Thinking small: Compact, cheaper living in 'tiny houses'


His retirement home is 238 square feet — one-tenth the size of the average new American house — and sits in his Anne Arundel County yard. He and wife Renee can hitch it to a truck and take it with them wherever they go.



Tiny houses fall into two categories. Some, like Cantori's, are technically travel trailers — tagged and road-ready. Others have foundations and aren't going anywhere.






"That's the No. 1 issue — zoning," said Steven Harrell, owner of Tiny House Listings (, where 20,000 to 50,000 people visit per day to check out tiny houses for sale. "There are a lot of people advocating, 'Hey, what's the big deal? Why don't you ease square-foot [regulations]?' Times have changed, the economy has changed, people are having to make choices. And tiny houses are one of them."

Baltimoreans can't live in a travel-trailer tiny home, or any other sort of travel trailer. But modest foundation-built houses are allowed in the city as long as their width is 16 feet at minimum. Also required: one room of at least 120 square feet, a kitchen — which can be in that room — and a separate bathroom.

"You're asking how little can you get, and the answer is 'pretty small,' " said Michael Braverman, the city's deputy commissioner of code enforcement.

He doesn't think Baltimore has any super-tiny homes, but there's a 1950s-era cottage in Roland Park that's not much more than 500 square feet.


"You probably could build the house," she said, but you would need to sort through all the rules to be certain.



"There's all these empty spaces around the city," said Levy, who lives in a Washington rowhouse near the lot he's building on. "If you take an aerial photo [and look at certain parts of D.C.] … it's striking that about 50 percent of the land is open space in the backyard. And right now, you can't build anything back there."


"In contrast to the manufactured-housing park, the tiny homes are typically about one-fifth the size, they've got gabled roofs, … they're designed and built by architects," Levy said. "And people, they stand in line for an hour to have a look. Calling a tiny-house community a trailer park is like calling Dupont Circle rowhouses tenements."


Matt Hoffman, vice president of innovation at Enterprise Community Partners, the Columbia affordable-housing giant, said small dwellings aren't a solution for everyone. But they're a useful choice to have. More than 10 million people in America are "housing burdened," paying over half their income on rent, he said.

"We want to see a range of housing options for people," he said. "It's not a one-size-accommodates-all."

Part of the early drive for minimum-size regulations was to stamp out dangerous tenements, Hoffman said. But small doesn't have to mean hazardous.

"It seems like it's the right time to re-examine whether we can move back in a direction where smaller can accommodate people in a healthy and safe way," he said.




In Cantori's case, it's sitting near his bicycle shed in his Pasadena yard. His actual residence isn't huge, either: just under 1,400 square feet for a family of four and their two dogs.








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