George Carlin, Climate Change, and the Future of Housing

A few weeks ago, I turned on HBO’s biographical documentary about the late comedian George Carlin. I’ve long been a fan of Carlin and his ability to comically slice through the hypocrisy and inhumanity that permeate most aspects of modern life. Years ago, when I worked for the micro-apartment startup LifeEdited, I wrote about Carlin’s famous routine about houses, stuff, and the meaning of life, a routine replayed on the documentary. In my piece, I waxed about the implications of designing homes, not as vessels for stuff, not as debt-bought deliverers of existential salvation, but as structures that support healthy humans, societies, and ecosystems.

Watching Carlin’s bit was poignant in light of conversations I’ve had with a new consulting client, Eco-Panels. I found the company while putting together a research report for a major retailer about the future of housing in America. Eco-Panels manufactures easy-assembly, super-strong, ultra-high-energy-performance, non-toxic structural building panels. I was impressed by the elegance, flexibility, and efficiency aspects of their product, which lends itself to countless use cases and environments.

As a consultant, I’ve been tasked with presenting Eco-Panels’ in a compelling way to prospective homebuyers, contractors, developers, architects, and other building decision-makers. But to make their products more compelling than conventional “stick construction,” one must see homes as more than commodities, status symbols, or to Carlin’s point, mere places to put stuff.

The Pre-Stuffed Home

Around 2017, I put together a continuing education (CEU) presentation about the past, present, and future of space-saving design (I know, I get all the fun jobs). In the report, I learned of George Washington’s fascination with space-saving furniture and fell in love with traditional Japanese architecture. I also learned the bedroom is a fairly modern invention and that medieval villages would often sleep en masse in Great Halls, with commoners and noble folk sharing one easy-to-heat-and-protect space. En suite was not an option.

Prior to industrialized construction — factory timber, power tools, etc . — making buildings was an expensive and time-intensive affair. Heating and cooling homes was also more involved than turning up a thermostat and paying a bill. There was no stuff to buy. Resource-intensive real estate and thermoregulation and few household possessions meant most spaces prior to the 19th century would be considered compact, space-saving, minimalistic, and multi-purpose by today’s standards.

The Brun family home is described as a typical middle-class home in 16th century Oslo, Norway.

In my research, I ran across the book “6,000 Years of Housing,” in which author Norbert Schoenauer profiles a typical 16th century Oslo home, where 2,240 feet was used as living quarters for fifteen, an office for the father, a stable for horses, and farm for livestock. Farm-houses, shop-houses, and other historic architectural models attest that work-from-home was a norm far longer than commuting from home to office.

Whether in a village or in the country, the main function of preindustrial housing was to protect its occupants from the elements and attack in the most resource efficient manner possible.

Housing: from Self-Protection to Self-Promotion

As a trip to Versailles will attest, not all preindustrial homes were strictly utilitarian. Throughout history, homes have served as status conveyors and places to store wealth. And as Louis XVI will attest, history is pocked with consequences when too many resources are needed for the construction and upkeep of extraneous housing. Countless wars have been waged, billions of lives taxed, exploited, tortured, and killed — all in the service of building and maintaining bigger, better homes (more or less).

Industrialization permitted a greater number of people to have things once limited to the wealthy, whether in the form of personal castles/homes, carriages/cars, and luxury goods/Instapots. Modern HVAC systems and subsidized utility service made heating and cooling spaces, even unused ones, cheap.

Castles for everyone! This abandoned Turkish suburban development architecturally express in an overt way what suburbs have done for years: giving everyone a fortified castle of their own.

This widespread access to industrial housing, consumer goods, and cheap energy ratcheted up considerably following WWII. Initially, industrial and energy markets were relatively small and domestic, and the scale of America’s housing remained commensurately modest. In 1950, the average new single family home was 983 square feet, which housed an average of 3.37 people. But as industrial markets grew, home sizes, consumer spending, and power consumption did as well. Today, the average new home is 2,540 square feet with 2.54 people. Fewer people, more space to fill, heat, and cool.

This graph is a little old, but numbers have remained more of less the same: houses remain huge (~2600 square feet for new homes) while the number of people occupying those homes continue to shrink.

Commodifying housing further decoupled it from its historic protective function. Today’s housing is as likely to be treated as an appreciating asset to trade or extract revenue from as a product to use. Mortgage backed securities (MBS) are one of the principal commodities maintaining U.S. GDP and undergirding the US dollar and Federal Reserve. Many of these securities are connected to low-quality, inefficient, underutilized housing.

The grey lines at the end represent newly issued debt issued in the last two years into mortgage backed securities, which recently made up a small percent of FED-backed securities.

Because building bigger is cheaper than building better, and because home size (square footage) is connected to market commodity value, consumers have been encouraged to buy bigger than they need. The size and low quality of these homes make them more expensive to maintain and more vulnerable to climate threats. For many of the 64 percent of American adults who own their homes alongside FED-backed lenders, their low-quality, inefficient homes comprise a huge percent of their net worth. Few at stake in this system have any incentive to change or challenge the value of these homes, many of which have enjoyed decades of steady appreciation.

The $26M price tag for a Miami waterfront mansion unlikely includes climate risk adjustment.

Back to the Future: Using Housing to Protect

Luckily for Eco-Panels, a warming planet will make change inevitable. The growth of $1B weather and climate events attest that storms, flooding, wildfire, and drought are growing in frequency and devastation with no end in sight. Quite the contrary, things will get much worse.

Existing building code will quickly be proven insufficient to withstand new conditions, insulation and mechanical systems pushed far beyond historic limits. Outlying, yet numerous events like Texas ice storms and Alaskan heat vortexes mean threats will be nearly impossible to predict. Most conventionally-built, grid-dependent homes and even solar-panel festooned Net-Zero homes are not prepared for these events.

The promotion of housing for its commodity and status value has come at the expense of promoting housing quality. This is not a recent phenomenon, but one that’s reaching a breaking point.

So-called “stick building” has flourished because it allows independent builders to take a bunch of sticks and turn them into a home with minimal planning or skilled labor for framing.

For the past couple centuries, America has relied on “stick construction” as its main way to occupy land. Stick construction allowed builders to turn cheap materials (industrial-cut 2x4s, more precisely) into reasonably-strong buildings requiring minimal skilled labor and planning, particularly compared to prior mason, stone, log, and post-and-beam structures. Today’s builders stick with stick over vastly-superior traditional and/or advanced building solutions like Eco-Panels for the same reasons: it’s cheap and requires minimal skilled labor and planning.

Eco-Panels’ marketing materials show the amount of thermal (energy) loss between one of their buildings and even a well-insulated stick home, whose latticework structure promotes “thermal bridging” — the transfer of heat from a building’s exterior and interior.

From Florida to Bavaria to Mumbai, buildings built to old code will become hard to maintain due to persistent moisture and low-performance interiors that are too expensive to keep comfortable. As witnessed in Texas, these events will disrupt power grid stability and increase (perhaps dramatically) energy costs. After one too many floods, after photovoltaics crack one too many times, after one too many $800 electric bills, folks will once again become cognizant of a home’s primary job: to protect its occupants from environmental harm as efficiently as possible. Towards that end, and because people like lists, here are few suggestions for doing that:

1. Go small. This should come as no surprise from me. Small requires fewer resources to manufacture, power, maintain, and dispose of than medium, big, and America’s favorite size, huge. The small axiom applies to buildings, transportation, urban plans, distribution chains, food networks, energy grids, etc.
2. Find ways to do without stuff. Because global commercial markets are so overdeveloped, consumers have been encouraged to add, upgrade, or replace stuff rather than ditching or doing without it: EVs instead of combustion cars, leased solar panels instead of grid-power, compostable cups instead of Solo cups. From four garages to smart refrigerators, there are so many things where the only “sustainable” option is to do without it. Before replacing anything, it’s helpful to ask whether the replaced thing was really ever needed. Fewer things means greater simplicity, reducing expense, upkeep, energy needs, liability, climate-exposure, etc.
3. Develop a protective shell. Climate change will, by necessity, shift existential and housing focus from protecting ego needs and personal wealth to protecting bodies, families, and communities. Storms, floods, extreme heat, fire, drought — they’re all coming to a town near you, and for many of us, they’re already here. As the strength and frequency of these things increases, the safety, and comfort of our homes can be a life or death matter. There are few more worthwhile preparations for these conditions than buttressing existing homes and developing new, climate-resilient ones using advanced building systems like Eco-Panels.