Affordable Housing Institute : US

Care for a little meandering journey into unusual housing configurations?  A little fable that makes a very modern point?  Even if it does go quite far afield to do so?

 

What does constitute a home, anyhow?  And what makes it not just livable but appealing? 

 

Much of what makes housing appealing in the short term is in the eye of the beholder. 

 

 

Not everybody would enjoy living on a boat with an alligator …

 

For intervals, anything can be charming.  As this New York Times article (subscription now required) soft-focuses it, for only $3,000 a month, this waterborne palace can be yours:

 

Many Americans dream of a romantic life on a converted barge, or Parisian peniche. … 

 

When Andy MacLellan moved his family out of a comfortable house in the Paris suburbs and onto a barge in the Seine, it fulfilled a fantasy for him. Perhaps less so for his wife, June.

 

“We should have people over, but the mud!” she said recently over dinner.

 

 

Peniche moored along the Amsterdam canals

 

In terms of floor space, the barge is roughly comparable to a normal US two-bedroom apartment (1,050 square feet):

 

The barge, about 70 feet long and 15 feet wide, is moored on a quiet stretch in Port-Marly, a village about 15 miles from Paris that was immortalized by the impressionists Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro.  

 

 

Actually, Pissarro loved cities too …. 

 

It is part of a microcommunity, one of several along the Seine consisting of about 1,000 peniches.

 

“It’s like living on a floating double-wide,” she said, referring to the deluxe units in trailer parks back home.

 

Like many who haven’t lived in the great underrated form of American affordable housing, the lowly mobile home (pejoratively known as a ‘trailer’), Ms. MacLellan is ill-informed — the peniche is much more like a single-wide (which typically runs 14×50 or 14×60). 

 

Most people who own single-wides supplement them, as with porches

 

In fact, the peniche is less convenient than the belittled double-wide:

 

 

1,050 square feet!

 

(A future post will correct the deplorable lack of respect for double-wides, but meanwhile, back to our regular programming.)

 

Instead, it appears the MacLellans are consciously ’slumming it‘:

 

Since the MacLellans moved in, their lives have become a sort of “Green Acres” on the Seine, with Mrs. MacLellan, 53, adopting the role of the skeptical wife.

 

“Dahling I love you but give me Park Avenue!”

 

Mrs. MacLellan … wrinkled her nose when asked about sewage. She pointed to the river and shrugged. “I don’t think you want to go swimming in there,” she said.

 

Alex, who commutes to school in nearby Saint-Cloud, sleeps below the water line in a private lair. “It kind of freaked me out at the beginning,” Mrs. MacLellan said, noting the way rainwater leaks through the roof over the stairs and lands near his bed.

 

Indeed, it’s much more like living in a throwback to a long-ago and much less happy time: the quarantine hulk prison.

 

 

The only known photograph of a hulk

 

Back in the late eighteenth century, when it was easier to maintain the comforting notion that people with more money were intrinsically better than those without, the hopeful theory arose that ‘those people’ were genetically different — predisposed to failure, crime, and squalor — so if we could just isolate them from the rest of us, society would be cured.  (Much talk of “ridding the body of society from disease” and so on.)  And back then, although being poor was by itself not a crime, taking such steps as stealing a loaf of bread (thanks, Victor Hugo!) were enough to land you in prison indefinitely, so there was an explosion in the prison population that happened also to coincide with a huge growth in the urban poor.

 

With so many of the urban poor find their way to prison, London started running out of places to put them.  For a time, the British shipped them to America — thanks, King George! — but something in 1776 put paid to that idea, whereupon Her Majesty’s Government hit upon a curious form of adaptive reuse of surplus military property: the hulk.

 

In 1775 the War of American Independence ended Great Britain’s century-and-a-half-old practice of regularly transporting criminal offenders to the North American colonies.  William Eden, the Home Office secretary to whose lot it fell to deal with the resulting crisis, estimated that alternative accommodations would be needed each year for about a thousand convicts, far more than could be crammed into the already overcrowded gaols and bridewells of England.  A decision was taken to retain in English waters certain of the ships engaged in the convict transportation, and to utilize them there as places of confinement. 

 

HMS Discovery, home to 500 convicts

 

The arrangement was viewed as a temporary expedient, and thus it was first authorized by Parliament for only two years.

 

By the way, note now a ‘temporary expedient’ gets extended, and extended.  Such things happen to governments (hello again, rent control), even when …

 

It was an arrangement that had no defenders. Conservatives condemned it because of the likelihood of its exacerbating the criminality of offenders. Liberals agreed and furthermore deplored its inhumanity. But in spite of these constantly renewed expressions of chagrin from all quarters, it was an arrangement that endured for eighty years.

 

Distorting the market, and not addressing the fundamental problems, only made things worse.  When those to be warehoused overran even the overcrowded and deplorable floating slums thus created, the apotheosis of this approach was transportation, the concept of sentencing malefactors to be shipped around the world — from Britain or Ireland to America, Canada, or Australia, there to shift for themselves or not.  Out of sight, out of mind, and out of our society.

 

Once they got to America, or Canada, or Australia, their behavior magically changed, and the same people whom London though the dregs of society build new societies, new businesses, new fortunes, new destinies. 

 

Hulks thus serve as a powerful piece of evidence that environment powers behavior. 

 

Doesn’t control it, doesn’t compel it, but powers it. 

 

What makes life on a Parisian peniche tolerable, despite the mud and leaks and cramped quarters, is both its variety (”Toto, I think we’re not in Kansas any more”) and that it is voluntarily finite. 

 

But life isn’t so bad if you ask the rest of the family, whose enthusiasm is, of course, her foil.  Hauling firewood and propane tanks is “kind of fun,” her husband said, “sort of like camping.”

 

The MacLellans go home no worse for the wear than a few cocktail-party stories of domestic catastrophes made humorous by the healing distance memory brings.

 

But what about when you can’t escape?

 

Good housing incubates good families, and good families incubate good citizens.

Bad housing incubates bad families, and bad families incubate criminals.

 

So, as taxpayers and policymakers and citizens, which would you rather pay for:

 

• Affordable housing, day care, and job training?
• Prisons, security guards, and welfare?

It’s one or the other, folks.

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