Lady Exoduster

From a broke city lady to a self-reliant lady homesteader.

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Across The Land And Into The Sunshine State

“Is this bon voyage?” Letisha, my gurl from my old corporate job days, sleepily said as she rolled over and got up from the sofa. “Yep,” I replied as I pulled my carry-on and rolling bag behind me through the narrow doorways and into the living room Letisha gave me a good sistahhug. Her son gave me another at his mom’s behest.

“I’m so excited for you!”, she squealed as she clasped her hands. “Thanks, hun. And thank you for hosting me!” She opened the door, and I passed into the echoing hallway. “California or bust?”, she said, laughing. “California or bust!”

Her son, while hugging her, reminded her to not be late. “What time do you have to be at work?” “Nine-thirty. But I have to get Charlie to school by 8:30. Staggering the time.” We wave as I wait for the elevator. Charlie pull-hugged on her to get going. “May I say goodbye to her?” The elevator dinged at arrival. One more wave, and I entered…and exited into the chilly cobalt-blue dawn, two scarves in hand, and searching for a place to dump them. I already have four of them, probably two more than I need. But hey…

I climbed into the train and watch the mostly Black and Brown day workers and homeless men find their seats. As the train tugged and screeched from stop to stop into Manhattan, the demographic shifts, reflecting both more varied genders and a consolidation due to gentrification. Sleepiness undulated through me—I got up about 4:30AM—but I quell it so I can get off and on at the right stop.

As Letisha said to me last night, my getting to JFK from the Manhattan stop meant escalators. Escalator up, escalator down and to the E train. I asked two MTA employees which side I should stand on to get to JFK. One of them said the opposite side. After the other one flashlight-flagged the conductor, he turned to me and said to stand near the second escalator. That particular train will let me off right at the Airtrain’s mechanical stairs. I thanked him  for the advice and stood where he told me to. Sure enough, my heavy bags and I connected with the Airtrain.

Wheeling hurriedly to Virgin America’s ticket desk, with about 45 minutes to get to the plane, I reached the agent. Refusing to check in my bigger bag—no money and no time--I scampered to the security line. I had to go through an extra security patdown because of my very expired ID. The very sweet female agent asked if I minded if she patted me in public or a private room, I teased that it wouldn’t matter because, thanks to my burlesque training, I could strip just about anywhere. We laughed. For all of the trouble, my expired ID cost me a confiscated $2 bottle of Suave body wash because it was too large to carry on the plane. I made it just in time…and I didn’t have to pay extra for my bag after all because it was too big to be considered as a carry-on. And the extra lovely of it all? A window seat! And on a very downtempo plane, all magenta and violet and tiny frosted white reading lights.

California or bust. So far, California…

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Saying Goodbye With Money

Me: So, I got a little choked up when I closed my [bank] account. As the cliche goes, an ending of an era. Tami: Aw, sis. It is the end of one phase of your life. It's natural to mourn that--for everything it was and wasn't. Me: Thank you for that benediction. ::hugs::

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To understand the breadth of tiny homes and the lure--and my upcoming critiques--of the Tiny House Movement, here's documentarian Kirsten Dirksen's 90-minute primer on it, called We The Tiny House People. 

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Jumping Out Of My Old Life

I bought my ticket for CA the other day. 

What cliche can I use to describe my excitement? Butterflies in my stomach? Screaming down that first rollercoaster hill? Jumping off a cliff? My every step has an extra spring, ready to propel me as I want to click my heels in mid-air? Joy cartwheeling through my heart, veins, and soul? All of them and more: champagne-bubble popping, giggly giddiness, wanna-hug-life, walking-on-sunshine, confetti-throwing, kiss-blowing elation. 

It won't become real until I'm on the plane and in the clouds, of course. But for right now, the ebullience buoys my last days in New York City. I even smile at another forecast for more snow on the East Coast.

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The historical assumptions we have about 'the great buildings of the world'--the Egyptian pyramids, the European and Asian fortresses, the great and marvelous metropolises that we see around us--they're expressions of a civilization, and they're great records. But what are they records of? In fact, in most cases, they were created by the oppression of others--and, in some cases, the downright slavery of generations and generations of people. And so you think, Well, what's so important and valuable about that? What does that mean to us now? We're still doing that today!

Eugene Tsui, Architect, Tsui Design and Research, from the documentary First Earth: Uncompromising Ecological Architecture

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Out of all of Kirsten Dirksen's Fair Companies' videos, I replay this one most often. Johnny Sanphillippo's story of buying land in Hawaii and building his mortgage-free tiny home on his housekeeper's salary--he makes $20K/year--inspires me and his insights re-shaped my ideas about wanting to take on a mortgage as well as validate my own decision to head westward.

"Mortgages make things fast. They speed up the process; it's instant gratification. Building a house slowly over a period of ten years on a cash basis means you have a much smaller house. It means you don't get everything you want right away. "Historically, most people never got mortgages because the banking system was really for rich people to loan money to each other for very specific things. And, if you wanted a home, you basically built it yourself Amish-style, like the barn-raising, or an extended family would get together, and Grandma and Grandpa and Mom and Dad and the kids ad the grandkids would all live in one big house because that's what your had to do to house yourself. Or people just rented. Now, it's like a shortcut--you can go and get a loan, and you can buy the big house with five bedrooms and six bathrooms and a two-car garage and a bonus room. And you get all at once, up-front, quick--you get everything you want right away. And you just pay it off for 30 years. "But that's kind of a lie, though, because nobody ever really pays off their home in 30 years. What happens is about 10 or 15 years into it you refinance your home. Then, "Oh! I can use this to buy a car...Oh! we need a new kitchen and the master bathroom can use a facelift..." And you do this whole thing. So, as time goes on, your house gets bigger and fancier, but your mortgage never really goes away. In fact, the mortgage keeps getting bigger. And there are a lot of financial incentive to do that: you can deduct all the interest on your mortgage, and that sort of thing. If you own a small house and you never improve it and you pay off the mortgage like you're supposed to, you're told you're not doing things correctly, that you're not taking advantage of the financial opportunities built into the mortgage system. But it means that people are 65, they lived in their homes all their lives, and they still have a huge mortgage."

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Thus Begins The Lady Exoduster

Even though home ownership is down, the media outlets report, the housing market is stabilizing. The Christian Science Monitor’s Mark Trumball, in his November 14, 2013 story, says:

“Some 64.7 percent of US units were owned, rather than rented, during the period from 2010-12. That represents a meaningful  drop from the level of 66.4 percent that prevailed during the prior three-year period, from 2007-09. “The downward trend isn’t a necessarily a bad thing. Rather, it may be a sign of the housing market normalizing after a period, before the recession…Today, by many measures, the US housing market isin recovery is in recovery mode: Foreclosures are fading, home prices are rising, and low mortgage rates are helping to keep housing relatively affordable by historical standards.”

And, indeed, that may be the case. But it doesn’t feel that way, especially to people of color in this country. It feels like the homes we own aren’t financially worth it, to ourselves and to the greater market. After all, banks disproportionately targeted Latinos and African Americans for subprime home loans (30.9 percent and 41.5 percent, respectively), regardless of our credit ratings and incomes. These communities are also disproportionately  suffering from foreclosures (11.9 percent for Latinos and 9.8 percent for African Americans), and foreclosed-upon homes in these communities are less likely to be maintained or even listed for sale, which further runs down these neighborhoods. My own friends, who got caught in the subprime imbroglio, attest to this through their prickled hurt of seeing their wealth-building dreams through home ownership staying stuck in that briar patch. This, even as some of the media reports that home ownership is still the main way to gain wealth for folks who don’t own stock or other assets and others have soured on the idea.

Having been a renter myself all of my adult life and am currently homeless due to losing my own place from a lack of steady income from freelancing, I, too, believed that renting was the single-and-childless way to pay someone else to worry about the busted water heater or the snow removal. But, to paraphrase the campaign slogan, New York City’s rent is too damn high and, considering the still-bleak housing situation, I’m not even looking forward renting again, let alone to financially swinging a mortgage, which is really paying rent for 30 years to a bank for a home and the homeowner is still stuck with all of the repairs and removals. Considering that two-thirds of US homeowners still have mortgages and that the housing crisis have sobered them up to seriously think about paying off that debt and that, right before the housing-market crisis decimated the finances of women of color, only 33 percent of Black women and 28 percent of Latinas owned their homes…there has to be another way. 

That way, for me, comes in the form of tiny-house living, a response to the McMansions and toward ecological sustainability. My friend Aiesha introduced it to me as a link on Facebook a couple of years ago as I lived in my own 250 square-foot attic studio in Coney Island (from which Superstorm Sandy displaced me). I knew I was capable—I was doing it, after all—and even envisioned mini Tiny House communities for me and my single, progressive homegurls, complete with communal gardens, in the rare empty lots in Brooklyn. As I couch-surfed at a friend’s place a couple of weeks ago, that mere theory blossomed into a practical obsession, to the point I dreamed of building my own from shipping containers, like the one below.

I tripped merrily into full-length and mini-documentaries about the Tiny House Movement—some of my favorites I’ll feature here—and discovered a man who built one in Hawaii on his housekeeper’s salary of $20K/year and a woman who created a studio made of cob and recycled materials for $500! 

I stumbled upon my midlife, life-changing answer.

So, like the Exodusters before me and so many people around our mostly of-color world--estimates say that about half the world lives in a dwelling made of earth--I plan to create my own tiny home built from the very dirt of the land I plan to own, complete with a garden (even on the roof) and solar panels powered by the California sunshine.  I’ll chart my own admittedly radical journey in hopes that more people, especially people of color, might recalibrate the idea that the wealth of a home may not necessarily rest in its large size and future equity but its affordability and manageability—after all, excluding human labor, a cob house can be built for as little as $500, but can run, on average and if its less than 1000 square feet, about $3000-$7000. (My own place will be about 600 square feet.)

However the housing market shakes out, I’m leaving this broke city lady life and buying a one-way ticket to The Sunshine State to become a Black lady homesteader--for my own stability. And no briar patches.