nothin Tiny Houses, Tiny Crowd ...  Big Solution? | New Haven Independent

Tiny Houses, Tiny Crowd … Big Solution?

Tiny Life NHV website

Should these tiny abodes be allowed as of right in NHV?

Katherine McComic has a tiny” solution for New Haven’s affordable housing crisis: 100-square-foot-plus abodes built atop city-owned vacant lots that the municipal zoning code currently deems too small for construction.

McComic, a Quinnipiac University law student, former intern with the city’s Economic Development Administration, and former pop-up cafe entrepreneur, is working with city Deputy Director of Zoning Jenna Montesano to figure out how best to amend the city’s zoning code to allow for the development of such tiny houses” in New Haven.

The goal: To diversify the city’s housing stock and increase the supply of low-cost, low-rent lodgings citywide.

The nascent zoning amendment initiative, which is described in greater detail at McComic’s Tiny Life NHV website, further proposes updating city law to allow for the conversion of backyard carriage houses and garages into accessory dwelling units (ADUs), or mother-in-law apartments,” which are also currently prohibited by the zoning code.

Thomas Breen photo

McComic and Orr at Fussy Coffee.


It’s not a safety issue,” McComic said this past Wednesday night in a conversation with the Independent about what’s currently holding back the creation of super-small housing units in New Haven. It’s a zoning issue.”

McComic, and Montesano have planned a series of public meetings over the next three weeks to discuss the proposed zoning changes before formally submitting them to the Board of Alders and the City Plan Commission for public hearings and subsequent votes.

One of the first meetings took place this past Wednesday night amidst the dim lighting and grad-student chatter of Science Park’s Fussy Coffee. It yielded a tiny turnout: Just this reporter and local architect Robert Orr, who has decades of experience designing tiny homes and is a longtime friend of McComic.

That didn’t stop McComic, Orr, and Montesano from honing their pitch for the project in anticipation of public presentations planned for City Hall, Wilson Library, Fair Haven Library, and Mitchell Library. (See here for a complete schedule of planned meet-ups. The group held a meeting at the downtown library branch last Monday. Wednesday’s meeting had originally been scheduled for Stetson Library in Dixwell, McComic said, but the location was shifted to Fussy after library staff had to cancel.)

McComic got the idea for the local tiny house push when she read the Affordable Housing Task Force’s final report earlier this year about how best to improve, increase, and preserve affordable housing in the city.

She was particularly struck by the recommendations regarding tweaking the city’s 1960s-era zoning code to encourage denser development and to put to better use New Haven’s many publicly-owned vacant sliver lots.

So she approached Montesano and Orr (whom she has known for years since she worked during college at his wife’s Chapel Street vintage store, English Building Market) about a tiny house zoning project that would also earn her class credit at Quinnipiac.

Small-scale developments like tiny houses and ADUs, she said Wednesday, would boost the city’s affordable housing supply without relying on large-scale private developers to agree to mandated affordable set-asides through a process known as inclusionary zoning,” which the City Plan department is also looking to pilot through its commercial corridor rezoning project.

The city currently has an abundance of lots that are undervalued because they don’t have building potential,” Montesano said about the city’s sliver lots.

All too often, those properties are used for surface parking rather than housing development because of zoning code restrictions on minimum lot size, unit size, and lot coverage. Parking, she said, is often not the highest and best use for these lots,” and do little to remediate the city’s well-documented need for more affordable places for people to live.

McComic said she hasn’t put together any specific zoning code change recommendations yet as she’s still collecting feedback from neighbors and residents citywide.

She has, however, pulled together a survey of tiny house projects in other parts of the country, from Madison, Wisconsin to Austin, Texas. Her website also states that the tiny house updates could allow for 900 square-foot three-bedroom apartments, 450 square-foot one-bedroom apartments, and studio apartments under 250 square-feet.

McComic has also identified some of the key impediments to such developments currently lurking on the city’s books.

City assessor’s database

Two vacant sliver lots at 575 and 579 Winchester Ave.

For one, she said, ADUs are out-right prohibited by definition in the current zoning code.

Also, the regulations for RM‑2 High-Middle Density districts, which include many of the city’s residential neighborhoods like East Rock, Fair Haven, Newhallville, the Hill, Wooster Square, and Edgewood, require a 5,400 square food minimum lot area for single-family, two-family, and multi-family developments. They also require a minimum lot area per dwelling unit of 2,000 square feet and a maximum building coverage of 30 percent of the lot area (meaning that most of any given parcel must remain undeveloped to allow for yards and parking), a maximum building height of four stories.

Many of the city’s vacant sliver lots, such as 575 Winchester Ave. and 579 Winchester Ave., are under 4,000 square feet.

Amending the zoning code to allow for the construction of tiny houses, she said, would not only add more low-cost housing to the city’s supply. It would also encourage single middle-income residents currently occupying larger studio and one-bedroom apartments in areas like Wooster Square to downsize, thereby freeing up that slightly larger housing supply for family use.

New units in the market don’t necessarily have to be expensive,” she said. Tiny houses could be built on slabs in as little as two weeks, she said, and in the tens of thousands of dollars range, rather than the tens of millions of dollars range of larger, podium-style residential developments currently popping up all over town.

A tiny house could cost as little as $500 per month in rent, she said, and could still turn a profit for the developer / owner because of the relatively low construction and utility costs.

Thomas Breen photo

Orr: Designing tiny houses nationwide since 1981.


It enables undercapitalized people to get involved in development,” Orr said about tiny house construction. Builders could turn to local banks instead of mammoth national and international lenders to get construction loans. The capitalization rates and operating incomes are better than with pricier larger projects. And the greater density encourages community cohesion and lack of reliance on greenhouse-gas polluting automobiles. Everything is less expensive” when you build small, he said.

And Orr should know. Because he’s been designing tiny houses since the early 1980s.

He worked on his first tiny house project in 1981, he said, in Seaside, Florida for a developer who had inherited 80 acres of land near the Gulf of Mexico and was having trouble attracting builders and tenants because of the site’s relatively remote location. Orr helped design a sort of motor court” of 16 tiny little cottages” surrounding a central courtyard. Those buildings have been occupied for over three decades now, he said.

He also traveled with a group of architects from the Congress for New Urbanism down to Waveland, Mississippi in August 2005 after Hurricane Katrina ravaged cities and towns from up and down the Gulf coast.

He and his colleagues helped re-design Federal Emergency Management Adminsitration (FEMA) trailers with decorative elements like porches and roofs to make them more attractive and hospitable for residents whose neighborhoods had been completely leveled by the storm. They also helped rewrite municipal zoning codes to allow for new, low-cost, small-scale housing construction.

The resulting Katrina Cottages” helped inspire a national tiny house movement, he said, that could also transform New Haven’s current surfeit of empty and underutilized land into viable housing. If city officials and alders and residents are up for the zoning change.

Zoning is all [currently] written around the car,” he said, and functions primarily to push things further apart.” A tiny house-amenable update, he said, would encourage cheaper, denser developments that are less car-dependent and still safe to live in.

It’s common sense building that is inexpensive,” he said.

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