NBC News - 10/13/13, Nona Willis-Aronowitz
Take a look at Dan Price's ultra-cheap lifestyle, starting with the home he built from scrap wood that he calls his 'hobbit hole.' John Brecher / NBC News
Price is part of a long tradition of eschewing the American dream of a house with a white-picket fence, from 1920s hobos to 1960s hippies. Nowadays, groups going back-to-basics are just as diverse, such as live-off-the-land types like Price, punky street kids, and twentysomethings living in modest group homes known as intentional communities. But they all have something in common: They’ve chosen poverty.
Some, like Price, have lived this way for decades. For others, it’s a decision spurred by the recession and its exposure of economic precarity. Either way, it’s often a political choice, one that questions a consumerist, deeply stratified society. The intentional poor are “looking for something real that goes beyond commodity,” said Karen Halnon, a sociology professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of "Consumption of Inequality."
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