Huts and Micro/Tiny Houses in the 23rd Century

There was this earthquake on 25 April 2015, and disaster struck. 7,000 people were killed and 450,000 displaced.

A buddy of mine was showing me photographs from a tiny village that was leveled. He explained that the residents can rebuild their stone huts by hand, but need money to get the sheet metal roofs. Metal roofing materials have to be brought in from a large city nearby.

Another buddy of mine is running a program here in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, that trains ex cons in the building trade and gets them working alongside certified union craftsmen, paid, and busy. They are construct micro housing, sometimes called “tiny houses”. Huge demand — buyers are already lined up out the door.

It didn’t escape me that our descendants may look back on our era in Western culture as a time of indulgence. A time when we were so wealthy and idle that we could build trendy tiny homes as fashionable expressions of taste and preference (towards meaningful outcomes, certainly, but still these are self-elected). A time when we have the technology and labor force and industry to construct tiny modular homes that will be energy efficient and weatherized and comfortable.

A time when our fellow humans toil in the aftermath of a horrendous earthquake to rebuild by hand, stone by stone, their rock huts while awaiting on the generosity of strangers to help them buy the corrugated tin roofing from the next town over.

I know it would be a logistical nightmare to ship tiny houses to Nepal. I know their are geographic and political and cultural reasons why it just is not practical for the tiny houses we build in Pittsburgh to house earthquake victims in Nepal. And I know it is expensive, to boot.

But I also know how history reads —and I’ve spent my fair share of time being a Monday Morning Quarterback. Just as that phrase will lose meaning, so too will all of our excuses for why and how much and this and that. What our descendants will stand witness to as they read about our position in history is that there was a time when we had the technology, and we had the ability, and we had the leisure, and we had the money, and in Pittsburgh, we had the tiny houses.

But in Nepal, after a horrendous earthquake, they still had tiny stone huts that had to be rebuilt, brick by brick.