The parasites desire to return our lives to 19th century industrial revolution living standards where entire families lived in open communal basement spaces with only a broom closets worth of space to live in then immediately say your life is still better than the 19th century because at least you have hot chips, T.V., and a smartphone to doomscroll on.
I’ll be real with you the one thing I won’t compromise on in anything housing related it is having private bathrooms.
One of the pivots I made in the past couple years was on the ubiquity of plumbing. We can snicker about how “the Nacirema measure their status by the number and lavishness of their household shrines dedicated to obscuring and purifying what they see as the innate ugliness of the body”, but it really is a measurable aspect of enculturation.
It is a human need to be able to relieve yourself somewhere that is less than 2 minutes away, and also to be able to wash up somewhere reasonably close. After living in a commune where the toilets were all composting and the shower was gravity-fed from a rain barrel with black piping to warm it up with just the sun, I realized that turning a water faucet on ~50 times a day and having 150 feet of water pressure directed to every 100-m³-sized voxel are not really so essential. It takes a lot more consideration in construction to resolve putting water inside a building, when water is something that you’re typically trying to keep out of the building. We can build really elaborate structures to accommodate everyone, and they can either be cheap and last a long time, or we can run water all around the interior and have an emergency that pops up whenever it clogs or overflows or leaks.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t or can’t want your own bathroom, but it drives up the complexity, almost as much as someone saying “I don’t want anybody above me”. We spend a huge amount of resources on things that we don’t really need and that are prone to breaking down. One of the best examples of this is the analyses of how suburbs and exurbs are a net drain on public works. On a planet with finite resources, in the throes of late stage capitalism, we are going to have to respond to many problems and whether they will be solved by exclusive rights or access rights. After all, every demand we make about standards of living for each person translates to a certain amount of labor that someone must be compelled to do.
My conclusion was that I could have a good quality of life with a fraction of the water access that I grew up accustomed to, and maybe a fraction of the electricity access too. My baseline for exclusive rights is 4 walls with a bed, a desk, a chair, a window, enough space to stretch, and maybe a lamp.
theres nothing that’ll change a person’s mind quicker about having interior plumbing than living in arctic conditions. having to wade through snow just to take a shit in a -20 degree outhouse is a positively miserable experience with the only net positive is that its so cold it doesnt stink anymore. Being able to take a comfortable shit should be a human right and I’ll never budge on this issue.
No one said you had to hike outside a dwelling; you can achieve this with an earth-bermed extension with insulated windows and a covered walkway that wraps around the main building to it. (Yes, I’ve lived in snowy climates)
The question is whether you can provide for said comfortable shit by your own power, or if your lifestyle imposes a requirement upon someone else.
People have made gradual improvements to human-scale solutions for millenia; it’s actually easier to do without connecting it to a water main