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My grandfather was a drill bit sharpener during the oil boom in Okahoma and Texas. When a new drilling field would open, men and their families would flock there, requiring lodging and food in a community completely unprepared to deal with the onslaught.

My grandparents and their three children traveled in one of those big, black, hearse-looking automobiles, packed full, with stuff on the roof -- a big tent, a gramophone, linens, mattresses, cooking ware etc.

The need for bare-basics shelter for so many people was the problem and the solution was the shotgun house.


This house isn't from an oil boom town, but it looks just like one.

So would this the be forerunner of the tiny house?

(Are there ways around zoning restrictions? I mean, if you take the wheels off a trailer and put it on a foundation, wouldn't it be a pre-fab home or modular or something?)

(Ooh. And what about those shipping container houses? There are some pretty cool ones. And they're cheap ... if you live near a place that has a lot of shipping containers. I'm not sure what shipping on a shipping container is. But they could be kind of like Jenga housing ... pull one out, and the rest might not collapse.)

But back to shot gun houses. Many were company housing, built to lure desperately needed skilled workers. Others were privately built and owned. But they were mostly built on tiny lots, and each one had to protect itself from the elements independently. That isn't really the cheapest way to live. Apartments and townhouses share walls, so the fight against the weather is shared.

My son once rented an apartment above a frame shop downtown on bar street of a small college town (the one we live in). Heat (gas) was going to cost him a bundle. But we figured that the frame shop under him would be heated (and heat goes up). Plus he had a neighbor in front of him and behind him, an owner-heated stair-hall beside him, and only one wall exposed to the outside. He decided not to turn on the gas until he really needed heat. He never did need to get the gas turned on.

I like the idea of tiny houses; I like the building of equity. But I'm not sure they are as efficient as they need to be. Maybe the slapping on of wheels and relocating cancels out that efficiency thing ... if this generation needs to be mobile in order to earn a living wage.