What We Can Learn From the Skinniest Home in London

There is an adage I was told as a young boy about using the “whole buffalo” that stuck with me. I’ve always interpreted it as having some reverence for the culture of the Dakota, one of the two native bands that I live among here in Minnesota, so I apologize in advance if that is not the understanding shared by others. 

The adage suggests that the Dakota, as resourceful and frugal—although also resource poor—would find ways to use every part of a buffalo, or whatever other animal, plant, or land they utilized for their survival. As I learned it, the lesson was that we should not waste what we have but find a way to make the best use of all we have been given. The subtext was that only the foolish or the gluttonous waste their resources. 

I still believe that, although as my life has progressed and become far more affluent than my grandparents or even my parents—Americans today live in astounding affluence, despite the relative measurements between classes—I find myself less sensitive to waste than I was brought up to be. I recognize how, in some ways, the abundance of American culture has made me gluttonous. 

Gluttony is a vice. One of the things that appalls us the most about wealth inequality is when the super wealthy waste resources seemingly just for the sake of wasting them (although that reaction is tempered by those who have studied evolutionary biology). Back in 2017, we wrote about how grass lawns became a status symbol of nobility because only they had the capacity to waste so much arable land on growing a decorative weed. In the future, it is likely historians will recognize the same behavior in us in terms of our automobiles. 

With this in mind, you’ll understand how impressed I was to read that London’s skinniest house has been put up for sale at $1.3 million. The house is just six feet wide and sits on 0.02 acres giving it a financial productivity of $54.8 million per acre. That’s an astounding level of productivity, especially in a single, two-bedroom home. For comparison, the typical big box store is around $0.5 million per acre and the famous Jimmy’s Pizza House I use in many of my presentations is $3.4 million per acre.

Besides being impressed, I would like to point out two takeaways from this story. The first and easiest is that London is really expensive. When a neighborhood becomes a place that people want to be, there is a massive incentive to use all the available resources. When space becomes the scarce commodity, people will come up with ingenious ways for making creative use of that space. We see this in London’s skinniest house, but also in London’s “thin house” and many other skinny houses you can find through a Google search.

My personal favorite is Jeff Speck’s flatiron home in Washington D.C. Jeff is one of those smart people who not only had the imagination to use the space, but also knew how to navigate the nine-month process to get it approved. That effort was worth it because the land in DC is so expensive.

But, even where the land is not as expensive—like in Peoria, Illinois—there are incentives to make full use of the available resources, as the Gary Morris Law Office did. And I think this is closer to the second takeaway, the “whole buffalo” insight about making the most use of the available resources.

It’s not clear to me how old London’s skinniest house is, but if I found out it was older than any house still standing in New York City or Boston, that would not surprise me. It is certainly older than any structure in my part of Minnesota. That means it was built at a time, and in a place, when London was much poorer than it is today, when the land on this block was far less valuable.

Yet, look at how intensively they made use of that land. Look at how they consumed the entire buffalo, squeezing every bit of value out of what they had. We see this pattern repeated over and over throughout human history everywhere resources are scarce.

Today, we throw away valuable land for parking and zoning buffers and landscape berms that actually degrade a neighborhood. We are gluttons, given so much developed land that we squander it at mind-boggling rates. As I say in many of my presentations: most American cities are large gaps with a building tossed in here and there.

The big question presented by the skinniest home in London is really why, when it seems like we have a scarcity of resources, when it feels like there isn’t enough to go around, we still build our cities like we have resources to squander? Why don’t we, even in the most expensive cities, use every bit of available land? Why, in the poorest of places, don’t we unleash human creativity to make better use of all that we have invested in?

The answer is a sad one: our cities are not designed to respond to the needs of people who live within them. American cities no longer serve as human habitat, as complex adaptive environments where humans co-create the space by responding to stresses and opportunities in the environment. No, instead they—like almost all we have built over the past century—respond to capital flows. 

We created a new development approach to serve us, but now we serve it. We built infrastructure to serve us, but now we serve it. We created governments and corporations and capital markets to serve us, but now we serve them. Our cities don’t serve us—they are machines of the macro economy.

Building places with many hands from the bottom-up is messy and fraught with challenges, but it also gives us the capacity to evolve and adapt to meet the needs of our friends and neighbors. The skinniest house in London is an adaptation of resource-starved people. If your community feels starved of resources, it’s time to lean into adaptation. It’s time to start building a strong town.

Cover image via Winkworth

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