Fort Collins Should Embrace Tiny Homes
Driving around Fort Collins, you may very well spot tiny little houses perched on trailers.
Tiny homes are still widely considered a niche market, but the housing trend has pickup attention on HGTV and across the internet. While there are building code restrictions for tiny homes in Fort Collins, they have become much more friendly to the building style. The city council passed 2016 legislation which dropped the minimum size of a home from 800 square feet to 120 square feet. Larimer County, on the other hand, considers tiny homes on wheels to be RVs and have a number of ways that a resident could break the law by living in a mobile tiny home year round.
Home buyers have been turning to tiny homes in Colorado and across the nation because increasing housing prices in some regions have nearly crushed the “American Dream” of owning a home. In June 2018, the median price out of more than 250 homes sold in Fort Collins was $425,000, according to a Coloradoan article. On the other hand, a tiny home averages $30,000–40,000 and maxes out at around $180,000, according to Reader’s Digest.
The ease of actually building a tiny home as a legal house in Fort Collins has improved, but the problem many perspective tiny home buyer face is where to put it. In Fort Collins, to legally be a house, it must be hooked up to utilities like water and electricity year round. Some tiny homeowners have turned to open spaces in mobile home parks, but many developing communities in Colorado have been pushing mobile home communities out.
Often times in communities with high property values the land under mobile home parks is sold out from under the residents. Some cities have tried to temporarily freeze rezoning processes to slow redevelopment of mobile home parks, but some cities have decided to take more decisive actions by buying the land municipally. Boulder, which is the most expensive city in the state, has purchased mobile home parks because the cost of living is so great it’s driving out the middle class and working class residents.
Salida, Colorado, located in the state’s central Rockies, approved a 200 unit tiny home community in 2016. The Sprout Tiny Home Community will have for-rent tiny homes built on permanent foundations with affordability in mind. Some cities, like Cedar Springs, Ohio, have developed communities, designed like mobile home parks with rentable lots and utilities, for mobile tiny homes to park permanently, as opposed to RV-style temporary parking like in Lyons, Colorado.
While homes under 750 square feet range in price from $160,000 to nearly $400,000 in Fort Collins, many middle class and working class citizens are pushed into renting, mobile homes and cheap apartment complexes. Developing tiny home communities wouldn’t just help those folks access stable housing options in the city, but would promote the themes of sustainability and unique architecture that Fort Collins is known for. While mobile homes are typically made of largely disposable materials and are structurally degraded every time they are moved, mobile tiny homes are designed with earth-friendliness and movement in mind.
By supporting a mobile tiny home community instead of permanent foundation community like in Salida the city would be taking home pricing power out of developers hands. A 576 square foot apartment can go for $162,000 because the seller is fairly certain that a buyer is willing to pay more to stay in Fort Collins, which is why home prices have shot up on houses worth a fraction as much 20 years ago. Knowing that mobile tiny homes can and likely will leave the area keeps the prices of the structures nationally competitive.
As a person born and raised in Fort Collins (who isn’t planning on going into a particularly lucrative field), it breaks my heart to see the possibility of staying in my hometown slip away. If the city were to support and nurture an affordable and sustainable housing option, I know that people like myself would be able to see a future in the city we call home. Otherwise, before we know it, everyone who works in an industry with a modest salary, like teaching, public service and even reporting, will be forced to say goodbye.
