Dan Phillips

The Founder of the Phoenix Commotion

I just learned that Dan Phillips died two days ago on December 21 of cancer. Phillips was an amazing person, a visionary. He had been a dance professor at Sam Houston State, but then founded the Phoenix Commotion up in Huntsville.

In 2013, I interviewed him and toured many of the Phoenix Commotion houses. I wrote the following essay for a book that never got published, so I published it myself several years later in my zine, Money. In tribute to Phillips, I want to publish it here.

mosaic from The Bone House (above)

The city of Huntsville is home to about 38,600 people, of whom 1550 are prisoners in the Huntsville Unit prison--better known as the Walls Unit. This is where executions are carried out in Texas--15 executions were carried out in 2012. Driving to Huntsville from Houston takes you through the Sam Houston National Forest. As you approach town from the south, you see a 67-foot statue of Sam Houston on the side of the freeway. You soon realize how distinct Huntsville is from Houston. Huntsville has hills, for example. Residents of truly hilly towns would snicker at Huntsville’s gently rolling terrain, but it is refreshing after the oppressive flatness of Houston. Huntsville is also a college town--home to Sam Houston State University with 17, 527 students. Despite the presence of the Walls Unit is, Huntsville feels like a typical college town. Driving through town, all may feel quite ordinary until you notice that a few of the houses are very odd. Like the one covered with bones. Or a house with license plates instead of shingles. Or a house with wine bottles in the fence. These whimsical houses were built by The Phoenix Commotion, a home-building company founded by Dan and Marsha Phillips.

The Charleston House (above)

The Phoenix Commotion mission statement describes the organization as “a local building initiative created to prove that constructing homes with recycled and salvaged materials has a viable place in the building industry. “ It divides its mission into four goals:

1.     Reduction of Landfill Burden

2.     Low-Income Housing

3.     Training Unskilled Labor

4.     Interim Financing

And there is an implied but unstated fifth goal—the creation of beautiful, artistically interesting houses. Dan Philips is outwardly modest about this aspect of the work. “The trick there is not that you have to be Dan Phillips. It could be anybody,” he claims. [Robert Boyd, Interview with the Dan Phillips, January 2013] I’m dubious. There is, for example, a mosaic of a phoenix on the floor of The Bone House, one of the most spectacular of the Phoenix Commotion houses. This mosaic doesn’t seem like something that the average person would be capable of creating, if only because the average person doesn’t draw very well. But this seemingly commonplace fact is not something that Phillips would agree with.

“Often enough, people say, oh you're an artist. You can do this. I can't do this. Or, I have to be an artist to this. Well, the simple truth is that those instincts that artists feed on are buried in all of us, and most people don't have the nerve to access those instincts,” he says. Phillips believes that fear of failure prevents people from being the artists they can be. A willingness to fail is a prerequisite for a project like a Phoenix Commotion house.  “It takes a little bit of grit … because you might fail. Oh well! And I fail 10 times a day. That's the whole process of art. On one hand I'll say yes, they're ‘art houses,’ but I really avoid that label. People automatically assume that you have to be an ‘artist’ to do this. No, anybody can do this.” [Robert Boyd, Interview with Dan Phillips, January 2013]

Phillips may believe, as Joseph Beuys did, that “every living being is an artist,” but that doesn’t mean that he believes in artistic collaboration. [Joseph Beuys, “A Public Dialogue.” Energy Plan for the Western Man - Joseph Beuys in America. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993, 25] “The trick is that you have to be one person who has his thumb on the design. Not a group of people. One person. As soon as you start sharing design authority, you end up with beige.” A belief in the individuality of a designer is part of Phillips’ philosophy of building. There is a desire not to look like every other house. His houses don’t resemble the average cottages and ranch homes in Huntsville, nor do they resemble each other—although there is a sense of style that identifies them as the work of one builder. (And that style could be called “Fairy Tale”—his houses look like they could be inhabited by elves or hobbits.)

This goes against the prevailing norms of home building. Industrial-scale builders build houses on a small variety of repeatable patterns with similar features. Home-owners’ associations (whom Phillips suggests are “often Nazis”) exist to enforce stylistic conformity. And such conformity hardly needs to be enforced for the most part because most people prefer it. Therefore, Phillips recognizes that The Phoenix Commotion “will never be mainstream.” His approach is influenced by Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre. People who buy houses have freedom to buy houses that express themselves without compromise, but they use that freedom to buy generic houses built by Perry Homes or Toll Brothers. These are acts of bad faith, a result of wanting to fit in. Phillips contends that people buy boring houses “because of the pressures of the culture.”

Phillips explains, “[Sartre] said that two beings tend to fulfill the expectations of the people around them. They act differently when they know they are alone than when somebody else is around. So when I'm alone I can do whatever I want. As soon as you walk in this room, oh my Lord, I fulfill this expectation for how I should behave. Well, when we multiply that towards the culture, that's what we get. Here comes the marketplace and here comes the marketeers and the advertisers and everybody thinks this way, and so the expectation is that if you don't use marketed materials, you're really weird. You're really oddball and you're going against the stream. That's the pressure everybody feels, and that's hard to break out of.”

The Storybook House (above)

So these houses that look as though they sprang from a book of fairy tales, or from fantasy novels by J.R.R. Tolkien or Ursula LeGuin, are expressions of Phillips’ authenticity. They are his project, a project to avoid bad faith. Consequently, he is a bit proprietary when it comes to designing a house.

“When I have a client lined up in advance, they don't have any authority over the design,” he explains. “They can't say I want to have the bathroom pink and the closet six inches that way. It's not as though I am a dictator. I listen to their wishes, but I filter them through who Dan is. That automatically gives a little bit of solidarity and unity to the evolution of the design because the design grows out of the materials.

“Architects are at an extreme disadvantage. What they have to do is to plan out in the abstract […] and they're never able to stand in the space and say, ‘Hmmmm. I think I'd like to have a window right there.’ Pow! And you do it. They can't do that. It all has to be designed ahead of time because you have too many people in the mix. They might want to do something else, but that's not what they do. They don't have that freedom. I have the freedom because I'm on my own. I'm funding it, I'm building it.”

Reduction of Landfill

But designing and building quaint houses isn’t the motive. The initial impetus for starting The Phoenix Commotion was to build houses out of recycled material—material that was otherwise destined for a landfill. The resulting architecture is a response to the materials he has at hand. The challenge is to take the material that he acquires at a given moment and find a way to make a beautiful structure out of it. “You let design strategies intervene so you don't end up with a Sanford and Son house. You want to make sure that people are proud of their houses.”

Phillips writes in The Phoenix Commotion mission statement that “a reasonable estimate would be that 10% of the average landfill waste stream consists of usable building materials.” Municipalities, for liability reasons, don’t allow scavengers to salvage material from landfills (in the United States, at least—the movie Waste Land documents artist Vik Muniz’s collaboration with the catadores or trash pickers in Rio de Janeiro’s largest landfill). So The Phoenix Commotion employs strategies for intercepting building material before it gets to the landfill.

 The resulting structures are about 70 to 80% recycled material. [TED, “Dan Phillips: Creative houses from reclaimed stuff.” TED, 2010. Web. October 2010 http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_phillips_creative_houses_from_reclaimed_stuff.html] This aspect of the work of The Phoenix Commotion underlies all the rest and is not surprisingly the one that has gotten the most attention from the public and the media. But the desire to recycle and reuse is not just about sustainability and the environment. It is also linked with the desire to create housing for poor people. It was galling to him the thought of so much building material being wasted in landfills while there was simultaneously a need for decent, low-income housing. [New York Times].

One notices the more obvious (and rather whimsical) recycled aspects of Phoenix Commotion houses first. The license plates used as shingles for the License Plate House (which due to their toughness are expected to last 75 years). The decorative bones on the Bone House. The Budweiser signs on the Budweiser House. The frame samples from the Tree House. On top of that, there are architectural elements that are unexpected materials—for instance, decorative “buttons” made of chicken eggs filled with bondo. [TED]

But these materials, while they typify Phoenix Commotion houses, aren’t primary building materials. You can make decorative buttons from chicken eggs, but can’t build a house out of them. So The Phoenix Commotion has had to make alliances with suppliers of building materials to make these houses work. The goal is to reduce landfill by intercepting material that was destined for landfill, but there is also a need to get usable construction material.

For example, The Phoenix Commotion has a relationship with Weyerhaeuser, one of the largest timber companies in the world. [Wayerhaeuser Annual Report and Form 10-K, 2011] Phillips gave a tour of the Huntsville Phoenix Commotion houses in the summer of 2012 and told this story about the walls of one of the houses: “This is all western red cedar, which is the most expensive domestic softwood. And those are two-foot pieces. At Weyerhaeuser, what happens is that a contractor will come in and order 50 bundles of 1x4 eight-foot long. And they only have 45. Well, they’re not going to miss that order. So they’ll take these five bundles of 10 feet long, keep that guy happy, then they have five bundles left that are two-feet long. Well, they can’t sell that. So they take the value of that out of their $85 million inventory. Of course, I’m standing there.”

These relationships with large construction material suppliers suggests that enterprises like The Pheonix Commotion can only exist in a world where large-scale industrialized building is already taking place. In order for The Phoenix Commotion to get the materials it needs, Weyerhaeuser must also be supplying the Perry Homes of the world—the builders who create cookie-cutter, deed-restricted neighborhoods and who fill dumpster after dumpster with building waste headed for the landfill. The Phoenix Commotion as it is currently constituted probably couldn’t exist in a world where every house was built on a sustainable model using a maximum quantity of recycled material.

The Tree House (above)

Training Unskilled Labor

In fact, it can barely exist now. Phillips says, “I'm in the for profit sector, but I'm about as non-profit as you can get.” Even though much of the building material is donated or simply found, building these houses is a slow process. Each one is unique both in design and in technique. Moreover, they are quite modest in size and in price.

“If I wanted to build for the gentry, I bet I could make six figures a year--maybe seven,” suggests Phillips. “Every time I get this national publicity, I hear from people all over the world. A lady called up from the Berkshires in New York and said I want you to come up and build a house for us.” Selling custom-designed houses to low-income people is necessarily a low-margin business.

“I'm trying to prove that you could make a reasonable living building houses out of recycled materials and hiring unskilled labor.” Phillips adds, “The unskilled labor is a very key part. They only get minimum wage. that's the only way I can get it to work because using recycled materials takes more time.”

The median wage for a carpenter in 2010 was $19.00 per hour. [Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment Outlook, Carpenters. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/carpenters.htm]. Construction laborers and helpers had a median salary in 2010 of $13.66 per hour [Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Construction Laborers and Helpers. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/construction-laborers-and-helpers.htm]. The federal minimum wage is $7.25.

Given this, what’s in it for the laborers? “It's a training platform,” Phillips explains. “They also get a firehouse of information.” Phillips is attempting to create workers who are not just skilled builders, but skilled builders who specialize in using recycled materials. He’s always clear that there is nothing special about him doing this. He sees The Phoenix Commotion as a model. And given this, the minimum wage workers who learn to build Phoenix Commotion style houses should effectively become vectors for this meme. You become a skilled builder with recycled materials, and you go off to some community somewhere and start your own version of The Phoenix Commotion.

This hasn’t happened yet. But in Huntsville there is Eric Farris, who worked for the Phoenix Commotion for several years before building his own house. Building your own house is a way to leverage the extremely low pay one earns from working for the Phoenix Commotion. Given that labor costs on average account for 22% of the total costs on a house, on a $100,000 house, a builder who has been trained in the Phoenix Commotion way of building can save $22,000. (This excludes any calculation of the opportunity cost of her own time.) And given that that perhaps 75% of the house would be made of recycled materials, that potentially represents another $22,600 in savings because building materials typically account for 30% of building costs.  So if building your own home is your goal, the minimum wage you received from The Phoenix Commotion can be made up in the savings you achieve later. Otherwise, it’s hard to justify. [“New Home Cost Components,” Michael Carliner, Housing Economics, March 2003]

Low Income Housing and Interim Financing

These two aspects of The Phoenix Commotion go together. If your mission is to put low-income people into homes that they own, this has to somehow be financed. The New York Times published a very laudatory article about The Phoenix Commotion in 2009, but one paragraph stood out in stark contrast to the rest of the article:

“While the homes are intended for low-income individuals, some of the original buyers could not hold on to them. To Mr. Phillips’s disappointment, half of the homes he has built have been lost to foreclosure — the payments ranged from $99 to $300 a month.” [“One Man’s Trash,” Kate Murphy, The New York Times, September 3, 2009]

Fifty percent is an astonishingly high foreclosure rate. Phillips has stated that he doesn’t want to build for “the gentry,” but that’s what happens when a house is foreclosed on and then resold by a bank to a member of the middle class. Foreclosure is, in effect, a mission failure.

Furthermore, The Phoenix Commotion must be compared to organizations with similar missions. Claire Bishop in Artificial Hells wrote of contemporary social practice art projects that their “perceived social achievements are never compared with actual (and innovative) social projects taking place outside the realm of art; they remain on the level of an emblematic ideal, and derive their critical value in opposition to more traditional, expressive and object-based modes of artistic practice.” [Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship chapter 1, Claire Bishop, 2012. Verso Books, London]

The biggest builder of houses aimed at low-income buyers is Habitat for Humanity, and they claim a foreclosure rate of 2%. [“For Habitat, Foreclosures Small Issue,” Dawn Wotapka, The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704517404576222731536937462.html] Not only is this a fraction of The Phoenix Commotion’s foreclosure rate, it’s lower than the foreclosure rate for the U.S. as a whole. [“US residential property foreclosures continue downwards, latest data shows “, PropertyWire, November 2, 2012] (Phillips claims the Habitat foreclosure rate in Huntsville is higher.) Mary Lawler is the executive director of Avenue Community Development Corporation (aka Avenue CDC), an organization that provides housing for low-income people in Houston. She said that Avenue CDC’s foreclosure rates were les than 2%. [Mary Lawlor, email to the author, January 22, 2013.]

But it is key to note the date of the New York Times article. 2009 was deep into the recession when foreclosure rates had exploded. In 2000, there were 470,000 foreclosures in the United States. In 2009, the number had climbed to 3,457,643. [Home Foreclosure Statistics, Statistic Brain, http://www.statisticbrain.com/home-foreclosure-statistics/] Many borrowers with adjustable rate mortgages were getting nasty surprises when their mortgage rates ratcheted up. Phillips explains, “That happened during the collapse of the subprime market. And some of these folks hooked up with predatory lenders and raised their interest rates up to 13% and they said, adios!”

But alone that isn’t enough to explain a 50% rate. There again, the example of Habitat for Humanity is instructive. The Wall Street Journal reported that “becoming a Habitat home owner is not easy. Applicants must show a solid work and credit history. Once selected, recipients undergo home-ownership education that covers the added costs of owning over renting, how to pay bills and home maintenance.”

Furthermore, Habitat’s relationship with the homeowner doesn’t end after the homeowner moves in.  “Unlike traditional lenders, Habitat checks back several times with new owners. The Dallas chapter noticed that its late payments spike in September – when families spend money on school clothes and supplies – and in the winter, when they shop for holiday gifts. It partnered with a local nonprofit to distribute free supplies. The group also helps its families get free tax preparation: Delinquent home owners often use their tax refund to catch up on missed payments.”

Avenue CDC likewise offers “pre-purchase training.” “Pre-Purchase Training teaches potential home owners the homebuying process including types of downpayment assistance available, how to select the right home for your family, preparing to qualify for a loan and finding the financing that best meets their needs.” Then after they have purchased the house, there is “post-purchase training”: “Post-Purchase Training helps homeowners adjust to their new responsibilities. Seminars cover home maintenance and repair, property taxes, insurance issues, landscaping, and more.” And for homeowners facing foreclosure, Avenue CDC offers foreclosure counseling. [Avenue Community Development Corporation, Homeownership, http://avenuecdc.org/home-ownership/]

Just as Avenue CDC and Habitat for Humanity are fairly picky about who can buy one of their homes, The Phoenix Commotion has likewise had to adopt stricter requirements. “I have learned that over the years,” Phillips admits. “Early on I was just going to save the world. And I realized that some people should not get into that. Bad credit and poverty go hand in hand, so when you're building for low-income people, chances are that their credit isn't very good.

“So I had to up the level of the clientele a little bit to the working poor that have good credit. I wish I had silver bullets for all of these. I don't,” Phillips said. It’s a common problem. Habitat for Humanity has been criticized for its credit requirements which eliminate many of those in most desperate need of housing. [“Sour Note,” Katy Reckdahl, The Times-Picayune, January 2, 2007, http://www.nola.com/frontpage/t-p/index.ssf?/base/news-7/1167720179104140.xml] People who are homeless or who have no formal work history need help, but not the kind of help that The Phoenix Commotion provides.

“Some people just shouldn't own a house,” Phillips adds. Avenue CDC apparently agrees. In addition to helping build houses for low-income would-be homeowners, it owns and/or operates several apartment complexes.

Dan Phillips doesn’t consider The Phoenix Commotion an art project, but given the unique and beautiful houses he creates, it wouldn’t be a stretch for an outside observer to declare it a social practice art project. And compared to the average house—particularly the average inexpensive house accessible to low-income buyers—Phoenix Commotion houses are fresh and exciting. They represent a different way of looking at shelter. But The Phoenix Commotion has to be judged at how well it accomplishes its missions. In terms of recycle and re-use, it is highly successful. It is still unknown how scalable this model is, but this aspect of The Phoenix Commotion has grown—it recently constructed an office building for a recycling business and it is building a park in Houston. [“Two-story office building made from junk is home to recycling business,” Lisa Gray, The Houston Chronicle, February 3, 2013, http://www.houstonchronicle.com/life/gray/article/Two-story-office-building-made-from-junk-is-home-4243510.php]

But it has fallen short in terms of providing houses for low-income people (specifically single mothers and artists). This has been a learning process that happened to coincide with the biggest recession and biggest real estate crisis since the Depression. In this regard, the Phoenix Commotion must necessarily move towards the models of Avenue CDC and Habitat for Humanity, at least in terms of screening applicants and providing education and counseling for them. This evolution is already under way.

And the jury is still out on how successful the Phoenix Commotion is as a training platform that creates people capable of replicating its model. Time will tell, but the practice of trading low pay for training and knowledge strikes me as the most hopeful aspect of The Phoenix Commotion. If it works, it guarantees that the Phoenix Commotion idea will continue and grow.

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