I mentioned in my last post that I was deep into Andre Dubus III’s novel Such Kindness. It’s narrated by a recovering opioid addict in eastern Massachusetts, who is spending week or so of his narration trying to raise enough money to get to Western Mass to see his college-aged son. It’s heartbreaking, very near-the-bone, very beautiful in a bleak way, just like a New England winter. Dubus trois is very good at New England bleakness, which may be why I love his stuff, since I grew up in New England bleakness. Massachusetts bleakness, to be more precise. Raising my children in southern Connecticut, I can tell you it just ain’t the same. Balmy down here. The crunchy, dirty snowbanks don’t last until April. Anyway, Such Kindness pretty well nails it, to the point that my chum Boone said, “It’s like Ironweed,” invoking the bleakest novel ever, about hobos looking for drink in Depression-era Albany. (That is one really bleak novel.)
I promise that I am getting to the point. To get there, I have to tell you that I also just finished binge-ing the Netflix show Beef, which is not a show about actual cow meat—that would be The Bear, about a restaurant that serves a lot of beef—but a show about a beef, or hostility, that two people develop after encountering each other in a moment of road rage gone very bad. Beef goes way beyond the road rage episode that begins the series, and the beef; the lives of the two beefers get very entangled, leading to adultery, kidnapping, various firearms violations, and some legendarily bad parenting. But what I want to focus on here is a small moment of Beef—a moment that will not involve any plot spoilers, a moment that yokes the show, in my mind, with the novel Such Kindness.
One of the two beefers in Beef is a Korean-American contractor named Danny (played by Steven Yeun). One of his great motivators in life is building a new house for his parents, who had lived in the United States until they lost their shirt in the motel that they owned (I won’t say how—it wasn’t their fault), and moved back to Korea. Danny is trying to acquire land, and then he will use his own hands, his own talent and labor, to build them a beautiful house, so that they can return to the US and retire in the style they deserve.
The house he wants to build them is not a modest little 1,500-sq-footer, but rather something grander, a large house with state-of-the-art appliances and a view over the California hills, a view that befits royalty. I don’t think it’s giving away too much to say that the house gets built, but at a huge cost to Danny’s soul. It doesn’t end well. If he’d only aspired to get them a ranch house on a quarter acre, things might have gone considerably better.
So back to Dubus’s novel Such Kindness, in which we learn near the top that the narrator, an old swamp Yankee named Tom Lowe Jr., lost everything when he took out an adjustable-rate mortgage he couldn’t afford, so that he could buy some land on which to build his dream house. He buys the land, builds the dream house, but when the rate re-adjusts he loses everything. To be sure, he has had some other misfortunes along the way, which make it harder for him to pay the new monthly bill; but the original sin was the mortgage he couldn’t afford (sold to him by an unscrupulous banker who fudges some numbers).
Square footage is a mysterious thing. There are people who feel quite house-rich because they have 1,200 square feet in Manhattan, or even 900 square feet in Berkeley, California; then there are people who won’t feel they have arrived until they have 4,000 square feet of McMansion in the ’burbs. Or 8,000 square feet. If intrigued, go to the classic website McMansionHell, and learn about “lawyer foyers” and “garage mahals”:
As for myself—and I’ll try to write this next paragraph without sounding hyper-virtuous or self-regarding—I am very uncomfortable when inhabiting too much square footage. I have one very wealthy friend who has acquired a rather large house, and like many of these houses, it is under-furnished, and every time I visit I feel I am alone in an airline hangar after dark. Another friend has one of these houses, but with enough furniture, yet I still get sad when I think about the unused rooms in the house; this is a single parent with two children, and the three of them have about 15 rooms, and I sometimes walk past a den that looks so forlorn and under-appreciated that I want to go in and hug it.
I acknowledge that my ability to live happily with six other people in 2,300 square feet—more than some such families have, less than others—is rooted in a snobbish shabby-genteel aesthetic that was bequeathed to me as much as it was cultivated. I come from people who would look down on my having too much square footage, so it’s rather easy to inhabit, without envying anyone else, the square footage I am fortunate enough to have.
But to the bigger picture: We have a housing shortage in many of our major metro areas—even as we have surplus housing in plenty of abandoned and dying cities around the country. One would like to think that the rise of remote work would ease this mismatch; shouldn’t more people be rehabbing houses in ghost towns on the Great Plains, and wifi-ing in to their edtech, biotech, or fintech jobs? (I only recently learned that “fintech” was a thing.)
And then there is all the bad policy that increases the supply of big houses while pushing down the supply of small houses. From a 2022 NPR story:
Overly restrictive zoning is a big problem nationally, says Robert Dietz, the chief economist with the National Association of Home Builders. “In certain neighborhoods you simply cannot build townhouses.”
“You have to build single family units on lots that are bigger than the market wants,” Dietz says. “This is not a free market choice. It's a government-imposed rule.”
He says that in many parts of the country, the classic NIMBY (not in my back yard) opposition stops higher-density units from being built. Existing homeowners who don't want more traffic and more homes in their neighborhood keep what he says are outdated, exclusionary zoning rules in place.
Meanwhile, we have this micro-trend of tiny houses—which cities also don’t want. But I do. Mark my words now: If I am ever old and (God forbid) alone, if the children ever all move out and I am sitting around in widow-hood rewatching John Hughes movies from the ’80s, I’d like to do so in a tiny house. This one, on the Quebec coastline, will do: