Tiny homes: More in Bay Area consider compact housing
Juliana Birnbaum’s two daughters may be living every kid’s dream.
While most children their age are spending time in front of the television, tablet or smartphone, Lila and Serenne have little time for gadgets when they are climbing up and down a ladder to get to their bedroom and frolicking in a 2-acre backyard that has woods, a tree house and a zip line.
Birnbaum, Lila and Serenne live in a 319-square-foot recreational vehicle. That’s pretty crammed for three lively ladies, but Birnbaum considers her living space more ideal than the bigger homes she lived in before.
She has two queen beds and two
single beds, a kitchen with a full-size oven and refrigerator, a bathtub big enough for stretching out and large windows that fill her home, which is the size of a garage, with natural light.
“I’ve had a lot of people say it’s as big as their apartment in San Francisco,” said the writer, who has been living in her Escape Traveler XL RV since September. At $78,500, the Traveler is substantially cheaper than any San Francisco home.
“My daughters really love it,” Birnbaum said. “It’s a great place for them to play and grow up. They say they never want to leave.”
Living has become simpler after she made the decision to trade a regular size home for a tiny house on wheels. She sold all her furniture and had to get creative with how she moved possessions around inside her RV.
She keeps her toaster in the microwave when she’s not using either and transforms her bed into an office by stacking a chair on her mattress and working on her laptop.
Birnbaum, who wrote a book called “Sustainable Revolution” on eco-village development, is among a growing number of Bay Area residents who are leaving the exorbitant housing market here in exchange for smaller, cheaper options like tiny homes and RVs, reducing both their spending and their carbon footprint.
Birnbaum, 42, is composting her waste and recycling bath and dishwater to grow a garden while a solar power system in her RV allows her to live mostly offgrid.
“I wanted to live in a way that is really close to nature,” she said. “Prices have gone up until it’s unaffordable or sustainable. Its very important for me to live this way and live close to my principles.”
But living off the grid does pose headaches.
In Marin County, where Birnbaum lives, people are not allowed to inhabit RVs or any other vehicle even on private property, unless they are in a trailer park. Last year supervisors banned RVs from being parked overnight on city streets, but loosened the ban in January by letting neighborhoods tailor the restrictions.
As a result, Birnbaum does not want to disclose where she parks her home.
She has, however, been getting many questions from curious passersby and has given three house tours to Marin residents who are also looking to scale down.
“Housing is just so crunched and overpriced, and people want to simplify,” she said. “I enjoy the process of simplifying my life because your stuff ends up owning you after awhile. I want my daughters to grow up feeling they don’t need all this stuff.”
At an invite-only exhibition Thursday in the parking lot of the Four Points by Sheraton San Rafael hotel, 50 people toured two new RV models by Wisconsin’s Escape Homes.
The company says it makes RVs in the shape of prairie-style houses with chic, minimalistic interior design and furniture. Escape Homes founder Dan Dobrowolski said that while the products are legally recreational vehicles, he refers to them more as tiny homes on wheels. The company delivered about 100 of them to Bay Area residents last year.
“While by law it’s an RV, it’s built like a highend house,” he said. “The framing, windows, insulation — everything is the same as a house. The architecture happens to fit with coastal California. People just love the design and feel.”
Among those at the house tour was 55-yearold Natalie Woodbury from Folsom (Sacramento County). The property management worker said she was pleasantly surprised; the big windows let in light and a cool breeze, and the slick pine walls and high ceiling made her feel like she was in a house more than an RV. Gleefully twisting the nozzles of the RV’s fiveburner stove, Woodbury joked how she could finally cook an entire turkey and savor it for herself.
With her two youngest children finishing high school and aging parents in Salt Lake City and Southern California that need care and visiting, she says she wants to downsize her home and make it mobile.
“I go back and forth for my parents, and I need a house I can take with me,” she said. “This is an opportunity to be debt free, to travel and live your life. People want to be free from this — you work your whole life and pay off your house, and then what?”