Tiny Homes: Greenwashing American Poverty

The “tiny home” trend has taken the US by storm, to the point where it merits its own television show on the HGTV channel. In exploring her own fascination and repulsion with the show, Roxane Gay finds a host of contradictory connotations exemplary of the current American economic condition.

A tiny house, which is typically no bigger than 600 square feet, represents the desire to “downsize” and reject the flashier McMansions of past generations in favor of an environmentally friendly and less expensive lifestyle. Yet the very fact that this could be referred to as a “lifestyle” suggests an aspirational element to the dream—and yet, one might ask, how could one aspire to buy and live in what is essentially the size of a trailer home? The same trailer homes that are the emblem of poverty and destitution?

Gay writes that “Moving into a tiny home allows people to hold firm to their middle-class sensibilities,” while they are clearly living less than middle-class lives. “Class anxiety” is repressed by turning minimalism into a new ideal—in what could be described as a greenwashing of American poverty. Gay calls this the "shrinking American dream."