When my husband and I bought our first house, its 800 square feet of living space was perfect for two. It was what we could afford, and it suited us. We fought rarely, lived within our means without too much trouble, loved living within easy walking distance of restaurants and parks, went away many weekends, divided up the two closets, and dumped all the extra stuff in the basement.

Then we had a kid.

Daycare bills made us broke, we argued 400 percent more often, and we spent more time inside. We moved our one living room chair to make way for the baby swing. We moved the desk into our bedroom, with one inch to spare. I invented a complicated system of labels and garbage bags headed to the consignment store, full of out-of-season clothes that were too big or too small, the acres of unwanted things that people give you, and toys that I could not stand to store in my living room. This Christmas, I provoked the familial equivalent of an international incident by limiting the presents that grandparents could send.

To be clear, my family does not live in a tiny house. People raising children in New York, or in apartments everywhere, will mock me. When our home was built 100 years ago, it probably would have accommodated a family of seven. But by today’s U.S. standards, it’s small, roughly one-third of the size of the average home [PDF]. And the difference between living in it as a couple and a family of three has been palpable.

More often that not when I see stories about people living in tiny houses, it’s a single person with not much more than a shelf full of books and a teapot. Sometimes it’s a couple with low personal-space requirements. But my own situation has made me curious about families who have consciously chosen to live with a much smaller footprint. What happens when the chaos and wonder (and stuff!) that kids introduce explode all over your artfully arranged tiny house?

So I asked Hari Berzins, who writes the Tiny House Family blog and lives with her husband and two children, 8 and nearly 10, in a 168-square-foot home. They downsized, in several steps, from a 1,500-square-foot home after losing their family’s restaurant business in the most recent economic recession. It has allowed them to squirrel away her monthly salary to finance a long-term plan to build a larger, mortgage-free home. But they’ve been in this tiny house for almost two years.

She’s often asked what is the hardest thing about living in the tiny house. It’s hard to answer, she says, because the biggest challenges can also turn out to be unexpected blessings. Berzins says that living in a smaller physical space magnifies whatever dynamics and issues already exist in a family. But with no place to hide from the people you live with, it forces more open communication. As she explains:

You’re still whoever you are when you move in. But I think a bigger house gives you the room to leave things and let them pass without having to face them like we do in the tiny house … What we’ve done, and it’s helped a lot, is focusing on communicating rather than expecting. You can’t really run from things. It feels like we’ve been in therapy, but the therapy is our house.

During the process of downsizing, they had many conversations with their kids about what things were most important to them. They had multiple yard sales and let the kids select, price, and haggle over the things they wanted to sell. Occasionally, they’d pull things back that they weren’t ready to part with. In the tiny house, they each have a couple of crates for their personal things, and her children will passionately argue that they lack for nothing. For birthdays and holidays, they tend to ask for presents that they can use every day, like pocketknives or binoculars.

What really matters for them is their family and being close and not the things so much. I guess what you would imagine they’re learning is true. I think also there’s an acceptance of themselves and of us as family. They teach me a lot and don’t seem to care what other people think, which is so awesome.

Berzins, who lives in rural Virginia, is the first to admit that living in such a small space would be tougher in an urban setting. Her kids will disappear into the woods for hours, and they tend a large garden. They spend a lot of time as a family outdoors, even in winter, when they bundle up and build large fires on their deck. Outdoor entertaining and living space definitely makes tiny living easier, as does having at least one person in your family who can build things (we have none).

Case in point: Interior designer Jessica Helgerson lives in this immaculate 540-square-foot home on Sauvie Island, just 15 minutes north of Portland, with her husband and two children.

She combined the living, dining, and kitchen spaces into one “great room” that’s open to the roofline, while leaving space for the parents’ sleeping loft. The built-in sofas double as guest beds, with drawers underneath for kids’ toys. And my favorite feature of all time is the cleverly designed sliding closet in the kids’ bedroom. (Because photos like these misguidedly lead me to believe that if only I built a sliding closet, my kid’s room would be this clean too! Paradise is always just one new storage solution away!)

Debra Jordan, whose family of three lives in a mortgage-free 320-square-foot shotgun house, says one key to living small is focusing on all the things that you do have. Because she likes to cook and entertain guests, her tiny kitchen holds four cast iron skillets, two soup pots, two crock pots, two full sets of beautiful china, a juicer, assorted baking pans, and 30 pieces of tupperware to help keep things organized.

To accommodate overnight guests, she built an ingenious living room sofa bench that folds out into a guest bed. And there’s even a dishwasher hidden underneath.

So how has downsizing from a 2,500-square-foot home affected Jordan’s 13-year-old son? In this video below from Fair Companies, which documents their tiny house renovation that turned his sleeping loft into a full-fledged bedroom, Jordan tells this story:

I remember one of the comments he made after his room was finished. I told him, “Max, you have a cool room now,” and he shook his head and said “No, mom. I had a cool room. I have an upgrade now.” And I felt very proud at that moment. That’s a lesson that you really hope to instill in your child — that of thankfulness and gratefulness.

And at the end of the video, Jordan offers this bit of wisdom about family living in a tiny home:

I don’t know if everybody could make this decision. I highly recommend it. I sleep every night really, really good. We never discuss money. It’s not a topic that comes up. Our life is much more peaceful now. I have learned to cultivate contentment. I’m not thinking about what I want to buy next or how I can increase my earnings. I’m content. I’m very happy and there’s a lot to be said for that.

So when my family had our day of reckoning about whether we would stay put or move, what did we do? We refinanced into a smaller mortgage payment and started counting the days until our 4-year-old would be coordinated enough not to fall out of a loft bed. Why?

Because like many people who’ve opted to live in smaller spaces, it gives us flexibility to do other things with our time and money. I wish I could say it has redefined our relationship with stuff, but our basement allows for a lot of overflow. I also wish I could say it has entirely rightsized our budget, but we still have that heinous daycare payment.

It has, most certainly, made me more organized. On the question of whether to pitch or save kids’ artwork, I am an unapologetic tosser. But I’m also sure it has made me a more engaged parent. The lower overhead allowed me to work a flexible schedule while our daughter was little. Plus, most of her play happens in the middle of our living room. And when my husband and I do argue, we resolve things pretty fast. It’s no fun to be 10 feet away from someone you’re really mad at.

For sure, there are minor inconveniences, like the rented scuba regulator that lived on our dining room table for two weeks because there was no other obvious place to put it. Or the lack of a workspace that’s even remotely ergonomical. But here’s the thing: I still like coming home to our little house. I like my family. I want to see them at the end of the day. It’s nice to have them close, in our familiar tight orbit. And it’s weirdly satisfying to survey most of the things you use on a daily basis just by turning in a circle.

So, for now, we’re going to work with what we have, and aspire to have less. And my daughter will continue to wonder how so many oversized toys could go missing in such a small house.

Ali Isha used to work on a large family farm in Somalia, growing maize, rice, sweet potatoes, beans, bananas, onions, tobacco, and livestock. Until the soldiers took the cows and the corn and threatened to kill his family. Civil war made it impossible to stay, so they walked for days to refugee camps at the Kenyan border.

Isha came to the U.S. nearly a decade ago, one of thousands of refugees unable to return to their home countries because of war or persecution. After a series of jobs fixing tractors, waxing hospital floors, cleaning airports, and processing meat, he wanted to grow and sell food again. Which is how he arrived this summer at a rocky farm southeast of Seattle that serves as an incubator for immigrants and other aspiring farmers.

Today, agricultural experts are looking to minority and immigrant groups — from Latino farmworkers [PDF] to refugees starting over in this country — to fill a looming void as aging farmers who now grow our food begin to retire in massive numbers [PDF]. They’re frequently mentioned in conversations about the new “next generation” of farmers.

It’s true that minority-operated farms were among the fastest growing from 2002 to 2007, the last year with updated data from the national Census of Agriculture [PDF]. Despite likely undercounting, it still found the number of Latino farm operators grew by 14 percent, Asian farm operators by 40 percent, and African-American farm operators by 9 percent (compared to 6 percent for white farm operators).

But that growth belies this fact: The chances are overwhelming that a person running a farm in this country — at least the ones paying the bills and running the front office — will be white. Nearly 96 percent of farm operators were in 2007, according to the survey. It’s certainly not that white people are the only ones who know how to produce food. Our agricultural economy runs on immigrant and minority labor, and it only seems fair that the people who already work hard to grow our food should have the opportunity to start new farms alongside young, unencumbered hipsters and white-collar job refugees with stock options. But immigrant and minority farmers have historically had even bigger hurdles to overcome.

Take Isha. He planted beets, carrots, collard greens, chard, and many other vegetables. The problem wasn’t that he didn’t have enough produce to sell, but that he had too much. Head-high mustard greens had gone to seed without finding a buyer. Orders hadn’t materialized in the quantities he’d expected, and without a car or nearby bus service, approaching customers was difficult. By mid-summer he was bringing in more money from food stamps than farm income, which was less than $100 a week.

“It broke my heart when my stuff [was] not getting to market, and I’m not really getting what I need. It broke my heart to do farming so maybe next year, I’ll do something different,” Isha said.

Working in fields or orchards may teach one about growing crops but precious little about running a profitable business. Farms require start-up capital, and people of color have often not had equal access to credit that can finance a land purchase or can grow a business. U.S. Department of Agriculture programs designed to help farmers have not historically been geared towards reaching minorities, and in some cases have demonstrably discriminated against them. And becoming an entrepreneur is even tougher for someone who isn’t comfortable speaking English, has never owned a computer, or who grew up in a cash-based society and tries to save money by sticking checks in a drawer.

To address some of those inequities and build more production capacity, a growing number of incubators and community farms aimed at supporting minority farmers have sprung up around the country. To varying degrees, they offer access to affordable land, financing, shared infrastructure like irrigation pipe and tractors, and even customers.

Pioneering organizations have proved the model can work, from the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA) that helps California farmworkers and limited-resource farmers go into business for themselves, to the Indochinese Farm Project [PDF] that helped Hmong refugees find a niche selling flowers at Seattle’s Pike Place Market in the 1980s. That nonprofit incubator, which operated for nearly a decade, helped newly arrived families learn basic farm skills like operating mechanized farm equipment and making change with American money.

But even with that support, aspiring farmers can still run into tough market realities.

Eddie Hill, who worked with Isha and other Somali Bantu farmers this summer at Seattle Tilth’s Farm Works incubator, said farm managers approached many restaurants, institutions, and groceries about buying their sustainably farmed produce. Though many were intrigued, relatively few businesses placed orders. The reasons ranged from established relationships to the tough economy to the fact that they needed a different kind of lettuce than what the farmers had planted.

“Using food to address social justice and economic justice issues without discussing the painful realities of agriculture to me is a disservice,” Hill said. “The market doesn’t care if you’re an African immigrant or if you have issues or if you’re broke and poor. The customer wants what it wants and wants it on time.”

As people work to blunt those painful realities, some wisdom has emerged: It’s possible for immigrant and limited-resource farmers to find a niche in local farming ecosystems, but it won’t happen without considerable support. And business and marketing skills are key.

Take Salvador and Misael Morales, who have worked in farm fields since they were boys, picking everything from cauliflower to cucumbers to berries. A decade ago, they leased land from a property owner in Bow, Wash., and tried to start their own farm. But come harvest time, they realized they were missing an essential ingredient: paying customers.

“I thought we would sell in big markets, but I didn’t really have any idea how to do it,” Salvador Morales remembers.

Several years later, they tried again, this time with the support and training offered by the Viva Farms incubator, a joint venture in Skagit County, Wash., between the nonprofit GrowFood and Washington State University.

Like most of the growers who now rent land at Viva Farms, the Morales brothers first took intensive farming and business classes, which are offered simultaneously in Spanish and English and teach would-be farm entrepreneurs how to manage everything from unwanted pests to accounting spreadsheets.

Graduates with solid business plans — which include Latino agricultural workers, carpenters put out of work by the housing bust, and unfulfilled professionals looking to change gears — can rent plots of irrigated land next to the local airport. They share expensive infrastructure, such as a greenhouse and cold storage, which would normally be out of reach for farmers just starting out.

A serious investment in marketing and distribution has driven the incubator’s early success. In its first year, managers noticed that cultural barriers made it difficult for their Latino growers to approach and sell directly to customers. They gravitated towards wholesalers and processors that regularly work with Latinos but buy cheaply and in bulk. So Viva Farms developed a distribution arm that buys produce directly from its growers and supplies a regional CSA that delivers weekly food boxes and a busy roadside produce stand.

Morales and his brother now sell to those Viva channels, which give them a guaranteed income stream while they develop their own relationships with restaurants and customers. It allows them to see what sells, learn market realities, and make mistakes without having their entire life savings on the line.

Morales says while his parents taught him a lot about growing food, they weren’t able how to teach him about business. He’s learned how to negotiate and get better prices, and, for now, the ends are meeting.

“I think this is an opportunity for us to be a business owner without that much education,” Morales said. “The lettuce has all the education. I only take care of them.”

This article is based on a longer series called “Betting the Farm,” which appeared on the Sightline Institute website in fall of 2012.

Despite our best efforts to get kids to love jicama sticks or broccoli spears, you can’t really force them to eat something they don’t want to. But this nifty New York Times interactive graphic, based on research from the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Program, demonstrates that subtle changes in the way food is presented and labeled can make a big difference in how many kids put it on their lunch tray.

The researchers explain their findings in today’s edition of The Atlantic, but here are some highlights:

• moving the salad bar  in front of the cash register nearly tripled salad sales
• requiring students to buy cookies with cash (but allowing them to use lunch credits for fruit) increased fruit sales by 71 percent
• using smaller bowls decreased breakfast cereal portions by 24 percent
• keeping ice cream in a closed-top freezer reduced the number of takers by up to 30 percent

This isn’t rocket science. There’s a reason moms leave fruit in a bowl on the kitchen table and cookies in a closed jar. Grocery stores know that people pick up stuff as they’re waiting at the cash register. Fast food restaurants never forget to ask if you want fries with that. And plenty of other industries – from hospitals to auto manufacturers – have improved health outcomes through better engineering.

As I’ve documented in some detail, it’s not easy to overhaul menus in school cafeterias that are charged with magically turning pennies into healthy meals. And it’s important to advocate for nutrition policies and adequate spending that will help in those efforts. But these seem like easy fixes that would cost schools little to nothing and could make a real difference in fighting childhood obesity. And best of all, students aren’t likely to notice how much better they’re eating.

Salad bar photo courtesy of flickr user aka_lusi via a Creative Commons license.

Her daycare class had prepared for the round-trip ride from South Lake Union to Westlake by learning about different kinds of transportation: making trains out of chairs, creating pictures with car wheels dipped in paint, watching seaplanes land in Lake Union, scooping up pebbles with bulldozers, reading books like Donald Crews’ “Freight Train.” But if my kid is any judge, it doesn’t take much to get them excited about mass transit.

“Bus” was one of her first words. She startles strangers on the street by yelling it at the top of her lungs whenever she sees one. Yet she hasn’t actually ridden on one yet. And as I saw how fascinated she was by the streetcar—looking at its reflection in buildings, watching the floor joints move, trying to lick the windows, I found myself asking why I hadn’t done this before.

In truth, there are lots of reasons: in the beginning, I was overwhelmed by leaving the house at all with a new baby. Then there was era of strollers and bottles and coolers and bags that were hard to juggle. And just around the time we could leave the house with far fewer trappings—only an extra diaper and water bottle, she got squirmy.

But the real issue was that after spending untold hours researching carseats, installing anchors, wrestling one into the back seat, getting it checked, getting your kid into it a jillion times, double checking every time you leave the curb to make sure you didn’t forget to buckle it in a sleep-deprived haze, the idea of letting your toddler sit in a moving vehicle—not strapped into anything—can seem a little weird and scary.

I admit that my grasp of physics and relative risk is not the best. And I probably knew that the images in my head of a three-foot, towheaded kid soaring through the bus aisle in the event of a fender-bender were not entirely realistic. But I hadn’t done any research, and my gut-level aversion won out.

After looking into it, the mom in me still sort of wishes there were seat belts in buses (you can find plenty on that debate here and here), but here are some numbers that made me feel better.

A study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2007 found that, statistically, you’re far more likely to be injured or killed riding in a car than a bus. In fact, riding a bus is safer than walking, bicycling, driving a car, or hopping on a motorcycle. Whether the reason is that sheer size of a bus distributes the crash forces differently or that they travel more slowly, the raw numbers are pretty compelling.

Here are the annualized injury rates (based on 100 million person trips in the US):

• Motorcycle: 10,336
• Bicycle: 1,461
• Car: 803
• Walking: 216
• Bus: 161

And here are the comparable fatality rates:

• Motorcycle: 537
• Bicycle: 21
• Walking: 14
• Car: 9
• Bus: 0.4

The study also breaks down injury and fatality rates by age. Based on its results, it appears I’m not the only one who hasn’t been taking their toddler on the bus. For children aged 0-4 nearly all of the reported injuries occurred while riding in cars or walking.

Now that I’ve seen what delight my daughter can find in a 1-mile streetcar ride, we’ll definitely do the bus next. And I’ll be mindful that we have a greater chance of getting hurt walking to the bus stop than riding on one.

Note: For other parents out there, Bus Chick blogger Carla Saulter offers excellent advice on riding the bus with little kids. She’s a mindbogglingly competent car-free parent, but doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges.

This post originally appeared at Sightline’s Daily Score blog.

It’s not clear exactly how the Canadian government will achieve its goal, but it seems like the strategy is basically to make the energy companies do it. (It’s worked elsewhere – Oregon regulators were requiring Portland General Electric to install so many expensive pollution controls at its Boardman coal plant that the utility now wants to shut it down decades earlier than it had planned.)

Meanwhile, Washington state has taken a more collaborative approach with the owner of the state’s only coal-fired power plant in Centralia, which happens to be the Canadian company TransAlta. State officials aim to convince the company to voluntarily phase out its coal power over the next 15 years by helping it find markets and financing to develop cleaner energy sources. (Updated details are at the end of this post.)

So how did energy companies react to Canada’s tough love? They expressed the usual concerns about where new power would come from, the impacts on shareholders and whether consumers would pay more for energy. But the article goes on to mention that these companies are, in fact, already phasing out coal. TransAlta had already decided to close a 54-year-old coal plant in Alberta, presumably because it was old and not very efficient or economical. Ontario Power Generation is planning to close another 4 coal plants in the next 4 years.

As the state of Washington tries to figure out what to do with the Centralia coal plant, it’s worth remembering that market forces could force the plant to close on its own. It might even happen years before the 2025 deadline that the state has set to cut the plant’s greenhouse gas emissions in half. Coal is such a dirty form of energy that simply putting a price on climate-warming pollution would radically change the economics of burning it.

In fact, modeling by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council shows that if certain carbon pricing policies are adopted, the Northwest’s big coal plants – Centralia in Washington, Boardman in Oregon and Colstrip in Montana – would shut down between 2018 and 2022 based on economics alone. Of course, that model is based on assumptions that may or may not come to pass. (In the model, coal plants become uneconomical around the time that carbon pricing reaches $25/ton.) But it represents regional power planners’ best estimate of what the future may hold.

Clearly, based on the political wrangling over a climate bill this weekend, it would be unwise for anyone in Washington state to assume that some future federal policy will just take care of things. State officials want guarantees that the Centralia plant will cut its greenhouse gas emissions, and sometimes a voluntary approach saves time and argument. But if it doesn’t, Canada’s example shows that strong policies – whether they employ economic or regulatory levers – can get the job done too.

 P.S. Not to give Canada too much credit. The country only has 21 coal plants (compared to 650 in the US) so it’s much easier for policymakers to decide the country can live without them. The country already releases a lot of greenhouse gas emissions for its population, and as The Globe and Mail article mentions, an expanding oil sands industry that will just add to that pollution. And Canada is a huge producer of natural gas that will replace much of the coal power, which isn’t the cleanest energy source either.

Update: The state of Washington and TransAlta signed a memorandum of understanding this week outlining the broad parameters and process for their negotiations. The goals are: permanently limiting greenhouse gas emissions, ending the use of coal at the plant, assuring reliable power and retaining a significant number of jobs at Centralia. They expect to publicly release a draft proposal in July.

Alberta coal plant photo courtesy of flickr user Paul Jerry via the Creative Commons license.

This post originally appeared at Sightline’s Daily Score blog.