- Tiny House Talk

More Tiny Homes for the Homeless: Now in Seattle

Last month I told you about a business man who built a community of tiny houses for the homeless in Texas.

Ever since then I’ve been noticing more projects and non-profits who are on a similar mission.

This story begins with a group of homeless people protesting in a parking lot in the city of Olympia.

They did so by camping out in the parking lot in 2007 when, later, police forced them out.

After this, local churches started offering space for the people to camp in since they had nowhere else to go.

Today- several years later- it is a self-governed village of 30 permanent tiny cabins for the group to live in.

Please don’t miss other exciting tiny homes – join our FREE Tiny House Newsletter!

tiny-homes-for-the-homeless-in-seattle-001

Photo by Bettina Hansen for the Seattle Times

[continue reading…]

{ 11 comments }

Small and Affordable: The 20K House Project

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the LumenHaus, a small, energy-efficient tiny house prototype by Virginia Tech. With its very high-tech features, it’s a neat example, but its $450-650,000 price tag puts it out of the reach of most of us.

But another university group has been focusing on designing small houses with a much, much lower price tag. That’s the Rural Studio at Auburn University.

The Rural Studio is a long-running design-build program that does most of its work in rural Hale County, Alabama. The Rural Studio’s 20K House project has produced a series of houses, twelve so far, so named because they’re designed to be built for $20,000. While some have met this budget and others haven’t, they are all interesting examples of simple but well-designed dwellings.

Roundwood House. Photo credit: Rural Studio

Take, for example, the Roundwood House. Its designers wanted to explore building applications for “thinnings”, small-diameter timbers that are removed to encourage forest health but are too small to be milled into conventional lumber.

[continue reading…]

{ 4 comments }