A Chattanooga board has postponed a request to temporarily place 10 tiny homes in a sanctioned homeless camp at 12th and Peeples streets, which the applicant said makes it unlikely the project can proceed in the allotted time.
“It’s probably not mathematically possible or practical,” Joseph Basel, the owner of tiny home developer Practical Revolution, said in an interview after the meeting. “It doesn’t make sense to do all of that work to only help people for a week or two when the same amount of effort could be put into a larger, more permanent zoning request.”
Dallas Rucker, director of the city’s Land Development Office, said during the downtown zoning committee meeting Thursday the project would have to get a special permit from an appeals board before returning to the panel for consideration. The downtown zoning board voted to defer the item pending approval from the zoning appeals board.
Basel had intended to replace 10 of the sanctioned camp’s existing tents with the structures, which he said have heat, windows, electrical outlets and locking doors. The project would have also acted as a demonstration for organizations interested in placing the company’s tiny homes elsewhere in the city.