Living Simply in a Dumpster
September 16th, 2014The biggest problem to overcome with anything like this is going to be local ordinances/cops.
Even on a university campus, it’s all fun and games when it’s one guy. It’s a cool curiosity. It’s hip. Journalists can visit and write articles about the novelty of it.
Get dozens of people living in alternative dwellings and my guess is that the university’s attitude toward the experiment would sour pretty fast.
When I met my wife back in 2004, she was living in a tiny trailer that was roughly double the size of the dumpster described in the piece below. The trailer park was called Irvine Meadows West and it was located on the University of California, Irvine campus.
Take a look:
Irvine Meadows West had the most sought after student housing at the university. You might not get a sense of this from watching the video, but it was virtually impossible to get to live there. Far more people wanted to live there than space allowed. Becky happened to be there visiting a friend when someone mentioned they were leaving and that’s how she got her trailer.
There were lots of trees, gardens and a great community—and it was dirt cheap to live there. As you can imagine, the university had been wanting to annihilate that place for a couple of decades. In 2004, they finally got around to it and the guys with bulldozers and chainsaws were sent in.
No shit, they paved paradise to put up a parking lot.
Sing it, Joni:
Via: The Atlantic:
Tucked behind the women’s residence halls in a back corner of Huston-Tillotson University’s campus in Austin, Texas, sits a green dumpster. Were it not for the sliding pitched roof and weather station perched on top, a reasonable person might dismiss the box as “just another dumpster”—providing this person did not encounter the dean of the University College Jeff Wilson living inside.
Research Credit: Pookie
I disliked living in the dorms (a new one at the time called “Lorien” in “Middle Earth”) at UC Irvine in the mid 70s — absolutely no privacy, and a constant stress for a severe introvert such as I was and am, although my roommate was rather cool (Gigi Golden, whatever happened to you?). But living alone was just toooooo expensive, and thus not an option for me.
I admire this dean who lives in a dumpster. But yeah, Kevin — if he were a lowly student on a mondo tight budget instead of university admin, he’d probably have been ousted soon after he set up his digs.