Adrian Crook is an entrepreneur and housing activist. He is probably best known for his blog 5 Kids 1 Condo. Additionally, Adrian runs a successful game design company. Somehow, with five kids and as a fulltime entrepreneur, he manages to find time to write and speak about sustainable housing. Adrian is challenging the way we thinking about homes and hosing.
There are few ideas that stood out for me in this conversation:
Single-family homes are the least sustainable form of using. Adrian makes the point that for the last 50-70 years, the single-family house in the suburb has been the most popular form of housing. He argues that we are going to need to give up on the dream of white picket fences, with a yard, and two cars. It is the most expensive way to live. This approach to living, also called sprawl, is inefficient for municipalities and residents. We need to focus more on density.
Housing and transportation and inextricably linked. From his own experience, he has seen that changing the size of your home has cost implications. Driving to and from the suburbs makes for poor quality of life and expensive travel costs. Time spent in your car, time spent on gas, and maintenance of your car all add up. It does not help in providing a good quality of life.
A lower standard of life does not have to mean a lower quality of life. Adrian made the point that the way trends are moving, successive generations are likely to have lower standards of living than their parents. For him, this does not then have to translate into a lower quality of life. If you make the right decision, you can live in an urban environment and not sacrifice quality of life.
The life you live is determined by the intentions and data you bring to it. Adrian made an intentional decision to raise five kids in a condo. He asked himself, why was he is doing what he is doing? Why was he living the way he was living? For him, he asked why and came to the conclusion that it made more sense to live in an urban environment than it did to live in the suburbs. The intention to live in an urban environment has shaped his everyday life and he has chosen to have a high quality of life above everything else.
The life of a rebel is actually mundane. Despite having a popular blog and being someone who deeply challenges existing beliefs around how we should all live, Adrian reminds us that his life is still relatively mundane. He takes his children to school, cleans his house, and then he writes or does the things he is passionate about. To him it is nothing too exciting, most of what he is doing is the everyday stuff of life.
People make irrational decisions in the face of fear and an unchallenged status quo. Adrian had an experience where someone reported that his children were on the bus unsupervised. He had taken the time to teach them how to take the bus. His children were all accompanied by their older siblings, yet someone complained that he was being an irresponsible parent. The Child Protective Services determined that he did everything reasonably expected and his children would be safe. Yah! He was a responsible parent. Somehow they still decided that his children under 10 could not ride bus unaccompanied by an adult. They suggested he move or drop his children to school. You would need to listen to the episode to follow how silly the whole thing was. His argument was the statistically, buses are the safest form of transport but it was still decided that his children could not ride the bus unaccompanied.
Look for stuff in the margins. Look for different ways of doing things that would make you happy instead of assuming that what makes other people happy will also work for you. Adrian found that when he is able to sit back and question the status quo, it brings out the best in him. He had fallen for the dream of a family and house in the suburbs. He learnt that he was happiest when he is able to question what he was doing, question what other people were doing or what society was telling him to do. Taking the time to step back and question the taken for granted, helped him think about the small mundane decisions that really drive larger decisions and his quality of life. Adrian has found that his best thinking is slow thinking.
Disruption is not always positive. Often the people who lose are the people who are already disenfranchised. For example, UBER’s algorithms work to drive wages down and the price up in favour or the company. Airbnb is taking away housing from the rental market and driving the rental prices up. What this often means, is that those who are already disenfranchised are the ones who might be losing the most.
Some decisions should be expert based while others should be crowd-based. This was really my point, but the idea that we should vote on decisions that are better done by experts is one that has irked me recently. For example, Brexit is a trade decision and is probably best left to people who understand the implications of trade. Transportation is a nuanced field and experts know that wide roads cause more traffic but the average person would likely vote for wider roads. There are just some decisions that are better left to experts and we should be clear on those.
I really enjoyed my conversation with Adrian. There is a lot to learn from this episode. Hope you enjoy the episode.