The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on Monday recommended Venice to be listed as an endangered World Heritage Site, as the city is at risk of irreparable damage from climate change and overtourism.
“The effects of the continuing deterioration due to human intervention, including continuing development, the impacts of climate change and mass tourism threaten to cause irreversible changes to the outstanding universal value of the property,” UNESCO said, as reported by France 24.
UNESCO said that Venice has faced long-running problems with overtourism and development that threaten this World Heritage Site, which has been on the list since 1987. UNESCO noted that little has been done to better protect the city, and even Italy’s recent protective measures have been insufficient.
As such, UNESCO has proposed to place the city on the World Heritage in Danger list, and this recommendation will be considered for adoption by the World Heritage Committee at its meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in September. In the meantime, Venice officials will review the recommendation and discuss it with the Italian government.
The World Heritage in Danger list was created by the World Heritage Committee to show heritage sites that require “major operations” as they face “serious and specific dangers,” per Article 11.4 in the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, created in 1972.
In 2021, Italy banned cruise ships from entering the Venice lagoon, as UNESCO was at that time also considering placing Venice on the list of endangered World Heritage Sites.
Earlier this year, the city’s canals were drying up from a prolonged drought. In just late 2019, most of the city was underwater from intense flooding, made worse by climate change.
“For many years Venetians experienced the flooding as simply a nuisance,” Shaul Bassi, English literature professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, said, as reported by Royal Museums Greenwich. “For kids it was a sort of entertainment — wearing your Wellington boots, wading through the water. Then of course, things became more serious. Now I think we need to fully understand that flooding is not just at a local level. Venice is at the forefront of the battle against climate change.”
In addition to climate impacts, Venice has faced overtourism, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic, with about 28 million visitors each year, according to the BBC.
As The Guardian reported, these impacts have led the number of locals living in the historic center of the city to fall below 50,000 as of summer 2022.
UNESCO stated that it hopes that the recommendation for Venice as an endangered World Heritage Site “will result in greater dedication and mobilisation of local, national and international stakeholders.”
As a child, Joycelyn Chui often helped her grandmother in the kitchen. She would separate eggshells and onion peels in little bowls, to compost them in her grandmother’s garden. For Chui, sorting and composting food waste with her grandmother planted a seed that has now germinated into Restaurant 2 Garden, a community composting project in Seattle’s Chinatown International District.
Restaurant 2 Garden is a hyperlocal organization that takes food waste from restaurants in Chinatown and converts it to compost for Danny Woo Community Garden—the only green space in the neighborhood. Elderly immigrants from Asian American and Pacific Islander communities cultivate the community garden, and grow foods relevant to the community, such as chrysanthemum and goji berries.
Restaurant 2 Garden is one example of recent statewide push to increase recycling and composting rates. Washington, along with California, is one of the first states to enact a sweeping set of policies targeted at organics and food waste to get food out of the garbage. Some of these measures are now being codified into law: House Bill 1799—passed in June of 2022—seeks a 75% reduction of organic material going to landfills by 2030, and a 20 percent increase in donations of edible food by 2025. These targets are a joint effort between local governments and the state. Cities and counties are now required to offer organics collection to businesses, if there is a facility available that can process organic waste. For businesses in areas with organics management, the statute calls for businesses to separate their organic waste and either subscribe to an organic waste collection service or process them on site.
Initiatives like Restaurant 2 Garden will be critical in helping make this legislation successful, says Heather Trim, executive director of Zero Waste Washington, a nonprofit that advocated for House Bill 1799.
“What usually happens is a business contracts with a private or a commercial hauler, and will pay for their material to be hauled to a commercial compost,” says Trim. “What Restaurant 2 Garden is doing is jumpstarting the little mom and pop shops and helping [composting] happen on a localized scale.”
Seattle already has industrial-level facilities that process compost, which can help keep nutrients from organic materials in circulation. But even though residents and businesses are required to separate food and paper for composting, a lot of food still ends up in the landfill.
“We know there’s a continued need for deeper engagement with our community to do a better job at keeping food out of the landfill,” says McKenna Morrigan, strategic advisor for waste prevention and product stewardship at Seattle Public Utilities.
Morrigan argues that community composting initiatives like Restaurant 2 Garden can help local businesses in culturally responsive ways, and support the circular economy—where materials are used as efficiently as possible and waste is recaptured.
“Our focus going forward is to support the circular economy for organics, which means doing our part to ensure that the city is purchasing compost made from the organics collected here, and that they’re being used in the many different applications where compost is beneficial,” adds Morrigan.
Compost can be used by the city for landscaping, amending soil, erosion control, stormwater filtration, and new construction. House Bill 1799 also requires local governments to use compost products in relevant projects and prioritize getting compost from places that produce it locally. All counties in Washington State will now be required to consider—in their growth plans—where compost facilities could be sited, and the bill aims to make it easier for compost facilities to obtain bank loans and grants so they can expand.
Back in Seattle, Restaurant 2 Garden currently works with two restaurants, both in close proximity to Danny Woo Community Garden. Since opening, it has collected over 5,000 pounds of food scraps and harvested a similar amount of compost. It’s not yet a fully closed loop: While community gardeners are using compost to grow food, the yield isn’t enough to provide food for restaurants.
Composting in the Danny Woo Community Center
People’s Economy Lab
But Chui and her co-founders—Elizabeth Chong Baskerville and Jennifer Cheung—are looking to expand to another plot of public land in the neighborhood. They want to build a demonstration site where people can see how food scraps are converted to compost, a process Chui sees as using public land to provide a public service.
She says the resourcefulness of her immigrant, refugee community deserves a lot more attention. “What modern-day ‘environmentalism’ is promoting, we’re already doing,” she says.
This story was produced in partnership with Communities of Opportunity, a growing partnership that believes every community can be a healthy, thriving community.
Stargazing used to mean staring at the sky and consulting a guidebook to decipher the stars, or acquiring an expensive telescope to see them more clearly. Now, dozens of stargazing smartphone apps make it easy for anyone to enjoy and learn about the cosmos. Generally, they entail holding your smartphone up to the sky, and visuals on your screen will reflect the section of the sky it’s pointing at. If you’re looking to improve your knowledge of the cosmos, identify constellations on a camping trip, or plan for future astronomical events, these apps will help you know where (and when) to look up.
Night Sky
A view of the Night Sky app’s user interface on an iPhone. iCandi Apps Ltd.
The free version of this Apple-compatible app offers many features, and all are accessible with Night Sky + for $5.99 a month. Along with a 1.7 billion star library, Night Sky has a real-time map of the sky overlaid with constellations that update whenever you move your device. If the view is overwhelming, choose what objects you want to see (or remove) on the side menu. The app features Augmented Reality (AR) functions, overlaying a surface with the solar system so you can watch the stars swirl at the speed of your choosing. Explore the planets, constellations, and nebulas in 3D, or zoom in on spacecraft like Sputnik 1 and The Space Shuttle. If you’re on the lookout for a specific object moving ahead — like the International Space Station — set notifications to let you know when to look up. Night Sky is great for city users and includes a filter that adjusts for light pollution so you can see celestial objects you might not otherwise be able to discern.
SkyView
The SkyView app’s Today Widget. Terminal Eleven
Identify galaxies, constellations, and stars, or man-made objects like satellites, the ISS, and Hubble as they pass overhead using SkyView. Using Augmented Reality, the app overlays the night sky with notes to teach you about each object above, including its history and related mythology (and you can jump right to its Wiki page to read more). Jump around in time to see what the sky looked like at different points in the past, or what it will look like in the future.
Because the app doesn’t require cell phone service to use, it’s great for campers. It also features a version for Apple Watch, a widget for your home screen that lets you know what objects are visible above, and push reminders for celestial events. For experienced stargazers, the app also supports Space Navigator binoculars, spotting scope, and telescopes.
SkyView (the enhanced version of the app) is $1.99 a month, but SkyView Lite is free.
SkySafari 7
The SkySafari app on an iPad. Simulation Curriculum Corp.
Three different SkySafari apps are available at different prices — SkySafari Basic at $4.99, SkySafari 7 Plus at $9.99, and SkySafari 7 Pro at $39.99 — but all offer Tonight at a Glance: a guided summary of what’s happening in the sky tonight that’s beloved by its users. Point your phone at the sky to locate planets and other objects through a visual blend of the real view with a simulated sky chart. Using Orbit Mode, leave Earth and travel to other planets, moons, and stars to view from there. Try the Events Finder to see what future lunar and solar eclipses (or other astronomical events) will look like from where you’re standing. The app also features audio tours about the science, mythology, and history of the stars, as well as pronunciation guides for those hard-to-say celestial terms. Although it’s still compatible with iOS, SkySafari is considered especially good for Androids and for connecting with telescopes.
Stellarium Mobile
Stellarium Labs
From Stellarium — the open-source planetarium with a well-known desktop app — comes Stellarium Mobile: a free app that offers a premium version for $13.99. Its simple design makes the app easy to use, and features a search function to find all known stars, planets, comets, and deep sky objects, as well as satellites and asteroids. The night mode option (which tints your screen red) helps you view the stars without interfering with your night vision. Stellarium Mobile is very well-rated by users, and is lauded for its star library, which contains more stars than any other app on the market. Among other features, the plus version allows you to see a 3D view of objects, explore a calendar of upcoming events, and includes a telescope control module.
Star Walk 2
Viewing the Perseids meteor shower with the Star Walk app. Johan Larsson / CC BY 2.0
Named best astronomy app, Star Walk 2 is considered a great option for beginners, as it’s meant to be viewed on a phone screen rather than a telescope. The premium version of the app costs $2.99 a month, but if you aren’t bothered by ads, the free version (Star Walk 2 Ads +) offers many of the same components. Featuring real-time, interactive maps of the sky, explore satellites, star clusters, nebulae, galaxies, asteroids, comets, and meteors to a soundtrack of ethereal music. Its “encyclopedia of the sky” also provides extensive information, photos, and 3D models of objects, and the app lets you know the best times for observing the objects that are visible from your location. Read astronomical news about stargazing forecasts, current astronomy events, tips for observing events like meteor showers and eclipses, and what celestial bodies are currently visible. Star Walk Kids is also available for both iOS and Android.
Sky Guide
Featuring 1.7 billion stars and 1 million deep-sky objects, Sky Guide is a favorite for identifying constellations, planets, and satellites above. The app doesn’t need Wi-Fi, cellular service, or GPS to function, making it the perfect option for backcountry campers. Users love the vibrant colors and simple display of the uncluttered, informative app that you can customize to your interests. Toggle on displays of aurora borealis and aurora australis, constellation lines, and overlays of Western/Ancient Greek mythological constellation art. Keep up-to-date with forecasts for meteor showers and other events, and use cinematic time controls to gaze at past and future skies. The app itself is free, with two upgrades available as in-app purchases: Sky Guide Plus or Sky Guide Pro, although you can check out a free one-week trial of both before you make a decision. Unfortunately, the app is not available for Android users.
Hello and welcome back to Record High. I’m Jake Bittle, and this week we’re going to explore the bureaucratic reason that the federal government doesn’t do more to help during heat disasters.
If you take a look at the primary law that dictates how the United States responds to disasters, the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988, you’ll see a long list of perils that qualify for federal emergency aid. The act defines a “major disaster” as “any natural catastrophe (including any hurricane, tornado, storm, high water, winddriven water, tidal wave, tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide, mudslide, snowstorm, or drought), or, regardless of cause, any fire, flood, or explosion.”
The word “heat,” however, does not appear on that list — or in any other part of the act, for that matter. That simple omission has had big implications for how we respond to heat waves.
In order to unlock the full resources of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, the president must declare a “major disaster” in a given area. But the Stafford Act doesn’t name heat as a qualifying catastrophe, and no president has ever made a disaster declaration over a heat wave. President Joe Biden has made more than 40 such declarations so far this year, but he hasn’t made one for the ongoing heat wave in the U.S. South. That’s despite the fact that the heat in Phoenix has become so severe that dozens of people have gotten burns from falling down on the sidewalk and local authorities have brought in freezer trucks to hold the bodies of heatstroke victims.
“Disaster funding is geared towards fixing expensive things that are broken, not people,” said Juanita Constible, a senior climate and health advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “So because heat is mostly a health consideration, it got left out.”
In theory, FEMA can reimburse state and local governments for any disaster response effort that exceeds local resources, but in practice it has never done so for a heat wave. Because the agency historically hasn’t devoted significant resources to fighting heat, Constible said, most state and local emergency management departments haven’t done much work to plan for heat either.
A FEMA representative surveys a woman about heat and power availability in a New York City neighborhood damaged during Hurricane Sandy. Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images
Part of the issue is that the damage caused by a heat wave is less physical than the devastation caused by a hurricane, tornado, flood, or similar event, so recovery isn’t just a matter of buying bricks to rebuild a school or sending trucks to carry away debris. Even so, heat waves place a massive financial strain on hospitals and power grids, and most local governments can’t afford to ramp up health services on short notice. Local economies also suffer as retail foot traffic plummets and outdoor industries like construction shut down.
During the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, for instance, hospitals in Portland were dunking heatstroke victims in ice baths to keep them alive. But as temperatures climbed, eventually reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit, they ran out of ice and had to scour the city for more. The Pacific Northwest heat wave ended up killing at least 229 people in Oregon and Washington over the course of the week, and perhaps as many as 600. Constible says the immense resources of the federal government might have been able to prevent some of those deaths if they had been available.
“When there are mass casualty events, there’s no big pulse of money that can come into the state or counties to help deal with the aftermath,” she told Grist. “One of the things that hospitals realized after the 2021 event, in Oregon in particular, was that they were wildly unprepared for the impact of that heat wave, and they had to do all this work after the fact to get up to some minimum level. Funds just aren’t really available for that kind of work without a disaster declaration.”
“Disaster funding is geared towards fixing expensive things that are broken, not people.”
Juanita Constible, Natural Resources Defense Council
The main FEMA initiative that could theoretically help with heat right now is the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, or BRIC, which distributes money to cities and states to help them prepare before disasters happen. FEMA released guidance this year signaling to state and local governments that they could use BRIC money to adapt to heat risks, and an agency spokesperson told Grist that more money will soon be available. But even this program hasn’t been much help so far: When the New York City Housing Authority submitted a BRIC application for a cooling center in 2020, FEMA declined to select the project for funding, saying it wasn’t cost-effective.
Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, introduced a bill earlier this summer that would add “extreme heat” to the list of disasters in the Stafford Act. The bill has some bipartisan support, but Constible says it still faces long odds of advancing given the gridlock in the present divided Congress. In the meantime, Biden has asked federal agencies like the Department of Labor and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to get better at protecting workers from heat and measuring heat waves. But in reality, these measures can’t compare to the immense resources of FEMA’s standard disaster response.
At a press conference on Thursday where Biden announced the new measures, Phoenix mayor Kate Gallego said that local governments are doing everything they can to address heat risk, including by tapping pandemic stimulus money and using Inflation Reduction Act grants to plant new trees. But she also warned that the adaptation effort wouldn’t succeed without more help from the feds.
“We would love it if Congress would give you the ability to declare heat a disaster,” she said to Biden. “We need a whole-of-government approach.”
Reporting on extreme heat doesn’t just involve covering brutal temperatures. We need to focus on the solutions that can help us adapt and chart a new path forward. That’s why we’re continuing our extreme heat coverage through the end of September. But we need your help by MIDNIGHT TONIGHT to unlock critical funding. We are just $195 away from unlocking a $20,000 match to support our work. Please take a moment to donate what you can as every dollar counts.
By the numbers
A new report from Climate Central revealed which U.S. cities suffer most from the “urban heat island” effect. Urban environments tend to get hotter than surrounding rural areas because streets and buildings absorb heat over the course of a day and release it at night.
The hottest month ever: July was the hottest month in more than 120,000 years of recorded history. The last time the world was this hot, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were still vying for species dominance. My colleague Lyric Aquino reports on a month of devastating temperatures.
The Last of Us was a documentary: In the latest installment of a Grist-Associated Press collaboration on climate change and disease, the AP’s Camille Fassett explores how warmer temperatures are enabling a fungus known as Candida auris to spread through the U.S. like never before. The fungus can cause sepsis and fever when it infects human beings.
Grid stress in New York City: Amid a sweltering heat wave last week, New York utility ConEd asked customers to reduce their energy consumption during peak hours. The City’s Samantha Maldonado explains why this happened and why a popular call on social media to “turn off Times Square” wouldn’t have helped prevent blackouts.
What “record-breaking” really means: Every heat wave brings with it the news that dozens of temperature records around the world have been shattered, but Umair Irfan over at Vox explains that not all temperature records are created equal. The significance of a broken record in a given location depends on how long we’ve been measuring data there, and those nuances often get lost in flashy headlines.
More heat means more fossil fuels: One big winner from the past month of heat waves? Natural gas. Grid operators around the country have responded to skyrocketing energy demand from air conditioners and fans by burning more gas than ever. Despite rapid growth in renewable energy, gas is still the baseload fuel of choice in almost every region of the U.S. Timothy Puko of the Washington Post reports on the vicious cycle.
Climate Connections is a collaboration between Grist and the Associated Press that explores how a changing climate is accelerating the spread of infectious diseases around the world, and how mitigation efforts demand a collective, global response. Read more here.
In early 2022, nearly 200,000 Malawians were displaced after two tropical storms struck the southeastern part of Africa barely a month apart. Sixty-four people died. Amid an already-heavy rainy season, the storms Ana and Gombe caused tremendous devastation across southern Malawi to homes, crops, and infrastructure.
“That March, we started to see cholera, which is usually endemic in Malawi, becoming an outbreak,” said Gerrit Maritz, a deputy representative for health programs in Malawi for the United Nations Children’s Fund. Cholera typically affects the country during the rainy season, from December to March, during which time it remains contained around Lake Malawi in the south and results in about 100 deaths each year.
The 2022 outbreak showed a different pattern — cholera spread throughout the dry season and by August had moved into Malawi’s northern and central regions. By early February of this year, cases had peaked at 700 per day with a fatality rate of 3.3 percent, three times higher than the typical rate. When cases finally began to decline in March, cholera had claimed over 1,600 lives in a 12-month period — the biggest outbreak in the country’s history.
As climate change intensifies, storms like Ana and Gombe are becoming more frequent, more powerful, and wetter. The World Health Organization, or WHO, says that while poverty and conflict remain enduring drivers for cholera around the world, climate change is aggravating the acute global upsurge of the disease that began in 2021. According to WHO, 30 countries reported outbreaks in 2022, 50 percent more than previous years’ average; many of those outbreaks were compounded by tropical cyclones and their ensuing displacement.
“It’s difficult to say that [Tropical Storm Ana and Cyclone Gombe] caused the cholera outbreak,” UNICEF public health emergency specialist Raoul Kamadjeu said. “What we can say is they were risk multipliers.”
Cholera is a diarrheal illness that spreads in places without access to clean water and sanitation, when people swallow food or water contaminated with Vibrio cholerae bacteria.
“Malawi’s water-sanitation indicators were already extremely bad,” said Kamadje, “but the storms made a bad situation worse.”
Flash floods spread sewage into lakes and boreholes, washed away pipelines and sanitation infrastructure, and ruined roads integral to the delivery of supplies. By one government estimate, Ana alone destroyed 54,000 latrines and about 340 wells. People displaced from their homes turned to whatever water sources were available, often ones that were highly contaminated, and transmitted the disease as they moved to new areas.
While Malawi’s outbreak was spreading across its borders to Zambia and Mozambique, hundreds of thousands of people in Pakistan reported cholera symptoms amid a massive monsoon season that left a third of the country fully underwater. And in Nigeria, cases spiked after over a million people were displaced by extreme flooding during the 2022 rainy season.
The global cholera surge drove a vaccine shortage right when countries needed it most. Malawi in the past used the cholera vaccine for prevention, but “now if you don’t have an outbreak, you don’t get the vaccine,” said Otim Patrick Ramadan, WHO incident manager for regional cholera response in Africa. In response to the shortage, the international coordinating group for cholera vaccines changed its vaccination protocol in October from two doses to one, reducing protection from two years to about five months.
Climate change doesn’t only affect cholera through worsening floods and storms. Hotter temperatures and longer and drier droughts can also have an impact.
“With a severe shortage of water, the remaining sources become easily contaminated, because everyone is using them for everything,” Ramadan said. “We have seen that in the greater Horn of Africa.” Amid a prolonged and extreme drought, which has been directly attributed to climate change, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya all saw cholera proliferate over the past year. In drought areas that have experienced crop failure, malnourishment has also reduced immunity to diseases.
Climate change doesn’t only affect cholera through worsening floods and storms. Hotter temperatures and longer and drier droughts can also have an impact.
Johns Hopkins University infectious disease epidemiologist Andrew Azman, who specializes in cholera research, cautions against making sweeping statements about climate change turbocharging cholera globally.
“We know cholera is seasonal in much of the world, but the associations between precipitation, drought, floods, and cholera are not really clear,” Azman said. “In some places, more precipitation increases cholera risk. In some places, it’s less precipitation.” He added that destructive storms in the past have not led to massive cholera outbreaks at the scale of the recent epidemic in Malawi, so it’s important to also consider other factors.
“While the storms may have created good conditions for transmission, the outbreak happened after a few years of relative calm in terms of exposures,” Azman said. “Immunologically, you had a much more naive population.” The strain circulating had also been newly introduced from Asia, and scientists are currently studying whether it was more transmissible.
Research suggesting that cholera is largely contracted from bacteria that lives in the aquatic environment and thrives under increasing temperatures has mostly been discredited, said Azman. “But one of the big mechanisms by which extreme events will impact cholera risk is the destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure,” he said. “That is an important point, because we can block those impacts if we invest in [those things].”
Climate Connections: A warming planet, pathogens, and diseases
A potentially fatal pathogen, Candida auris has adapted to cross the “temperature barrier” into humans, causing cases to jump by 1,200% since 2017.
Kamadju agrees. “Cholera is just a mark of inequity and poverty,” he said. “It’s a problem of investment, development, and infrastructure.” Malawi’s outbreak came at a time of economic crisis, with its currency devalued in May 2022. Limited health resources were also stretched thin by COVID-19 and a polio outbreak, the first in 30 years.
This March, a year after the cholera outbreak began and as cases were beginning to go down, Malawi and its neighbors braced for a new storm. Cyclone Freddy turned out to be the longest-lasting cyclone ever on record, causing untold damage and killing more than 800 people across Mozambique, Madagascar, and Malawi, with some counts even higher. But while cholera cases started to spike in Mozambique as predicted, in Malawi they continued their downward trend.
Ramadan says that’s in large part because the ongoing cholera response already occurring in Malawi’s southern region — high vaccination rates, advanced distribution of water tablets and supplies, and messaging around cholera — reduced transmission in spite of the direct impacts to infrastructure.
Maritz of UNICEF worries that a shift in Malawi’s methodology for reporting cholera cases may be giving a false impression of just how successful those mitigation efforts are. On June 1, as cases continued to decline significantly, Malawi shifted to an endemic protocol for measuring cholera, which requires a rapid diagnostic test and a lab sample to confirm an infection. In contrast, during an outbreak, anyone who presents at a clinic with symptoms gets marked as a case.
Kamadjeu said this strategy made sense given the low number of current cases. But Maritz says that capacity challenges and delays in testing with the new protocol have led to underreporting of cases.
“We are still seeing people arriving at clinics with cholera symptoms that are not being reported in the national dashboards,” said Mira Khadka, an emergency health specialist leading cholera response for UNICEF in Malawi’s Blantyre district. It’s hard to mask a big cholera outbreak if people start dying, but the reporting lag is still cause for concern.
“Agencies that were responding to the cholera outbreak are now withdrawing,” said Khadka. “This can create the potential for another big outbreak to start.”
A team of government officials and health experts is assessing reporting methods in the southern districts where cases persist.
“What climate change means for us as a humanitarian agency is that we cannot do business as usual anymore,” Maritz said. “We are already preparing that most likely come January, February, there will be another cyclone with a huge flooding event.”
This story is part of the Grist arts and culture seriesRemember When, a weeklong exploration of what happened to the climate solutions that once clogged our social feeds.
In 1997, Jay Shafer built his first tiny house: a miniature country chapel with tastefully weathered wood, a high-pitched roof, and tall, crimson-trimmed windows. The exercise was part design challenge, part architectural rebellion. Shafer’s abode measured roughly 12 feet tall and 8 feet wide, less than the minimum size requirements for a house dictated by most building codes.
“Once I learned it was illegal to live in a house that small, I decided I had to,” he said, “just to show that it was actually a safe and efficient and reasonable thing to do.”
But as Shafer would soon learn, tiny-home living appealed to more than those with a taste for civil disobedience. While most Americans were never going to move en masse into trailer-size homes, within certain environmental circles, it was fairly common to hear someone sigh into a Nalgene and declare, “I’d really like to live in a tiny house someday.” The idea particularly seemed to enchant people who idealized a low-footprint, quality-over-quantity style of life — one in which they could awaken in a loft bed, wrap themselves in linen, brew a French press in a compact yet exquisitely designed kitchen, emerge onto the tiny dew-covered porch, and sip thoughtfully as sunlight filtered through pine needles.
A tiny home sits on an RV trailer in Richmond, Virginia, in 2015.
Mike Morgan / The Washington Post via Getty Images
One of the very early tiny-house adopters, Shafer is sometimes credited with “inventing” the minicottage aesthetic that launched this fantasy. In 2000, he founded his own design and construction company, Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, and by the time he left the company 12 years later, the business had seen “exponential growth.” An entire ecosystem of tiny house blogs, books, reality series, and documentaries had cropped up extolling the virtues of living better by living with less.
But for all the hubbub, tiny houses never really entered the mainstream realm of homeownership. Instead, they entered the province of tourists seeking a brief decampment to a smaller-scale, climate-friendly lifestyle. You’re more likely to encounter one while scrolling through $300-a-night Airbnb listings than browsing Zillow.
This is not to say that the tiny-house movement failed. Rather, the expectations placed upon it were too high: that it could take on all the sins of a bloated, profit-driven housing industry, and deliver us as a nation to a humbler, happier way of living.
“The movement is still strong,” said Shafer. “It just seemed like a lot of parasites were attaching themselves to it. You have the movement, and then a lot of people that were trying to make money off it.”
A sign hangs on a tiny house called “Babe,” which is used as a holiday lodge in the Catskills. Christina Horsten / picture alliance via Getty Images
Shafer defines a tiny house as one in which “all the space was used efficiently and nothing was lacking.” A more technical definition is a structure taking up no more than 600 square feet, with permanent provisions for living, sleeping, eating, cooking, and sanitation, but those are relatively palatial parameters for the more hardcore tiny house devotees. They would argue that a true tiny house is 8.5 feet wide and able to fit on a wheeled base, like an RV chassis. The amenities of such structures can range enormously, from a barely glorified camp bedroom to a fully functioning home complete with hot water, a composting toilet, and a solar array.
A tiny home with all the trimmings might set you back $100,000 or so — not exactly a small investment. But shortly after the 2008 recession and housing market crash, tiny houses started to look appealing to a generation of young people disillusioned by their parents’ overblown, overmortgaged homes.
There is also, of course, an environmental appeal to a tiny house. The size of a house strongly correlates with the resources required to keep it powered, cooled, and heated. If your home is very, very small, your personal use of those resources will be quite minimal. (Granted, this is equally true for a Manhattan studio as it is for a tiny house, and a Manhattan studio will never need to be hauled using a 500-horsepower truck.) And extremely limited storage eliminates the opportunity for wasteful consumption of stuff, a significant American climate culprit.
A ladder leads to a lofted bed in a tiny home in Richmond, Virginia, in 2015.
Mike Morgan / The Washington Post via Getty Images
In 2011, Christopher Smith, freshly out of college and starting to imagine the shape his adult life might take, bought a plot of land in “middle-of-nowhere” Colorado with the dream of building a small homestead on it with his own hands. The precipitous costs of meeting building code requirements quickly eroded that vision, and he began to lose faith in ever having enough money to have a home on that land.
By chance, Smith’s mother had recently sent him a copy of YES! Magazine, with tiny-house movement pioneer Dee Williams on the cover. After reading Williams’ profile, he realized that the wheeled design of the tiny-house base would remove the costly requirements of building a foundation structure that was up to code. “It made the whole project possible,” he said. “For me, the tiny house was a solution to a problem. But for a lot of people, I think it was more of a lifestyle choice — to simplify, downsize, control finances — a bit of a different motivation.”
Christopher Smith and Merete Mueller, photographed in 2012, sit in front of their tiny home on land near Hartsel, Colorado. The exterior of the home is 19 feet by 7 feet. Cyrus McCrimmon / The Denver Post
Smith built the house with his then-partner, Merete Mueller, and the two filmed the whole process in a documentary, TINY: A Story About Living Small.
“After the film came out, the tiny-house movement kind of blew up,” he said. “I’m not saying it was entirely due to the film, but it had a fairly large impact on it, the fact it was on Netflix and Hulu and all that. We knew it was this idea that was coming at the right time, but the speed, the way it became this phenomenon, took us by surprise.”
Suddenly, tiny houses were popping up everywhere across the internet. You couldn’t shake a stick at your Facebook feed without hitting a shared photo of some wee storybook cottage tucked away in a forest grove. Mueller categorizes the phenomenon of the tiny-house social media craze under a very “millennial” way of posting — one that leans heavily on perfection and idealization, in contrast with Gen Z’s ostensibly more unfiltered approach.
“All of this coincided with this era of Instagram and social media and a time where the thing was more, ‘Look at these cute perfect houses!’” she said. “Even me and Christopher, the way we were posting and sharing about our experiences did definitely have this perfect, hashtaggy — now looking back on it — barf-inducing flavor.”
A reporter looks in the window of a tiny home called Alfa in the woods of Tiny Home Estates on June 5, 2019 in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.
DON EMMERT / AFP via Getty Images
By 2014, the debut of the Netflix home improvement-style reality show Tiny House Nation had launched the movement fully into the mainstream. And that was around when, to hear Jay Shafer tell it, the good intentions of the tiny-house movement became overshadowed by consumer obsession. “The industry became a commercial thing,” he said. “It wasn’t so much about civil disobedience or about aesthetics so much as it was about selling houses.”
In 2005, when the sustainable-housing developer and writer Lloyd Alter first laid eyes on a sleek, solar- and wind-powered tiny house on wheels, designed by the architect Andy Thomson, he fell completely in love with it. It was a “gorgeous, modern design,” and he imagined toting it around the continent to park in beautiful scenic places and show at conventions. He happily paid $120,000 for it.
But what he quickly learned was that hauling the house was prodigiously expensive. One such journey from Toronto to Philadelphia cost around $4,000, and finding a place to park the damn thing for long periods of time was nearly impossible. If you don’t own land, it’s very challenging — especially in cities — to find a place to legally park a tiny house and connect it to utilities. Even if you do own land, you might be subject to all kinds of restrictions on the usage of your tiny house, due to aforementioned pesky minimum housing-size requirements.
“It just became a millstone,” Alter said. “I paid all this money, I couldn’t afford to take it to shows, it’s too expensive. And because it was small, people would say, ‘You want $450 per square foot for it? What are you smoking?’ And in a sense, they were right. You could get a house for much, much, much cheaper per square foot, and they did come with land! I finally sold it last year at an incredible loss, and sort of put it out of my mind as one of my bigger mistakes.”
In the United States, a person’s home is usually their most valuable financial asset. Traditional real estate tends to appreciate in value, which arguably rationalizes the massive upfront cost of buying a home. But tiny houses are different, particularly ones built on wheels, because they depreciate pretty quickly. That’s on top of an extremely high price per-square-foot, which is also hard to swallow for the standard American homebuyer.
A truck pulls a 135-square-foot tiny house built on a Tumbleweed trailer through Portland, Maine, in 2013
Yoon S. Byun / Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
But the rise of Airbnb offered a “guaranteed business model” for people who wanted to make a tiny house into a legitimately profitable investment, said Zach Milburn, a real estate developer. That’s because short-term rentals will always net more money than month-to-month ones, according to an economic theory known as the “rent gap.” Several scholars have pointed to this phenomenon as a cause of gentrification driven by Airbnb, as homeowners convert what would otherwise be stable monthly housing into more profitable short-term rentals.
Tiny houses are tailor-made Airbnb bait, so to speak, and have become the highest-grossing “unique space type” on the platform, producing $195 million in revenue for hosts in 2021.
“There are three parts,” said Milburn. “They’re Instagrammable, and the cute-cozy aspect is attractive to people as well. And especially after the birth of these shows like Tiny House Nation, I think a lot of people want to try it out and are willing to pay a decent amount for a unique experience.”
Merete Mueller suggests that the proliferation of tiny houses as vacation retreats may have contributed to the fading of a cultural craze around them. “It used to be something that was an extreme enough lifestyle that it was more exciting to get a window into how someone did it, why they chose to go that route, and how it was panning out or impacting their daily life,” she said. “But when you could book one for the weekend and stay in it as a vacation house, it just became more and more normal. It became less exciting.”
Though tiny-house media coverage today is dominated by listicles of petite properties one can rent in any vacation destination under the sun, the idea that tiny houses could be harnessed for the greater good of society hasn’t gone away entirely. Cities like Seattle and Oakland have floated them as a stopgap measure for homelessness, to mixed degrees of success. The Accessory Dwelling Unit, or ADU, movement has fought for years and years to make tiny houses a viable solution to the affordable housing crisis. The idea is that if enough homeowners construct tiny houses in their backyards, it could increase supply in neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes. The concept is particularly appealing in increasingly expensive, lower-density cities like Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles.
One of 150 tiny homes constructed for people transitioning from homelessnes sits in a community in North Hollywood.
Gutknecht / MediaNews Group / Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images
Smith, the TINY documentarian, said that he sees the clearest evidence of the effectiveness of the tiny-house movement in a quieter yet crucial realm: incorporation into municipal building codes.
At the beginning of the movement, “from a regulatory or legal perspective, it really felt like it could go either way,” he said. “Government could clamp down, or it would always be this gray area or this fringe thing. But it became bigger and people started fighting to get building codes for tiny houses, and it’s been embraced by the housing-first community and people working on homelessness. There’ve been a lot of people in the tiny-house world who really fought to legitimize tiny houses, and they’ve largely done that.”
Anything that becomes wildly popular eventually faces backlash. After all, you will bang your head on the ceiling that hovers four feet over the loft bed and crack the glass carafe of the French press on the corner of the countertop in the ridiculously small kitchen. Winter makes the beautiful tiny porch unusable for six months of the year.
“It kind of became political in a way that it wasn’t,” said TINY documentarian Smith. “When I started to learn about tiny houses, a lot of conservatives were in this movement, people who were looking at ways to be more self-sufficient and live a simpler life. I think what ended up happening was there was a group of people who started taking it as this liberal ploy to get everyone to cram themselves into tiny houses, saying that’s what the environmental movement wanted, and we saw a lot of those reactions to our movie.”
Christopher Smith and Merete Mueller, seen here in 2012, stand beside the tiny home they built together. Cyrus McCrimmon / The Denver Post
Mueller also attributes the backlash to the glowing, idealized nature of tiny-house media coverage in the first place. “Maybe if it had been framed in a more normal, realistic, middle-of-the-road way, it wouldn’t have had such a peak and decline,” she said. “I actually think that the most realistic representation of tiny houses is that it’s a thing that people do for a number of years to get to the next stage in their life.”
Mueller and Smith didn’t live in the tiny house they built together for more than a couple of months. They moved to New York for some time to work on their documentary, and eventually broke up. Smith moved to Los Angeles, intermittently transporting the tiny house around rural properties in Colorado and Montana. The cost and ordeal of moving it became too onerous, and he eventually sold it in 2020.
For her part, Mueller ended up staying in New York. “I was always excited about tiny houses as an ethos and a philosophy that could be applied to other square footages — it didn’t have to be the 120-square-foot house that fits on a flatbed,” she said. “Minimalism, experiences, and relationships over material possessions, those are still things I really stand by, and still kind of how I live my life. A New York City apartment is perfect for me.”
