Timothy Birdnow

Here is a story that made me laugh out loud when I heard it on the evening news yesterday. Seems a young hipster's homemade tiny house was stolen from property in the trendy Tower Grove South area where it was being constructed. Police found the unfinished shack in the woods in Hillsboro, Mo.

From Fox2 News:

JEFFERSON COUNTY, Mo. – Christmas came early for the owner of a tiny house that was stolen in south St. Louis over the weekend.

"I’m still in complete shock,” says Meghan Panu.

Panu laid eyes on her tiny house for the first time in five days. It was 40 miles from where it was stolen in Tower Grove.

"I’m just shocked it’s in Hillsboro, Missouri. That’s a lot better than California,” she said. End excerpt.

Hillsboro is the county seat for Jefferson County, the epicenter of hillbillism in Mid east Missouri. Clearly someone was stealing this building to use as a camping cabin or hunting shack - or meth lab.

Why does that make me laugh? It illustrates the ridiculousness of Progressive thinking.

The tiny house movement has swept the Prog Nation. The idea is to "reduce your footprint" by living in what is essentially a storage shed or camper. Not only are a lot of hipsters doing it, but there has been an attempt to build these puny structures for the poor.

But of course we already HAD such structures; they were called trailers, or mobile homes. Cheaply built, movable, they provided cheap shelter for those without a lot of money or possessions. But nobody respects trailer park dwellers so the liberals had to come up with a new packaging for them. Now they are "tiny house" dwellers. And the ease with which the place was stolen pointed out the absurdity of the whole movement. It would have been harder to steal a mobile home, if for no other reason than that it is a lot larger.

Here is the kicker from this story:

"Panu built the tiny house as part of her senior project for Environmental Studies at Webster University.

"I think the biggest take away from all of this is don’t steal because you could be stealing someone’s dream,” she said.

Panu handled a lot of the labor herself with help from some friends. It cost her about $20,000 in materials."

End excerpt.

They showed photos of the inside of the structure. This building is considerably smaller than the Ozark Hilton, my home-built cabin. I spent well under a thousand dollars on the OH, using old boards and scrounged materials. This structure was unfinished inside, looking like a storage shed. She's going to sink another twenty grand into it to make it into a real house, I suspect. Then she's going to have to have a lot for it, and hook up utilities. In the end she'll spend at least forty thousand dollars on a cabin that looks to be about 250 square feet or so. It's a fine thing for a getaway place but a home to live in?

Also, being this small, it won't last with permanent occupation. The tighter the space the harder it is used. That is axiomatic.

And I suspect she'll have a hard time getting insurance for it. She'll have to insure it as a trailer IF they find it up to code.

About a year ago I commented on a story on the St. Louis University website about SLU students building these doll houses for the poor. It was an idea that was stupid beyond words; in St. Louis you can get a house for very cheap to completely free. Oh, they may not be in the best of neighborhoods, but they are usually made of brick and come with the lots and the utilities already hooked up. In fact, the City of St. Louis had to pass a law making it illegal to deed your property to them because so many property owners were simply walking away from their houses. And here you have these dumb kids building these tiny new cabins for the poor when full sized houses are readily available.

Granted, that is in St. Louis where housing is dirty cheap. These tiny homes may have some value elsewhere, but not a lot. As I pointed out you can recycle beer cans into a nice, shiny aluminum mobile home. This is a project solely designed to make the intellectually sloppy feel good about themselves. Oh, and it's easy to steal these things.

The real purpose of this "tiny house" movement is to condition Americans to be "sustainable" meaning to cut back our lifestyles, get used to living with less. The Progressives and especially the Gang Green are Malthusians, still believing the eighteenth century musings of Thomas Malthus that suggests population will grow exponentially and eventually we'll be eati9ng other peoplle. Remember the Charleton Heston movie "Soylent Green"? The Progs actually think it will come to that. Or they don't, but they see the value in terrifying the public, making the public voluntarily submit to them. We already know the Millenials think this way, believing that Global Warming is going to doom all of Mankind. They will submit to any yoke upon their necks because we are in a "planetary emergency".

History has not born out Malthus, and yet he is still the cornerstone of Progressive thought.

So, i cracked up at this story. Leave it to some hill folk to see the practical benefits of the green dreams of this hippie chick. And they just went and took the place in broad daylight, in a densely populated part of the city. I can't help but snicker at that.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:28 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 959 words, total size 6 kb.