So you and your partner have given up the idea of owning property, or even renting, in Vancouver. You’ve decided to move into a tiny house or van! Congratulations!
Options for affordable housing are tight in The Most Liveable City On Earth™, and you’ve discovered Craigslist is the rental market equivalent of The Hunger Games. Unfortunately, you’re not Jennifer Lawrence and your partner’s not the crossbow-wielding hunk whose name escapes me. You’re idealists but also realists, and you’re ready to cram for the local lifestyle exam.
You’re ready to think inside the box: a very small one!
The Van Option
Cynics may dismiss living in a van as “homelessness” rather than what the CBC called “a lifestyle alternative.” Don’t buy it. Your metalhead cousin from Horsefly - the one who did up his Chevy van with a shag rug, dingle balls, and airbrushed warrior babes in breastplates - was simply decades ahead of the curve. In fact, there is a wide range of van makes and models available for every mobile lifestyle, from app-developer-on-the-brink-of-a-buyout to artist/hoarder-in-automotive-residence.
As any Breaking Bad fan remembers, a well-appointed camper van can offer a dead-serious setup for the career-minded entrepreneur. The overhead is low, both literally and figuratively. You can turn your home on wheels into a craft beer nanobrewery, a pop-up tattoo parlour, a palm-reading/Tarot boutique…or whatever you can dream into being!
However, you may find that “cozy” gets cumbersome over time, what with your limbs constantly banging against interior furnishings. There may be barely enough room for your essential oils and your partner’s ukelele. That’s the downside.
On the upside, you won’t have to get out of bed to put a pot of coffee on the hotplate - assuming your hipster boyfriend isn’t already using the one remaining outlet to blowdry his topknot.
As the months shade into quarterly visits to the auto repair shop, you will surely find that involuntary simplicity is the way to go - and grow - with your partner. Enjoy the vast stretches of silence punctuated by the smallest of small talk!
But wait…in five years time of van living you’ve now saved enough money to consider buying a tiny house!
The Tiny House Option
Tiny houses come in many varieties: laneway homes, microsuites, nanostudios, and refurbished Porta Potties. The City of Vancouver is now putting out bids for “Traffic Circle Homes,” little luxury structures set in residential street intersections. These highly affordable units will combine the sophistication of detached homes with the security of constantly circling motor vehicles.
The Quantum Housing Option
Not to play the gender card here, but the average man likes big, wide-open spaces, while every style-conscious woman knows that anything small is “cute.” (If Putin was was somehow shrunk down to 6 inches in height, he’d be darling.) And the same applies to housing. Small isn’t just beautiful, it’s adorable. So it logically follows that a condo complex with units smaller than a gnat’s navel would be totally awwww-some.
In fact, high-concept “quantum homes” are already on the drawing boards of big West Coast developers. According to promotional material, “Whoville On The Fraser,” already exists “in a fog of probability like Schrodinger’s cat, with amenities unknown until completion!”
No doubt fuddy-duddy skeptics will debate the classical solidity - or even livability - of the microscopic Whoville units, while the smart set will jump at a sure-fire investment opportunity…sight unseen!
Smile, it’s all part of globalism! No matter where you live in the industrialized world, you’re obligingly shrinking your ecological footprint down to the tardigrade level while politicians, policy-makers, beancounters and banksters “bring the Third World home.” But it’s all about the angle of perspective: the World Economic Forum promises that by 2030 “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.” Bank on it…Klaus Schwab and his friends certainly are!
It’s all about a place for your stuff, isn’t it? But if you have no stuff of your own, your place can be that much smaller!
Okay, you may sometimes ache for the expansive living spaces and domestic bric-a-brac of your childhood. Ditch the nostalgia: old-school detached homes, with their rooms stuffed with mementos gathered through years of conspicuous consumption, are the relics of an unsustainable, middle class past.
That doesn’t mean you can’t be optimistic. Once your parents pop their Crocs, you’ll inherit their winnings along with their Winnebago. Enjoy being the last generation to have anything passed on. Until then…think small!
The Putin idea is brilliant...someone ought to take that very seriously...and I am planning to live my last years in a Yurt on Crown Land. I'll let you know how that pans out...