More Homeowners Looking for Smaller Options
There's more to a house than square footage
By Jay MacDonald, bankrate.com | Published: 11/01/2007
Bigger isn't always better -- for some buyers, tiny cottages trump hefty houses.
The reasons are too much house are many. Baby boomers, 77 million strong, are looking to downsize in retirement. Young home buyers find it increasingly difficult to afford or maintain larger homes. Urban land is at a premium. Smaller homes in desirable neighborhoods are scarce or outlawed by covenant. And environmental concerns about a residence's "carbon footprint" have further dampened enthusiasm for spacious showpieces.
In some cases, the small-house trend goes to the extreme Lilliputian end of the scale.
Jay Shafer lives quite comfortably in a 100-square-foot house in Sebastopol, Calif. You may have a toolshed or a master bath about the same size.
Shafer's home is on the small end of a line of compact, ready-made dwellings he designs for his Tumbleweed Tiny House Co. His designs have won numerous awards for energy efficiency and green building. The homes cost between $20,000 and $48,000, excluding land.
Though many customers use them as vacation homes or mother-in-law cottages, there are those smaller-is-better devotees who, like Shafer, simply prefer to live within their means.
Shafer, founder of the Small House Society, says "supersizing" came about when home builders hooked consumers on the one easily quantifiable aspect of every house: its square footage.
"It's true that the cheapest thing you can add onto a house is square footage, and of course the building industry likes to build these things and people are willing to pay a lot for that not-so-expensive addition," he says. "When the housing industry pushed for larger houses back in the '70s and '80s because their profits were leveling out, the banks followed suit. Then the codes followed suit, so it became illegal to build smaller than a certain size."
Americans quickly came to believe that more square footage paid for itself in resale, especially during the run-up of housing prices in the last decade. Since 1970, the average American home has grown from 1,500 square feet to 2,450 square feet, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
Against that bigger-is-better investor mind-set, smaller homes were either shunned as fixtures from a bygone era or lumped in with mobile homes. Shafer, Alchemy Architects, the Tiny House Co. and others are attempting to change such perceptions about compact living by extolling the virtues of small houses.
Virtues of small houses:
Energy efficiency: The propane bill to heat Shafer's cabin in frigid Iowa City, Iowa, was less than $170 for the entire winter.
Durability: Tumbleweed houses withstand winds of up to 180 mph.
Expandability: Modular design allows for growth.
Custom materials: The smaller the house, the easier it is to use cedar, rubber shingle tiles, cork flooring and other materials that would bust the budget of a larger house.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to downsizing is where to put stuff. Jim Gauer, author of "The New American Dream: Living Well in Small Homes," has these suggestions for maximizing storage space in a small home:
1. Install kitchen cabinets that go to the ceiling.
2. Put in drawers, drawers and more drawers. Put them under beds, in kitchen bases, in bedside tables, inside closets.
3. Include closet systems, such as those available at California Closets and IKEA.
New York designer Marianna Cusato wasn't out to change the world when she designed the Katrina Cottage. Her goal was to help provide immediate housing to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
But when Lowe's executives saw Cusato's compact, self-contained cottage at the International Builders Show in 2005, they recognized a solution to the broader need for affordable housing nationwide.
Lowe's partnered with Cusato and made Katrina Cottages available to order at its 29 locations in Louisiana and Mississippi. The one- and two-bedroom bungalows, in four styles ranging from 544 square feet to 936 square feet, are delivered in sections for easy assembly.
The cost: $40 to $50 per square foot, or less than $50,000 for the largest floor plan.
Cusato says the availability of a durable, new, "right-sized" house touched a nerve with people tired of having to carry the financial burden of oversized homes.
"A lot of times, houses are sold because Realtors convince somebody that it's not necessarily what they may want, but it's what they have to have to resell. So many people are living in houses not because it's the exact house they want but it's the house they need to sell out of," she says.
Ultimately, says Cusato, the solution lies in well-built communities where homes can be of a human scale, instead of stretched out of shape in an effort to fit in everything from a fitness room to a movie theater that should be shared by the neighborhood.
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