Tiny houses, in our town, shouldn’t be welcomed, they take too much ground.
Contributed by Kim Shanahan
With apologies to Don “Tiny Bubbles” Ho, it never ceases to amaze me how the “tiny house movement” just won’t go away.
First, it’s important to correctly define a tiny house. The state fashioned building codes to address tiny homes, but not for the kind you’re thinking. The state’s codes are for tiny homes on permanent foundations.
Those codes are not for homes built on axles that go down the road with a license plate on their back. The state has no codes for those at all, other than for what’s built at the manufactured-home plant in Albuquerque. We call those single-wides. They are decent housing. But that’s not what you’re probably imagining.
Neither a single-wide nor a cute tiny home like seen on HGTV shows is ever the most efficient housing on a given acre.
The most efficient and cost-effective housing model is the row house, which is why the urban cores of our oldest Eastern cities are virtually all comprised of row houses.
It’s all about the setbacks.
Imagine an acre parcel, 540 feet wide and 80 feet deep. That’s 43,200 square feet and about an acre. Now imagine a row of street-facing units 18 feet wide that would allow for two off-street parking spots 20 feet deep.
Now imagine a first-floor footprint 40 feet deep. Eighteen times 40 feet is 720 square feet — a nice-sized one-bedroom unit. Add a second story, and the footprint can hold two more bedrooms.
Now imagine every unit has a private backyard 18 feet wide and 20 feet deep.
That scenario would get 29 units on an acre, which coincidentally is typical zoning for many multifamily apartments.
Back to those pesky setbacks.
Axle-built “tiny homes” are literally single-family detached homes, which means they all need to be 10 feet apart for fire codes. That means a tiny home sitting in the middle of an 18-foot-wide lot can only be 8 feet wide. And if it is 40 feet deep, that’s 320 square feet compared to 720 for the row house. And you can’t easily put a second story on an 8-foot-wide axle-house.
True, both scenarios get 29 units on the acre, but who doesn’t want more space for the same amount of money?
Another big advantage of 29 row houses versus 29 tiny homes, or even 29 apartments, is construction costs.
Row houses are classified in building codes as townhomes, and townhomes are built to residential building codes, not commercial codes as apartments are. And tiny homes on axles are built to no codes at all.
As a carpenter and builder, I love tiny homes. I built one years ago on our land on lower Cow Creek. It was 12-by-16 feet with a nice deck and a sleeping loft, a perfect 192 square feet of off-grid getaway. But I can’t imagine living in it.
Row houses can be rented or owned, or a combination of the two. They can be built-to-rent by a developer and then converted into rent-to-own for young families needing something for two cars in front and a backyard for a swingset and a kiddie pool.
We seem to forget there are a lot of missing middle designs between three-story apartments and single-family homes on lots zoned five to the acre. What needs to be dispelled, even for emergency or temporary housing for people struggling with homelessness, is that tiny homes offer any practical solution at all.
Unless you’re needing a weekend getaway by the creek.
Kim Shanahan has been a Santa Fe green builder since 1986 and a sustainability consultant since 2019. Contact him at [email protected].
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