Rethinking Home Sweet Home

Americans resist the notion that homelessness is now normal in their country. Anyone older than 20 can remember when virtually no one was living on the streets of the United States. The hope lingers that something that came with such speed will pass with equal speed. Unfortunately, an impressive body of research suggests the opposite.

If homelessness is a disease with no quick cure, are there at least palliatives for it? There may be some, but perhaps only if we can begin thinking of person, place and house in a new way. Hitherto, we have thought of the “house” as a thing fixed to a place, and of the house/place unit as owned or rented by a person.

But what if the link of a house to a specific site could be broken and “a roof over my head” could be thought of as a portable product? Project X, a course taught by Steve Diskin at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, asks: “Can we think of little buildings as big products? Can environmental designers and product designers get together and work toward new solutions for small-scale habitat?” In other words, can we begin thinking about things to live in rather than places to live?

Portable houses--tents, recreational vehicles, mobile homes--are nothing new in our society, of course, but even a car needs a parking place. Diskin says that whatever design breakthroughs he and his students might achieve must be matched by zoning breakthroughs. Los Angeles has in its zoning code a little-noticed RU (Residential Urban) category that is “designed to encourage the subdivision of small single-family residential lots for development with manufactured homes. . . .” RU, by permitting temporary, manufactured housing on single-family lots where they are normally forbidden, is different from the “quarantine” zoning that accommodates conventional mobile home parks. Unsurprisingly, only one tiny parcel of land has actually been zoned RU.

But if the homeless are not going to disappear as quickly and mysteriously as they appeared, then the recognition may finally dawn that unconventional shelter and unconventional zoning require each other and that urban America requires the combination. The Times applauds Project X and encourages the city authorities to consider wider use of RU.