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FLAT ROCK – Sometimes, 224 square feet can seem downright spacious.

Standing outside her cheerful tiny home, with its Cape Cod features, crab blue siding and gray metal roof, Jacki Cronin beams.

“This is an upgrade,” she said with a laugh. “Hey, I lived in a van for one and a half years before this.”

Cronin owns one of the 114 homes in Simple Life, a tiny home development off Upward Road in southeastern Henderson County. It seems like a gated, miniature version of a nice subdivision, with tree-lined streets, neighbors sitting on comfy porches and residents splashing in the community pool.

The main difference is all the homes sit on wheels.

It’s also growing quite nicely. The company is adding 12 more homes and plans an expansion on 25 acres across the street that could hold another 150 tiny houses.

Clearly, the concept is popular there, but closer to Asheville? Not so much.

Tiny homes have not taken off in Buncombe County yet, in part because they pose special problems with permitting and zoning, some of which come down to how you actually define “tiny home.”

The adorable abodes in Simple Life boast most or all of the features of stick-built, larger homes — and cost between $99,000-$150,000 — but they fall into a regulatory conundrum that’s tied up in state zoning and insurance rules about recreational vehicles, site-built homes and what is considered a permanent dwelling.

It gets complicated quickly.

“Tiny homes are classified as ‘park model homes’ and are the same as a recreational vehicle,” said Toby Linville, code enforcement services director with Henderson County. “We only allow them to be permitted in a recreational vehicle park. We do not permit them on individual lots.”

The state sets the building code rules, so all counties are in the same boat when it comes to permitting these homes.

Coles Whalen, marketing director for Simple Life, said the neighborhood’s two sections, The Village and the Meadows “utilize a zoning that most closely resembles modern RV zoning, but has some significant modifications.”

“We like to say Simple Life has found a way to combine the benefits of modern RV living  — shared costs for utilities and amenities, owner-operator property maintenance, and small footprint housing to name a few — with the benefits of typical residential home living,” Whalen said.

Those benefits include higher-quality, craftsman-style construction, high-end home building materials, and exteriors and interiors that can be customized.

About 60% of Simple Life’s residents are full-time residents; the balance are seasonal.

But the state code defines “park model homes” as “designed for temporary living quarters for recreation, camping, travel and seasonal use (but in no case for use as a permanent dwelling).”

“They are still considered temporary by our definition,” Linville said.

Asked if residents should not be living there permanently, he said not according to the zoning definitions of recreational park and park vehicles.

So, what gives?

“It is not something that we actively enforce, but they are not defined as permanent living,” Linville said.

‘Quality of the builds’

Mike McCann, president and CEO of Simple Life Partners, said, “It’s the quality of the builds” of their tiny homes, including upgraded heating and cooling systems, full water and sewer, as well as high-value insulation, that make them the equals of HUD-approved permanent housing.

“What (Linville) and his team have acknowledged is that (Henderson County) is full of (housing) units that are 20, 30, 40 years old that people are living in full time,” McCann said. “They’re not to the standards that they should be, but people are living (in them). The same is going on in Buncombe County. People are living in units that are not designed for full-time living, but it’s all they can afford, and it’s all that was offered.”

In short, sometimes counties and municipalities were having to look the other way when people lived in nonpermanent homes on a permanent basis.

McCann says Simple Life’s answer was to install tiny homes that meet the standards for permanent dwellings, as established by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In Buncombe, both city and county development officials, and one real estate expert, say tiny homes just have not taken off. You might see some small homes going up, but their permitting might be questionable or non-existent.

Ben Woody, the city of Asheville’s Development Services Department director, said tiny home building here is “very limited in scope.”

“Ultimately, if you’re going to build a 300-400 square foot house for permanent residence, you’ve got to meet the North Carolina building code requirements for a bathroom, sleeping area, energy efficiency, foundations and everything else,” Woody said. “The practicality of it is when you add all that in, it becomes cost-prohibitive.”

McCann said he has met with city and county officials in Buncombe, but “nobody was confident” that zoning tweaks would happen in “any reasonable amount of time” to accommodate a tiny home development. Simple Life has a project ongoing in Florida and the expansion on the horizon in Henderson County, and McCann said he just doesn’t have the resources to effect the necessary changes in Buncombe.

“I think Buncombe County’s time is going to  come, and we’re going to be very interested when it does,” he said, adding that land prices are also a consideration.

While Simple Life’s homes are likely not going to meet the federal definition of affordable housing, they are considerably less than a lot of homes, albeit larger ones, on the market now. For 2018, the median sale price of a home in in Asheville was $310,000, while for all of Buncombe County it was $285,000.

For now, the cheapest way to build a tiny home “is to put it on a chassis,” Woody said, and that’s going to be classified as an RV. And RV’s technically are not permanent dwellings.

The upshot is you’re hard pressed to find many true tiny homes in Asheville.

Buncombe County Planning Director Nathan Pennington said even defining “tiny home” is problematic.

“When you see ‘tiny homes,’ that can mean lot of different things,” Pennington said. “A lot of what you see on these TV shows that have gotten so popular are really RVs.” 

To build a permanent home, well that’s a different matter, and that comes as a rude awakening to a lot of people.

“The deal is, we get a lot of requests from folks who see these shows, and they want to bring in a tiny home on a piece of property and have something that has a composting toilet,” Pennington said, noting that this likely does not meet the requirements for a permanent dwelling. “RVs are not meant to be permanent habitation. They simply don’t meet the code.”

The website thetinylife.com notes the “typical American home is around 2,600 square feet, whereas the typical small or tiny house definition is a home with square footage between 100 and 400 square feet.”

‘It feels plenty big’

Code confusion and tweaking aside, the tiny home concept clearly is working at Simple Life, which comprises 28 acres, with each home sited on about 2,500-4,000 square feet.

Simple Life, which also has a tiny home community in Oxford, Florida, bought the Flat Rock community two years ago from the original owner, then upgraded the roads and the clubhouse. Most of its residents, about 70 percent, are retirees, but all age groups are represented.

Overall, 17% of Simple Life’s residents rent, and the development has a fairly even mix of fully retired, semi-retired and working residents.

While the concept is cheaper than larger homes, it’s not going to fall into the affordable housing category.

“For those who finance a park model/cottage the typical monthly payment with home site lease and house payment combined is $1,200-$1,500,” said Whalen, the marketing director.

The “homesite lease” is what Simple Life advertises as “one monthly fee,” which covers your home site rental and most of your utilities. Fees start at $550 for “The Meadows” section of Simple Life, which has smaller homes, and $566 for “The Village,” which has larger, park model homes, often with L-shaped add-ons and square footage measurements pushing 550 square feet.

Simple Life offers water and sewer, twice weekly trash pickup and recycling, and 70 channels of cable TV. Residents have access to a dog park and a bocce ball court. Lawn maintenance and snow removal are provided.

Cronin, at 25, is one of the younger residents, and she loves her new community. She moved in Dec. 15, 2018, after spending those 18 months living out of a van.

Her new home is on wheels, too, but it’s custom made, to her specifications.

“I drew it up on graph paper, and they built it for me,” Cronin said. “This is like a modern farmhouse, but it’s custom to how I wanted it.”

The home is indeed tiny – just 224 square feet and 28 feet long – but it’s got a lot of nice touches, including butcher block counter tops and subway tile in the bathroom. She’s also got a loft for sleeping, another for storage and a locking storage shed on one end of the home. 

“It feels plenty big,” Cronin said. “If it was the wrong kind of 200 square feet, it probably could feel wrong pretty quickly.”

Inside, her home feels surprisingly roomy. The water heater is an instant-heat model, and the stove and oven run off propane.

“Everything is like a normal house,” Cronin said. “You’d never know.”

An avid cyclist, Cronin works for a Chicago-based company that produces and markets a beet extract called “Alt-Red” that helps cyclists with performance. 

Cronin travels “a lot,” including a lot of weekends, and she spends about four hours a day on her bike, averaging 400 miles a week of road time. When her boyfriend visits, the home is still big enough, though, and she points out that he’s 6 feet 2 inches tall. 

Of course it helps that “he owns less stuff than anybody I know.”

Growing up, Cronin’s parents owned homes on Cape Cod.

“I grew up in a 5,000-square-foot home, and my parents were like, ‘You want to live in a tiny home?’” she said with a laugh.

The coastal upbringing influenced her choices in the tiny home, including the “Georgian Bay blue” exterior and the wood trim cedar shake up high. It’s a nice fit, as she looks out over one of several ponds in Simple Life.

While people may debate if tiny homes constitute “affordable housing,” Cronin said the finances worked for her. She paid $65,000 for her home, most of which is paid off, and she pays the monthly fees at Simple Life, for a total of right about $1,000 monthly.

“I didn’t think I would own my own home at 24,” Cronin said, adding that she’d probably be a renter like most of her friends if not for the tiny home.

About half the residents finance the homes, and half buy in cash. 

Want a ‘more minimalist life?’ A tiny home could be perfect for you

Shirley and Merle Braley, 62 and 67, respectively, paid cash for their 400-square-foot Simple Life home, which had a purchase price of $92,000. Their lot rental is $515 a month, and the remaining monthly costs average $50-$75.

“The big motivating factor in our life is we wanted to live a simple, more minimalist life, with less consumption,” Shirley Braley said. “The amenities here are really nice, but it wasn’t really what drove us to come here.”

She and her husband are retired software developers.

Braley is also passionate about seeing the tiny home concept spread, because she said she really believes a more minimalist lifestyle is better for people and the planet. But she also knows all about the zoning and permitting conundrum.

“At the time we bought here, this was the only place in North Carolina where we could live legally in a tiny house,” she said. “It’s very difficult.”

Their home has a living room and dining room area, a kitchen with full-size appliances, and a staircase leading to a lofted bedroom, as well as a full-size bathroom and a bedroom with a door at the back of the home.

It’s a nice way to live, and one that Braley would like to see offered in other counties.

“I’m actually quite passionate about it,” Braley said. “I would like to see municipalities revisit the rules that force people to live in bigger houses and pay more in property taxes and not be able to consider more housing opportunities.”

Charity hopes to crack tiny home market in Asheville

Asheville consistently lands on the list of cities with the most expensive cost of living in North Carolina, while local wages lag behind many other metro areas. So affordable housing is a perennial problem here.

More on affordability:

• This is how much it costs for a two-bedroom rental in Asheville
• $1.4M in home buying help to go to Asheville’s poorest residents, teachers, city workers

As it stands, tiny homes are not poised to solve the affordable housing crunch like the one Asheville and Buncombe have.

But the Rev. Amy Cantrell, who founded BeLoved Asheville, a charity working with the city’s poor and homeless, hopes to change that with the privately funded BeLoved Village in East Asheville.

“We’re shovel ready,” Cantrell said. “We’ve gotten our first permits, and we’re moving forward.”

Their plan calls for siting 12 “micro homes,” each about 440 square feet, on an acre of land off Tunnel Road. They’ll be one-bedroom homes with a kitchen and bath and a front porch.

“Our goal is that this is a new model, and it’s will continue to build and really change the equation,” Cantrell said. “We call it deeply affordable housing — we’re building at 30 percent of median incomes.”

The idea is that they’ll be “permanently affordable,” set up on a model where residents pay roughly $400 a month. It will be privately funded.

“We will take a chunk of that ($400 a month) and put it in an equity account for each home,” Cantrell said. “Then you’re adding to the equity account based on the appreciation of the home.”

The homes will be stick-built, on foundations. 

“They’re permanent homes,” Cantrell said. “We can’t build anything (permanent) on wheels in the city or the county.”

The homes will have the same features of any permanent home, and that permanent nature will increase the cost. Each home will be about $94,000, including a 30-year-maintenance plan and site work.

They are trying to raise 100% of the cost of the village from the local community, and Cantrell realizes that’s about a $1 million goal. The land was gifted to BeLoved.

They’ve had a lot of community volunteers out helping with site work, and other builders and contractors have suggested they can help with construction. But Cantrell knows they have to get the money raised first, and “a lot of it is leveraging the goodwill of the community.”

“We hope to have a large amount of it raised by the end of this year,” she said. “As soon as we get the cost of the first two homes raised, we will start that work.”

The units will be built for either one or two people.

“We want to build this model all over our community,” Cantrell said. “We’re desperate for a housing answer, and we’ve seen a lot of people going through the housing crisis, whether it’s elders being priced out of their homes or people of color being priced out of the city.”

Economics are tough, but the concept is ‘liberating’

As it stands, BeLoved is a pioneer in the tiny home concept in Buncombe.

“I don’t know of anybody doing tiny homes in Asheville,” said Mike Figura, owner of Mosaic Realty in Asheville, which employs 31 brokers.

As is usually the case, this all comes down to economics, said Figura, who is also a partner in a new home development in West Asheville.

“The general rule of thumb is you want to spend around 20 percent of your total total budget on land,” Figura said. “As land gets more expensive, that’s why you’ll see larger homes being built. You need to dilute the cost of the home over more square footage.”

For example, Figura said, if you spent $80,000 on a lot and built a 300-square-foot house that costs $150,000, you’ve got a total of $230,000 in the project. That’s a whopping $766 a square foot.

“That’s way outside of the market norm,” Figura said.

Zillow, the online real estate company, notes, “The median list price per square foot in Asheville is $231, which is higher than the Asheville Metro average of $195.”

“We got into trying to build smaller homes for a while, but the numbers just didn’t work, especially with the land costs going up,” Figura said. “I think the better way to do smaller is to do multifamily. That way you get the economies of scale.”

Simple Life’s McCann said he thinks North Carolina and its municipalities will come around to making it easier to build tiny home communities, in part because of demographics. 

Deloitte.com noted in November 2015 that, “Single-person households in the United States are set to grow steadily over the next 15 years, which could have implications for several industries, ranging from housing to health care.”

From 1960-2014, the “median age of first marriage rose to 29.3 years for men and 27.0 years for women, from 22.8 years and 20.3 years, respectively.

“During this time, the share of single-person households in total households more than doubled to 27.7 percent and the average number of people per household fell to 2.54 from 3.33,” Deloitte reported.

That could mean more younger customers looking for a small home. And don’t forget about retirees looking to simplify.

Braley said she and her husband wanted to retire early, “and we had no way to figure it out financially unless we were living in a tiny house.

“We looked around for quite awhile,” she said. “The first time we came here, we went on a tour and we went out with a contract. We knew right away it was exactly what we wanted.”

They feel strongly about living a minimalist lifestyle with a smaller footprint.

“For us to downsize and get rid of about 90 percent of our possessions, that was very liberating,” Braley said.

Learn more

To learn more about BeLoved Village or to make a donation, visit belovedasheville.com

To learn more about Simple Life, visit simple-life.com

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