Tiny abodes could be next housing wave to hit city
We’ve seen monster homes. We’ve seen skinny homes. It looks as if tiny homes could be next.
Coun. Andrew Knack is among the advocates for this newest form of affordable housing in Edmonton.
“It’s a huge gap, a huge opportunity for seniors and more affordable housing (for anyone),” said Knack, who plans to introduce a motion to include tiny homes in the next infill revisions when staff return with an update this year.
“It would not be a very contentious type of housing because often the pushback comes from larger, bigger,” he said. “Here, you’re not building big.”
Neighbouring Sturgeon County tweaked its zoning bylaw to accommodate movable houses no larger than a bachelor’s suite in September.
Tiny homes could be a fad — a millennial dream featured on popular by YouTube shows and HGTV’s Tiny Homes Big Living. But some Edmonton residents are already living in what’s basically an ultra-small, custom-designed mobile garden suite.
Others say they’d jump at the chance if it was legal.
Legalizing tiny homes would let a homeowner buy a small unit for an aging parent, to downsize or for rental income. They could keep it as long as it’s useful, selling and moving it again before the homeowner sells the property or no longer needs the secondary unit.
Or the owner of a tiny home could find someone to rent them space and utility connections. If necessary, the home could be fixed to the ground with screw piles or other temporary foundations.
“We have so much stuff; people are finding satisfaction in letting go of all the extra stuff we have,” said Kenton Zerbin, describing one appeal of slimmed-down living.
He lives with his wife, Melissa, in a 216-square-foot house in Sturgeon County, which he designed and built himself for about $120,000.
It means at age 30, he is mortgage-free. He has heated towel racks, cork flooring, feature wood stained with blue streaks by pine beetles — all the luxury he needs and can afford because the house is so small.
He can now work as much or as little as he wants to pay his minimal water bill, but his dream is to move to the city, buy a centrally located property with other tiny homeowners and live in a community.
Steve Zaleschuk, who builds tiny homes on his own for a living in Morinville, said demand is so strong, “if the city allowed these, I’d be hiring 20 guys.”
He keeps a list of all the Edmonton residents who contact him and said they’d buy in a minute if they had a place to park one. His homes range in price from $65,000 to $119,000, and in size from 168 square feet to 420 square feet.
The largest was for a family of four living outside Stony Plain.
“It’s a great way to get financial freedom,” he said.
It also cuts down on time spent house-cleaning, since tiny home dwellers tend to put things away immediately by necessity. The homes are all custom-designed to use every inch of space, often with a loft or hideaway bed for sleeping. Current Edmonton zoning rules are somewhat unclear — tiny homes could be classified as a mobile home only allowed in a mobile home park. If a homeowner wants a permit for a house or garden suite, it must be larger than 30 square metres (320 square feet).
Sturgeon County development manager Clayton Kittlitz said it eliminated its minimum size rules for most areas and removed a rule that said secondary units could only be for family members or a farm hand.