July 2006 | Features
Tiny Houses
Living Well by Living Small
By Jordan E. Rosenfeld
With “monster” houses—4,000 square feet and bigger—sprouting up across the country like massive, shingled mushrooms, the American homeowner’s motto seems to be: “Live large.” Since 1970, the size of the average American home has increased 55 percent, even as family size has declined by 13 percent. But the cost of large living is high—not only for the homeowner, but also for the planet and its dwindling resources. “Affordable housing,” is now more soundbite than objective reality as many Americans are forced to take out interest-only loans (to the tune of $500,000 or more) to purchase even modest-sized homes.
But what if you could purchase all the usual comforts of home and hearth at about one-sixth the cost of a regular house? Enter a small army of “Tiny Home” proponents who have been standing up for downsized dwellings that range from as little as 100- to 1,000 square feet. These advocates of “less-is-more” architecture believe that Tiny Homes could easily be built as in-fill in development-heavy urban areas. There, they could support homeless populations, promote affordable housing, improve energy efficiency and ultimately alleviate the heavy ‘footprint’ our consumption patterns place on Earth’s limited resources.
Jay Shafer is a Tiny Home advocate. The former college-art-professor-turned-tiny-home-builder is the owner of Tumbleweed Tiny Homes in Sebastopol. Shafer grew up in a sprawling 4,000-square-foot Midwestern house but, for the past six years, he has been living comfortably in a home occupying fewer than 100 square feet.
When Less Is More
“A lot of this country has a frontier mentality, which goes: ‘Because we can claim it—we will!’ I hope that, by showing the other extreme, people will think of the middle ground,” Shafer says. In 1999, Shafer suffered through an unforgettably cold Iowa winter in a poorly insulated Airstream trailer. The experience inspired him to design a practical dwelling on the same scale—but one that would survive low temperatures. The result was Shafer’s first Tiny Home—an elf house no more than 70 square feet but filled with everything he needed to live, including a composting toilet, hot plate, refrigerator, counter space, and enough elbow room for three friends to join him for dinner.
The “bigger is better” belief, according to Shafer, evolved from “the English manor concept: that a house has to be a kingdom unto itself. That idea just doesn’t mesh with the reality of everyday life,” he says. Part of the allure of small homes arises from a romantic association with artists and poets like Thoreau and Whitman who lived in woodsy bungalows. Ultimately, Shafer predicts, as natural resources are increasingly depleted, there will be little choice but to build small. The small house movement is just beginning to catch on in the US, Shafer notes, but “the Japanese have small living down to an art.
“I thought that when I built my first house there would be a few Tiny House freaks like myself who would appreciate it, but it turns out—and this is why my business started—there was quite a demand. People understand the need for small housing on an intuitive level,” he says.
Shafer’s demi-domiciles offer obvious advantages when it comes to building materials and energy efficiency. They are quicker to construct and cost less to maintain. It’s cheaper to install solar and other forms of alternative energy, and it’s easier to heat, air-condition and power smaller dwellings. So why aren’t communities of Tiny Homes popping up in America’s crowded and pricey urban areas as part of the “affordable housing” movement?
Shafer believes that the major obstacles are current housing codes and “fear that small houses will reduce the value of larger houses nearby.” Building codes and zoning laws often make it difficult to build new, freestanding cubby-homes by imposing stringent minimum square-footage requirements. According to Shafer, the building industry also works in cahoots with banks and municipalities to make it more difficult to obtain a mortgage for a Tiny Home. (None of this has stopped people from illegally converting garages and toolsheds into homey little retreats.)
The “Emerson” gable home, one of Shafer’s mini abodes, covers a mere 100-square-feet and costs just under $40,000. With the median price of an LA home topping half a million, that’s practically pocket change. But without financing, that’s still $40,000 out of pocket. So, for the do-it-yourselfers, Shafer sells plans for his homes at $680 a pop.
“Upfront costs on a small home are higher per square foot. But I don’t think that people in the planning stages of designing a big dream home think about the back end of it,” says Jeff Oldham who designs products with the alternative energy company Real Goods, in Hopland, Calif. “In your retirement years, when no one wants to keep paying a big mortgage, you’re stuck with it! Home-owners can build themselves into a corner,” says Oldham. Because he believes in the adage that “small is beautiful,” Oldham is pleased to report that “a lot of people who downsize discover that what they feared would be claustrophobic… is actually more nurturing and comforting.”
Why Bitty is Better
There’s another advantage to building small, advocates argue: the reduced size allows for an affordable use of non-wood alternative building materials and energy efficiency. In 1994, sculptor Christina Bertea and her business partner, Mary B. White, built a 360-square-foot home in Oakland, California as a rental unit on an existing property. “I made a pilgrimage to a forest in Oregon where I promised to do something to promote materials other than wood,” Bertea says. She used a construction technique known as “rammed earth” that incorporates a dirt-like material called “quarry fine” (technically a waste material) to build walls that are immune to rot, fire and pests. Rammed-earth walls provide superior insulation and need no maintenance, which saves money in the long run.
“The whole project was an exercise in limitation,” Bertea says. “We all need to accept that we’re a part of nature, and we don’t have the right to use an excessive amount of nature’s resources.” Despite its tiny size, Bertea didn’t skimp on the comforts of home. She added skylights to bring in more light, lofted the bed to add a sense of spaciousness, and incorporated other homey particulars like wall sconces and counters. “I found it an exciting challenge,” says Bertea. “It’s much harder to design something small because you have to maximize every inch. Everything in the design is a detail.”
“I like to say that a well-designed little house is just a big house with all the unnecessary parts cut out,” adds Shafer. Working against Tiny Homes is the stigma of their dimensions in a state where size equals status and property is generally one of the best investments a person can make.
“I want people to understand that ‘small’ is not synonymous with ‘derelict,’” says Shafer. His long-term vision is to build cluster communities of Tiny Homes with a few shared facilities, such as laundry, and possibly a larger common house for events. This model has already been adopted by small-scale intentional communities, like Frogsong in Cotati, Calif.
People are always saying how the world is “growing smaller.” If that’s true, doesn’t it follow that we should start building smaller homes? As Shafer puts it: “The entire world is your home; you don’t need to have everything within the footprint of your house.”
Jordan E. Rosenfeld is a Petaluma-based writer. Her articles have appeared on AlterNet and KQED’s California Report as well as in The Marin Magazine and Writer’s Digest.
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