By Emily Pinkerton
Micro-living is having a moment — as evidenced by a recent Portlandia sketch — and the Bay Area is jumping on the bandwagon.
San Francisco already has micro-apartments (with more in the pipeline), but according to Curbed SF, we’re only seeing the beginning of a big push for smallness in the Bay Area. Jay Shafer, founder of Four Lights and Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, is scouting four potential sites in Sebastopol to develop into a tiny house community. Curbed also reports that Shafer is in conversation with local officials and hopes to begin construction within a year.
If Sebastopol is too off the beaten path for you, there’s still hope. Chelsea Rustrum, a local collaborative housing advocate and interdependence consultant, is looking to develop a tiny house community “within close proximity to San Francisco.” She’ll host a meetup on April 1 to strategize about potential properties and how to secure funding for the micro-community’s land.
While enthusiasm for the tiny house movement runs high nationally, such communities often run into hurdles even after land is secured and houses are built. The tiny houses of Washington DC’s Boneyard Studios, for example, sit empty as a sort of showcase of tiny living’s potential (the city’s zoning laws prohibit anyone from legally living there).
The major snag that tiny, would-be utopias run into are zoning restrictions that essentially outlaw micro-dwellings. Building codes are commonly adapted from a standard set of regulations ratified by the International Code Council that specify a main room of 120-square-feet and no habitable room smaller than 70-square-feet. Shafer circumvents these regulations by mounting his houses on trailers so they’re classified either as RVs or “a load on a flatbed.” Each designation poses its own challenges in terms of mobility, financing, and insurance.
What this means for potential tenants or owners in Shafer’s proposed community is that they’ll likely live in an area zoned as an RV park — which begs the question, is it problematic that relatively well-off, young, urban dwellers are eager to live in certain types of prefabricated mobile homes but not others? Curbed SF notes that Shafer intends his community to be “very different from your typical trailer park,” suggesting it’ll appeal to people passionate about aesthetics and lower environmental impact rather than those who would live there out of sheer economic necessity. (An article in Bloomberg last year noted that some tiny houses can be built for as little as $11,000 and cost $900 per year to maintain).
Micro-homes, it seems, are the new barn weddings: something formerly unappealing suddenly rebranded and romanticized for a new generation of conscious consumers.
Herein lies one of the great challenges for tiny living: given the opportunity to create truly egalitarian affordable housing, why is the community so divided? Numerous existing tiny house villages serve as transitional housing for the homeless and impoverished, yet Rustrum insists her community will be designed for the “creative class” specifically. Micro-homes, it seems, are the new barn weddings: something formerly unappealing suddenly rebranded and romanticized for a new generation of conscious consumers.
It’d be great to see more tiny houses around the Bay Area, especially if cities don’t exclude the populations that such houses could potentially help most. In the meantime, those looking for small, affordable housing in San Francisco can only hope that the 42 units (“efficiency dwelling units” in the parlance of city code) slated for Folsom don’t carry a big price tag.
[via Curbed SF; photo courtesy of Bill Dickinson/Flickr]
Got a tip for The Bold Italic? Email tips@thebolditalic.com.
