Researching smaller homes recently put tiny houses on my radar, so when I noticed the documentary “Tiny” at DC’s Environmental Film Festival I made a point to see it.

The film follows Christopher Smith and his girlfriend and fellow filmmaker Merete Mueller, as they built a 124-square foot home in the countryside outside Denver.  Because homes there are required to be at least 600 square feet, smaller homes are being built on wheels, which makes them exempt from minimum house-size laws.  Most “tiny houses” are under 200 square feet.

The couple, neither of whom had ever built anything before, built the house on wheels in a friend’s backyard.  When it was finished – much later than originally expected – they moved the tiny house to the rural lot Christopher had bought for it. The materials cost $26,000; the land cost wasn’t mentioned.

So how did these newbie homebuilders do it?  By watching how-to videos on Youtube, often on a smart phone while doing a specific job, like wiring.

One of Merete’s big discoveries was that compost toilets are “way less terrifying than I thought they would be.”

The film has gotten lots of nice reviews,  here.  And here’s the trailer.

One important feature all tiny houses share is using their limited space as well as possible.  On the Tiny House Blog there are lots of success stories, and the blog gets an impressive 10,000-15,000 visitors a day.

Other tiny-house proponents in the film include pioneers like Tumbleweed Houses owner Jay Schafer, who went tiny in the late ’90s.  After marrying and starting a family, they moved to what he calls their “500-square foot mansion.”  All relative, I guess!  (Check out Schafer’s Village of Tiny Houses, scheduled to open in  2015.)  And there’s super-pioneer Dee Williams, a woman of a certain age who built her tiny house by herself.

Ikea was one of the film’s sponsors, by the way.  Might they be interested in helping to promote Greenbelt’s modest-size housing in some way?

Environmental Issues

While tiny houses certainly save on many resources, especially for utilities, how “green” they are overall depends on lots of other factors – like whether they’re adding to sprawl, as Christopher acknowledged that his home does. There’d be no empty space left if everyone followed suit, so he prefers a model for the feature that doesn’t affect land as much as his house did.  So far, tiny houses, so often outlawed by zoning, are in the woods or in people’s yards.  And funny thing – turns out Christopher didn’t like living in the middle of nowhere, so he moved his tiny house to Boulder.  His home has no running water but at least in Boulder, he can just shower at the gym.  Merete has since moved to New  York City.

Tiny Houses in Cities

Lee Pera of Boneyards Studio spoke after the movie about tiny houses in D.C., which are usually located in alley lots and back yards on trailers.  Often they’re not totally legal, so the homeowners need to stay under the radar and avoid publicity, like one single mother Lee knows who’s who’s breaking zoning and child protective service rules – by virtue of her small house size.

Lee has seen tiny houses in D.C. used as artist’s studios, as man or woman caves, hang-out spaces for a teenager, or even rented out to provide income from infill housing.

Boneyard Studios has monthly open houses, and I hope to catch one soon.

Northern Virginia has lots of new tiny homes, including some that are modular.  And in other cities, Pittsburgh was mentioned as having a thriving tiny home market because the city has no minimum size lots.

Nationally, tiny homes are catching on in cities as infill development, to provide low-cost housing and increase the tax base without using open land.  Better to use derelict, unused spaces.  Apparently there’s a big contingent of tiny homes in West Virginia and also in Richmond, though many of the homeowners are trying to avoid attention.

Internationally, their popularity varies – “really big” in Australia, but not in Europe on Latin America.

Now back to Greenbelt:  I recommend “Tiny” for a Reel and Meal event!