Kennedy: The tiny house generation

This 24-foot tiny house was built by students at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale.
This 24-foot tiny house was built by students at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale.

Our 10-year-old son is a big fan of little houses.

He watches all the cable shows: "Tiny House, Big Living," "Tiny House Hunters," "Tiny House Builders," "Diminutive Domiciles."

OK, OK, I made the last one up.

Our son says he wants a tiny house...actually he insists that he "needs" one.

This is odd because in the daytime he hardly ever goes into his own bedroom, which is the size of a small tiny house with a full-size bathroom attached.

Earlier this month, the first Tennessee Tiny House Festival came to Audubon Acres in East Brainerd, and our 10-year-old begged to go. (My 15-year-old son, meanwhile, would have probably gone too if he hadn't been at a soccer tournament - and if I had slipped him a $100 bill, and if I had agreed to stay at least 100 feet away from him at all times.)

As a treat to son No. 2, I shelled out $20 to ride school buses from Hamilton Place mall to Audubon Acres to tour 40 tiny homes. My sister went, too.

Touring, in this case, consisted of the 10-year-old finding the ladder in each tiny home and climbing up to explore the sleeping loft. Having reached the tippy top of each tiny house he would look down, like Edmund Hillary atop Mount Everest, and exclaim: "Wow, cool!"

I can understand why a 10-year-old would find a tiny house appealing; all the dimensions are just right. Tiny bathrooms, tiny beds, tiny appliances.

As for me, tiny houses make me claustrophobic. Downsizing 90 percent is dramatic.

Still, I understand that the whole tiny-home movement is at the confluence of several demographic trends.

-Lots of baby boomers are becoming empty-nesters, and downsizing their living space is appealing. An estimated 40 percent of tiny-home buyers are over 50 years old. How many are willing to downsize from 2,600 square feet (the size of an average new home) to 260 square feet, the size of typical tiny house, is an open question.

-As family incomes stagnate, living mortgage free has big advantages. Over two-thirds of tiny-house owners have no mortgage, compared to about 29 percent of all U.S. homeowners.

-The per capita income of tiny-house buyers is $42,000, which happens to be a reasonable price point for a modest tiny home (not counting lot). The average starting pay for a newly minted college graduate is just under $50,000, which also makes millennials prime customers for tiny houses.

While making the rounds at the Tennessee Tiny House Festival, I noticed that one of the houses - a 24-foot model listed for $65,000 - was built by students at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale.

A few days later, I telephoned John Youngberg, associate professor of construction management, to get the scoop.

Youngberg, who worked in a series of construction jobs before settling in as a professor at Southern, says student-built tiny homes are a way of creating a learning-based employment opportunity for college kids majoring in construction management.

They work a couple of afternoons a week on a tiny home (the university fronts the money for materials), haul it out West where zoning laws are more tiny-house friendly, and then split the sale profits to help pay tuition. Last year, four students split about $15,000 earned on the sale of a tiny home, he says.

"What I like about the tiny-house build is they can see all stages of a project in one year's time," Youngberg says. "They learn roofing and plumbing and electrical and drywall and painting."

The students use computer-assisted design to lay out floor plans and to solve problems such as weight distribution, Youngberg says.

The professor says that while some places in the country have embraced tiny houses, zoning and building codes in our part of the country have not been modified to accommodate tiny homes.

"It would be nice if our county building officials would actually address the fact tiny homes are here to stay and we need provisions in building and zoning codes," he says. "They have not done that adequately."

But if demand continues to surge, change will surely come.

Today's 10-year-olds are tomorrow's home buyers.

Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com.

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