult to obtain. Many architects and socially-concerned individuals and groups are working towards ameliorating conditions in such places. Mogro – or mobile grocery – is a project th...