Since 1950, worker productivity has more than doubled. That means, roughly and theoretically, that if we could somehow maintain a 1950 standard of living today, we could each work forty hours per week for less than six months each year, or twenty hours a week for a full year. But we have chosen instead to channel the benefits of increased productivity into more consumer goods for workers, and higher profits for corporate executives, directors, and shareholders.

Trade unions and a variety of civic organizations are working to lighten our load, but in the meantime, unless you move to Europe or take a time machine back to a prehistoric era or at least the fifties, you'll have to be creative if you want to live more of your life at home.

-- Shay Salomon, Little House on a Small Planet, Ch. 7 - Live at Home.

I picked this off the new books rack at the library with some trepidation. Too often, I've found, "small house" books and articles focus on being childless, optionally single, and well-employed, such that you can have a kickin' Manhattan loft - you have a small living space because you're just that hip. But I was wooed by the "Small Planet", and noted the fine print "Foreword by Frances Moore Lappe", and was not disappointed. While the book is certainly oriented at those with enough income to have plenty of choice, affordability is certainly treated as a prime factor, and all of the house profiles in the book include both construction/acquisition costs and ongoing utility costs. Including affordability is crucial for a book on housing to get past my retch reflex and actually end up read.

That hurdle passed, I found the book pretty decent, if a little choppy. It rotates around the premise that there's absolutely no good reason to live in the kind of massive house typically built today for the kind of small, nuclear families typically lived in today. (McMansions are criticized for combining the "it's not a feature, it's a bug" issues of hugeness and open floor plans for simultaneously making the social creatures that people are feel lost and lonely while also not providing enough real privacy and personal space.) Living in "small houses" is looked at from various angles, ranging from sharing space with other people to Katrina Cottage-style manufactured affordable homes to "earthships" built by hand of rammed earth or cob. Even my favorite alternative is given heavy coverage: "don't build your dream house - live in the one that already exists", that existing buildings are both more affordable and more environmental than pretty much anything equivalent you could build new. (Dale's plan to move historic houses out of the way of development as affordable housing gets a shout-out in the chapter "Make Friends With the Past".)

I'm particularly happy with the book's treatment of a home's life cycle, of modifying space for uses from home offices to children's rooms, and for rearranging homes to house varying numbers of people over time. I particularly like the Canadian Grow Home, an affordability-oriented row house designed to maximize space flexibility. I have, in the past, occasionally dreamed up my ideal home as a urban co-housing arrangement with easily movable interior walls, such that apartments could be grown or shrunk with little fuss to accommodate occupant preference, family size, and so on, and the Grow Home seems like that concept actually created (and built 10,000 times over across Canada).

Finally, I find it pretty cute that the author specifically calls the book a cure for house lust - any time you're feeling dissatisfied with the space you live in, she says, and lusting after the Jones' house down the street, look back to this book, figure out what it is you really want out of a home, and figure out whether a spankin' new McMansion is really the way to achieve that. (Probably not.)