Conscious Choice Seattle: Tiny Houses

April 2006 | Feature Story

Tiny Houses

Going “small” is not necessarily the opposite of living large

By Jordan E. Rosenfeld

With “monster” houses —4,000-square-feet and bigger —popping 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 for Planet Earth and its dwindling resources. “Affordable housing,” is more a sound-byte than objective reality as a growing number of 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 lessen the heavy ‘footprint’ our consumption patterns place on the Earth’s limited resources.

Jay Shafer is a Tiny Home advocate. The former, college-art-professor turned tiny-home-builder, is now the owner of Tumbleweed Tiny Homes in northern California. 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 that occupies less 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 the cold. 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.

According to Shafer, the belief that “bigger is better” is an idea that evolved “from this 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.”

Part of the allure of small homes arises from a romantic association with artists and poets such as Thoreau and Whitman who lived in woodsy bungalows. Ultimately, Shafer predicts, as natural resources become increasingly depleted, there will be little choice but to build small. The small house movement is just beginning to catch on in the U.S., 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,” he says. “People understand the need for small housing on an intuitive level.”

Going Local and Small

In Seattle, Jim Soules and Linda Pruitt are discovering that small housing has high-end enthusiasts too. They are co-owners of Cottage Company, which has built six small-house communities of 8 to 16 houses each, the latest called Danielson Grove in Kirkland. The Danielson floor plans range from 700-square-feet and one bedroom to 1,700-square-feet and three bedrooms. The homes are selling in the $500,000 and $600,000 range, in a town where most new-home construction begins at $750,000.

“Our buyers are looking for high quality in a new small home, not just a shelter devoid of authenticity,” says Pruitt.

It’s an important point about the small-housing movement. The mindset cuts across socioeconomic categories and aesthetic tastes. You can save environmental resources whether you are building it yourself or adding the several operable skylights, vaulted ceilings, built-in bookcases and detailed millwork trim typical of Cottage Company homes.

“I had a very interesting conversation recently with a guy in the tech world,” says Pruitt. “He was explaining that in the early days of big computers and little storage that every keystroke counted. You had to be more astute and efficient. Now software developers have all the storage space they need. People can afford to be sloppy, he said. [The urge to build bigger houses] is the same idea.”

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.

From his northern California perspective, Shafer believes the tiny houses movement has many enthusiasts but a formidable number of opposing forces too. 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, free-standing cubby-homes by imposing stringent minimum square-footage requirements. According to Shafer, the building industry 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 tool-sheds into homey little retreats in the Bay Area region.)

100-square-feet and $40,000

The “Emerson” gable home, one of Shafer’s mini-manses, covers a mere 100-square-feet and costs just under $40,000. With the median price of a Bay Area home inching towards a million dollars, that’s practically pocket change. But without financing, that’s still $40,000 out of pocket. So, for the do-it-yourself crowd, 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.” A believer in “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.”

“I like to say that a well-designed little house is just a big house with all the unnecessary parts cut out,” adds Shafer.

Seattle’s urban housing boom inspired Soules and Pruitt, who are married and operate in Northeast Seattle. They noticed smaller homes in “older legacy neighborhoods” were selling at the highest prices.

“Jim was dissatisfied with more conventional home development,” says Pruitt. “He believed people could value something else.”

Pruitt said the local small-housing trend can only go as far as municipalities are willing. She says the smaller homes “better utilize precious land” and that Cottage Company has found opportunities in Kirkland, Redmond and near the Langley waterfront on Whidbey Island.

“Look at the Built Green movement in King and Snohomish counties,” says Pruitt. “There are so many more [conscious] builders. Building a small house is one of the most sustainable ways to [use] less raw materials, even more than focusing on finishes, low-VOC paints or floor choices.”

Jordan E Rosenfeld is writer-broadcaster based in northern California. She is the host of “Word by Word: Conversations with Writers” on an FM station in San Francisco.

Additional reporting by Andrew Mulholland.

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