Even a struggling inner-city Chattanooga neighborhood doesn't want tiny homes.
Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise (CNE), a nonprofit housing organization whose motto is "dedicated to building a better Chattanooga," pulled its plans to build a village of seven one-bedroom, under-600-square-foot homes clustered around a common area on a half acre at S. Willow Street and Vance Avenue because of opposition from the Ridgedale Community Association.
Julianne Jones, Paula Jones and Zach Downs, from left, talk on the porch of the "tiny" house on Willow Street on Thursday, October 8, 2015."We met with the neighborhood last week. They had some heartburn," Bob McNutt, real estate development manager at CNE, told the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission at its meeting Monday. Neighbors were concerned about such things as the tiny homes being used as rentals, McNutt said.
So instead, CNE submitted new plans for four two-bedroom homes on four separate lots all facing Vance Avenue. Planners approved rezoning for that on Monday.
"Still small, still affordable," McNutt told planners. "The neighborhood seemed happy with that."
Ridgedale is just east of Highland Park and west of Missionary Ridge.
Gary Ball, vice president of the Ridgedale Community Association, spoke to the planning commission and thanked CNE for listening.
All but one of a small group of Ridgedale residents voted against CNE's plan at a special Jan. 3 meeting of the community association, Ball said after the meeting.
"It wasn't that they didn't like the tiny homes, it was too much in one spot," Ball said, adding that one Ridgedale resident said, "It just looked cluttered. And there was a lot of concern that the houses didn't face the street. The rental question was the biggest issue that several people brought up."
Burglaries, shootings and homicides occur in the neighborhood, including about a year ago when a couple were shot and killed in front of a 5-year-old boy on 13th Street, and three years ago when five people were injured in what was described as a "running gun battle" on 13th Street.
An advantage to building tiny homes, McNutt said, is the one-bedroom buildings tend to attract single people without children - or urban pioneers.
That was CNE's experience about 20 years ago, he said, when it was the first began building homes in Chattanooga's then-blighted, now-thriving Southside neighborhood. That was before Battle Academy, an award-winning kindergarten through fifth-grade school, was built at Market and Main streets.
"We didn't have a single buyer who had children," McNutt said. "I used to joke we had 'risk-oblivious' buyers. They wanted to be in the city. They wanted to not be in these whitebread [suburban] subdivisions."
CNE proposed its village of tiny homes to be built next to a 532-square-foot home it built in 2015 on S. Willow Street that McNutt said sold for $79,900. That's "very affordable" for a new home, he said, but also a very good price per square foot for the Ridgedale neighborhood.
CNE also sold land that formerly held a vacant Tennessee Temple University dormitory on Kirby Avenue at South Hawthorne Street, so a neighborhood of one- and two-bedroom so-called "tiny homes" around 800 to 1,200 square feet could be built on Kirby .
CNE, which McNutt said owns a lot of former Tennessee Temple University property, hopes to recreate the same renaissance in Ridgedale that it helped spark on the Southside, he said.
"We hope we can do something similar here," McNutt said.
This isn't the first time a proposal to build a cluster of tiny homes has been subject to neighbors' opposition in Hamilton County.
A proposal to build a community of 32 affordable "tiny homes" in rural Ooltewah near the corner of Snow Hill and Mahan Gap roads where renters could live, work and raise food got turned down by planners and county commissioners last year after more than 1,800 signatures opposing the project were presented by three Ooltewah-area homeowner groups.
Contact staff writer Tim Omarzu at tomarzu@timesfreepress.com or www.facebook.com/MeetsForBusiness or twitter.com/meetforbusi ness or 423-757-6651.