A Historical Exploration of the Tiny House Movement
Tiny home human settlements are a recurring pattern and artefact across history and geography and a symbol of freedom in societies where the masses are oppressed through the denial of decent land and housing rights.
This essay explores the tiny movable house movement:
- Today, in the 21st century, globally
- During the 19th and 20th centuries in Barbados following the abolition of slavery
- In 19th Century Ireland, with the help of the Ladies Land League, under the British Empire
Last Christmas, in December 2021 at home in Ireland, my Jamaican sister-in-law Jo made our family the most delicious and vibrant red drink, known as ‘Sorrel’. It’s kind of similar to sangria, which originates in Spain and Portugal. Sorrel is made from the dried sorrel plant, boiled with cinnamon, cloves and ginger. After overnight steeping, white rum and sugar are added. Serve chilled. As we drank it around the kitchen table, Jo recounted a memory about this special plant with red berries.
Our ancestors used to say Sorrel was planted along the path to guide runaway slaves to freedom
This anecdote has stuck with me since and re-emerged whilst researching for this piece.
21st century Global Tiny Home movement
In the wealthiest countries in the world today, tiny (movable) homes are a growing market — in 2021 it was valued at USD 16.49 billion and is expected to reach the value of USD 29.41 billion by 2029. It’s a self-build, ground-up, user led movement, that operates slightly outside of the top-down planning system, depending on the local regulations.
‘Tiny Homes’ are small, somewhat ‘movable’ structures to live in, and it is this transient quality that enables them to be less-strictly bound to the typical stringent political challenges that building permanent structures faces such as purchasing land, obtaining legal rights to build through the planning system, meeting strict regulation around construction, and paying high professional fees to engineers, surveyors, architects and lawyers. Tiny homes exist legally, in many countries, in a grey area.
Buildings are technically less difficult to build than an aeroplane but politically are much more difficult, as so many regulatory bodies and stakeholders are involved
— Alastair Parvin
Tiny homes support new and emerging forms of human settlement that are highly adaptable to rural, coastal, and urban contexts. This is an interesting opportunity, during a time where we are undergoing massive shifts as a global society.
Contemporary tiny home settlements offer a glimpse of future human settlement patterns which exist outside of the established rural and urban land distinctions. These established land distinctions in planning support centralised large scaled industrial agriculture — a sector undergoing a huge transformation at the moment and considered to be unsustainable.
Why this movement, at this time?
freedom / noun
- the state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint.
- exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc.
- the power to determine action without restraint.
Freedom of location People are living in tiny homes today, in many cases out of need, but also interestingly sometimes out of choice. This housing solution can offer freedom from living in the city which is sought after for some. As documented in the book City Quitters: Creative Pioneers Pursuing Post Urban Life, trend forecaster Karen Rosenkranz documents the stories of many who have made the transition to leave the city and live somewhere where the land is cheaper and closer to nature such as the mountains, forest, ocean or an agricultural project for a slower and more fulfilling life.
A couple I spoke to who had recently left academic jobs and relocated to rural Portugal paid €30,000 to a local builder in 2020 for their custom built, timber tiny home, so that they could pursue a life closer to nature and a small land based enterprise. Their tiny home is situated on a small campsite which provides water and electrical services and they pay a small amount of rent for this plot.
Freedom from a life controlled by debt (debt servitude) Tiny homes can offer freedom from the mortgage market, or a rental trap where a large proportionof people’s income regularly goes to a private landlord and is rarely reinvested for the benefit of the community or person living there. As housing prices are now vastly out-stripping wages so for so many, a tiny home can bring more of a sense of economic security and long term stability. Unlike renting, which offers no long term economic stability, in many countries this model is unfit for living somewhere longterm as the right to put down roots indefinitely is not guaranteed.
Wellbeing & Meaning Spending less on housing — being free from a life controlled by high debts — means that you can reclaim more time to spend on things that give your life meaning, whether that’s starting a new business, raising a family, pursuing creative projects or simply having more time to just, be. The reclamation of time was something that was experienced and cherished by many during the pandemic of 2020 to early 2022. Less debt also means less stress which has incredible health benefits.
Design flexibility In a broken and rigid housing market dominated by one-size-fits-all typologies, tiny homes offer total user customisation and a certain amount of design flexibility to the end user, which can cater exactly to their needs, as long as the structure is technically moveable and roadworthy. The ability to adapt the space to ones needs is limited when renting from a private landlord, even though it is an essential element of a healthy and functioning home, when viewed from the user’s perspective.
Given today’s context, it makes perfect sense that Tiny Homes are gaining popularity and are heralded as ‘symbols of freedom’. People who are wanting to live a life a little different to the status quo are literally building alternatives to housing and land inequality via these highly practical design solutions — Tiny Homes.
And it’s not the first time.
After Slavery was abolished in Barbados in 1838, there was also a bottom-up tiny home movement. The social / political context might seem radically different to today. But if we view history through the lens of land ownership which offers a sharp and distinct lens of where power lies, there are some fundamental patterns of housing rights evident within the oppression connected with generation rent today and the formerly enslaved people in Barbados in 1838, almost 200 years ago, that are identical.
19th/20th Century Barbados — The Abolition of Slavery
Pre Abolition — Slavery and the British Empire — 1650, Barbados
In 1650 there were forty-four thousand British colonists in the West Indies, more than in all eight colonies on the North American mainland.⁷ To British Colonists the landscapes of the Caribbean Islands with their tropical climate and rolling landscapes were a highly profitable location. Plantation owners had a total monopoly on the land — which contained all the conditions necessary for life — food, water, shelter, along with total control over the legislation.
“Land-poor Barbados devoted nearly every parcel of agricultural land for sugar production, and the enslaved were forced to cultivate it under the arduous gang system from “sunup to sundown”
Slavery was written into law to provide free human labour for the sugar factories. This written legislation enabled a workforce to be highly controlled and was made up of white managers, indentured servants from England and Ireland, and a growing number of enslaved Africans. The sugar, that was being produced, played a key role as an energy source in a newly industrialised Britain. Plantation owners had access to a cheap disposable workforce made possible by a transatlantic slave trade. Barbados emerged as a hotbed of industrial agriculture and slave society through the cultivation and processing of sugar.
The Caribbean was at the core of the crime against humanity induced by the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. In the 17th century, Barbados surpassed Portuguese Brazil as the principal market for enslaved labour.
Abolition Movement →Apprentice system → Tenantry System
By the 1770s, the movement to abolish slavery was well underway in Britain and in 1807 the slave trade in the British Empire was abolished as the public understood how dehumanising it was for the African people.
Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends, to toil for your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your greed? Why are parents to lose their children, brothers their sisters, husbands their wives?
— Olaudah Equiano
Living Conditions under the Apprenticeship System (1834–1838)
The apprenticeship system was created by plantation owners as a way for slaves to transition to being ‘free’ whilst continuing to work at the plantations as ‘apprentices’. Slaves in the Caribbean were not ‘freed’ until 1838, and only after slave owners, rather than the slaves themselves, received financial compensation.
- 45 hour work week — ‘sunup til sundown’
- apprentices could live at the purpose built slave houses on the sites of the sugar plantations’ and were entitled to limited supplies of food, water and clothing
- one day off a week to earn their own money — in theory this meant they would be ‘free’ from their former owners
Due to abolition there was a huge reduction in migrant enslaved Africans — the amount of work to do increased, with fewer people, so plantation owners were trying to get as much work as possible from their workers.
Women and Children — Life for women actually got worse under the apprenticeship system, because they had to work their own hours, tend to their children’s needs, and on top of this, work extra hours to avoid their children becoming apprentices⁸. As slaves, the older women took on the role of looking after the children whilst the mothers worked, but this system no longer existed when slaves became apprentices. Women were also expected to carry out heavier work than before. Plantation owners started to interfere in women’s reproductive lives and breastfeeding, for their own benefit, of a continuing workforce.⁶
As the apprenticeship period came to an end, plantation owners used the threat of eviction to keep control of the formerly enslaved. The denial of land to the emancipated slaves ensured an ongoing dependence on the sugar plantations for survival, as there were the conditions necessary for life — food, water, shelter.
Living Conditions under the Tenantry System (1838–1937)
Once the apprenticeship period had run its course, it was replaced with the tenantry system. Apprentices became tenants, and these new social contracts were defined by the terms of the sugar plantations labour demands. Again, the amount of work that the ‘tenants’ had to provide, didn’t really change from when they were slaves. However, now that they were officially ‘free’, the landless workers were entitled to a wage. The plantation owners were the landowners and the employers so they controlled everything. The workers now had to spend the majority of their wages on rent and food, which kept them in debt servitude to the plantations.
Tenantry Contract
- Tenants had to work exclusively for the plantation owner. Anything other than exclusive labour resulted in eviction and was grounds for prosecution.
- Tenants were forced to cultivate sugar under the arduous gang system ‘from sunup to sundown’.
- Migration away from the island of Barbados was illegal.
- Contracts were short term, eg one month. There was no guarantee that the person could live there on a long term basis.
- They would be paid a low wage, but the majority of it was deducted as ‘rent’ for shelter known as slave housing and spent on food.
- Tenants had the right to live in the purpose built slave housing on short term contracts.
- No formal written contracts in the tenantries. The allocation of houses and house plots legally established the binding contract of free people — having a home there made them legally bound to the plantation.
We know that the living conditions for the formerly enslaved people in Barbados was horrendous during this period of the tenantry system.
Death / Starvation
A man named Samuel Bottin was documented in official government reports of 1875, due to a case of death by starvation. He was found dead in his house. Due to the evidence showing that he did not earn enough to be able to cover the cost of rent and food⁶, the coroner returned a verdict of death from a ‘want of the common necessities of life’.
Women and Children
Another case from official government reports of 1875 describe death by starvation, one of a baby whose mother had had to return to work weeks after giving birth and could not feed her daughter often enough, or worked so hard so soon after birth that she could not produce enough milk to feed her baby. According to the priest of the Parish Church, this was a common incident⁶.
Kinship Networks & Eviction
Anthropologist Stephanie Bergman recounts the following story in her PhD¹:
Mimbo, documented as a Black Barbadian in the 1834 Return of Slaves Registry, was living in one of the tenantries on the Nicholas Abbey estate and occupied a house there. In 1839 she was evicted from her house, at the age of 17, because the plantation manager did not like her husband visiting the plantation to see her. Earlier that year her husband who worked at the same estate, had been evicted from a house he shared with her because he refused to perform some work that he had been called to do. Not only did he lose his home but he had to move away from his wife, his family and his village. But this did not keep him away from the plantation as he continued to visit Mimbo and his loved ones — apparently this infuriated the manager at the estate as he felt a loss of control of this man he had already evicted. As a result he wielded his power of eviction and banished both of them from St. Nicholas Abbey.
Women and children living on the plantations are documented as having suffered the most severe repercussions from housing evictions. Because women were paid lower wages than men, and were apart from established family networks and support for raising children, they were constantly at risk of homelessness if they did not perform the work demanded by their boss — their landlord. If a hired labourer that a woman on a plantation lived with was evicted, then she would also be evicted or be charged excessive rents which would typically result in homelessness¹.
The tenantry system created a lot of social unrest and in 1838 workers were gathering in the local parish to demand land, and better wages from the plantation owners.
No such demands were met.
In 1840, evictions were formalised in law, 33 years after slavery was abolished, with the Contract Act, which formally legalised house evictions and the imprisonment of tenants for not working to the demands of the plantation owner.
The secret of how the elites retained power and control over the lives and bodies of the enslaved post emancipation, was by redefining a slave to a tenant, who had to pay rent with a constant looming threat of eviction.
New Settlements
Plantation workers created new housing settlements for themselves, during this period to free themselves from oppressive landlords / bosses.
Innovative Tenure Models — instead of spending large chunks of their hard earned wages on excessive rents to live in houses built and owned by the estate, landless workers came up with the alternative solution to lease plots of land for a cheaper price. Plantation owners could not decrease wages for those who did not live in estate housing. Within the plantation, on certain areas of land that were designated for them, workers were relatively free to construct their own houses and organise their settlements.
They had the right to build.
Chattel Houses —
The term ‘chattel house’ is an old-fashioned term to mean ‘movable’.⁹
Eviction and displacement from the plantations were often an inevitable part of life for plantation workers, due to being sacked or unable to pay rents to the landlord. The landless workers invented a solution that would allow them to keep more of their wages, channel their income into something that was theirs and make it possible for families, couples, friends and communities to stay together. After a few years of working for pay, many people were able to save enough to afford a chattel house, built of imported materials with co-operative labour.
Perhaps even more important than the economic benefits, chattel houses made it possible that plantation tenants could always ensure that family would stay together during times of eviction. The chattel house provided them with autonomy and freedom over their daily lives, family, and labour.¹
Design features of the Chattel House:
Architecture & Craftmanship — The scale and sense of proportion of these tiny wooden homes demonstrate the craftsmanship of the early African population. They were the creators of a new approach to architecture and building.
Movability — These small movable houses were constructed out of a lightweight timber frame structure and historically sat on above-ground, loose stone foundations to maintain their mobile structure. Sundays were the day that workers had free, and the houses would often be moved on this day. The house would be taken apart and loaded on to carts for transportation to another spot, wherever they could find a job. The movability made it possible for workers to escape abusive landlords and for social ties to stay together during times of eviction.
Modular — With the modular structure, as the family grew, they would add on another house. The timber used to build the houses was imported and pre-cut in length. Another feature common to chattel houses is zinc corrugated metal sheeting used for roofing.
Responsive to local climate — Each house has a steeply pitched roof and short eave, adapted to suit the climate of heavy rains and and to lessen the impact of hurricanes. The roof’s angle deflects the wind rather than provide a platform for it to lift off. Windows traditionally were timber shutters, that provide ventilation when open and protect against hurricanes when closed. Decorative, intricate wooden fretwork around the windows and openings provide shade and a filter against the rain.
Chattel houses played an important role in the strengthening of social ties, and kinship, all of which gave people a sense of belonging, something which is essential as a human need. Barbadian writer George Lamming stresses the social value of homeownership in his memoir of growing up in a plantation tenantry:
“If there’s one golden rule we all on this island got it is this: if God give you health and strength, work til you can get yuhself a shelter over ya head by day, and a corner to rest yuh bones by night. And once you got it, give the good God thanks and never get rid of it.”
- George Lamming, The Castle of My Skin (1953)
19th Century Ireland — Ladies Land League Huts
During this period, a huge number of Irish tenant farmers were being violently evicted from their farms and often their homes would be burned down in the process so that landlords could be rid of them and use the land for turning their properties to pasture.
Evictions was the most common way of getting rid of unwanted tenants.
The tenant frequently built his cottage himself from local materials. However, his rent was higher if he had windows, if his door was over a certain height and if he made any type of improvements or enlargements to the dwelling.
The landlords practiced “Rack Renting” in order to get rid of unwanted tenants. Rents were raised to the point that the tenant could not afford to pay them. The landlord then had the tenant evicted for non payment of rent. There were no appeals and no mercy shown. — Source
A major political movement emerged in 19th century rural Ireland, to reform the country’s landlord system under British Rule. The leading organisation of this movement was known as the Land League. At the time, absentee landlords were common While the male leaders of the Land League were held captive in Kilmainham Gaol, the Ladies Land League, became very active in their service duties.
The Ladies Land League provided much needed practical assistance, by making light and transportable prefabricated wooden dwellings, available as temporary homes for people who were evicted from their homes.
The Ladies Land League also provided aid to prisoners and supported their families. They also discouraged land-grabbing, and provided food and support to imprisoned political leaders and their families.
Recurring themes in a broken land system
Today the land system is more complex but the core patterns have not changed. We see the idea and practice of ‘eviction’ being justified by the pursuit of individual profit again, again and again throughout history, as part of a dysfunctional land system.
- During the famine in Ireland when farmers were displaced because their landlord viewed pasturing animals as a more profitable venture over farmers living there and cultivating crops
- To threaten, coerce and exploit workers in Barbados on the sugar plantations
- Today homes as longterm rentals turned into more profitable airbnbs by people who own multiple properties, resulting in the displacement of long-term tenants
- Whole swathes of our cities being vastly eaten up and turned into whatever venture can make the most profit whether that’s a hotel, student accommodation for the rich, or co-living for a nomadic/international workforce — all at the loss of space for local homes and businesses
For how long more will we tolerate this?
What gives someone the right to displace another, however indirectly that may appear? These legacies of colonialism have become so embedded into our way of life, our customs, our economic practices and our psyches that it is now totally socially acceptable to displace a person from their home for the pursuit of passive income for another.
In Ireland, we freed ourselves from colonialism. However, our systems of how we own land have not changed since they were rewritten during the colonial era, when we were under occupation. These legacies are still embedded into our legal systems, our social structures and possibly our psyches. It’s time we implemented better ways to share this earth as a collective.
“As no man made the land, so no man can claim a right of ownership in the land.”
― Henry George
Moving Forward
Inspired by the incredible tenacity, ingenuity and resilience of the Barbadians, here are some ideas for steps forward we could make, collectively, and to our legislation, to harness the energy of the ground up tiny home movement, into the building of healthy functioning places to live for everyone.
Planning rights for tiny homes
Let’s harness the energy of the self build movement by recognising tiny homes as dwellings in the planning system and grant them suitable permits.
Right to build — Denying people and communities the right to live in a tiny home, because of an inefficient and seemingly rigid planning system, during a housing crisis where neither the government or the private market can deliver suitable housing is an absurdity. The chattel house as a vernacular structure improved and refined over time would not be possible today because of the rigidity of the planning system in the UK and Ireland.
France has already been doing it since February 2014¹⁰ governed by the ALUR (law for Access to Housing and Renovated Urbanism).
Innovative ownership models for temporary dwellings
Tiny homes alone are not a solution to the housing crisis today. Without addressing tenure, tiny home communities risk become tenants to landowners, which is a model for draining the resources out of the community. Tiny home settlements have the potential to create new regenerative forms of human settlement — but to achieve this, fair ownership models must be enacted providing dwellers with security of tenure, fair rent that is intelligently redistributed back into the community, along with stewardship responsibilities.
References:
- Properties Of Belonging: Landscapes Of Racialized Ownership In Post-Emancipation Barbados — Stephanie M. Bergman
- Education, Literacy and Ink Pots: Contested Identities in PostEmancipation Barbados — Sean Edward Devlin
- Great House Rules: Landless Emancipation and Workers’ Protest in Barbados, 1838–1938 by Hilary McD Beckles
- Sugar as an essential nutrient during the industrial revolution
- Slavery Images Record — http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/page/welcome
- Contextual essay: When did plantation workers in Barbados truly become free?
- Andro Linklater — Owning the Earth
- Enslaved women before and after 1807, Diana Paton
- World Heritgae Papers — Caribbean Wooden Treasures
- Setting up a tiny house in France or Belgium: What does the law say?
