HOUSING | Tiny Homes, Big Ideas
An innovative pocket community shows the way toward new housing solutions
Written By Satchel Walton
An Atlanta-area development provides an interesting look at new ways to think about building housing in the U.S. The South Park Cottages in College Park, Georgia, are 29 new micro-homes, with areas of 615 square feet (for $230,000), 410 square feet ($210,000), or 335 square feet (sold out). It is a joint project of Black developers Booker T. Washington and Rashad Jones-Jennings, who bill it as the seventh-largest micro-home community in the country. Is there demand for homes this small? 25 have already been sold.
Finding innovative ways to build new types of housing in the U.S.’s booming metro areas makes sense, and practitioners and policymakers should work together to find ways to facilitate similar micro-community projects
Washington says that he has seen a rapid shift in the demand for housing in the last five years, particularly since the pandemic. He sees benefits to smaller community-oriented and citizen-led development.
“A lot of people trust larger builders and developers to come up with solutions for them, but they’re just not because they can’t pivot as fast,” Washington said.
More Americans than ever are looking to live in households outside the model of the nuclear family. Since 1960, married couples with children have declined from being 44 percent of American households to only 19 percent. However, new housing is still being constructed as if everyone will need thousands of square feet and a two-car garage. Between 1973 and 2014, the median size of a newly constructed single-family home went up by 61 percent to 2,453 square feet.
Having more space per person, on the one hand, can be read as a sign of growing middle class prosperity. Still, we ought to have more options for housing of all sizes and prices. Decades of rising prices (far outpacing inflation) have squeezed many out of the market entirely, and others would simply prefer a smaller home, finding that they simply don’t need thousands of square feet. After all, smaller homes take less power to heat and cool and can allow for higher urban density.
But it’s about more than just density. Washington is critical of development that “doesn’t promote community, just density and a roof.”
“This type of neighborhood provides amenities and activities and togetherness that are missing in the urban environment,” Washington said.
Even adjusting for inflation, “starter homes” that first-time buyers can use to get into the market for less than $200,000, have been a dying breed in the U.S.
Atlanta is a great place to experiment with small homes. It is one of the fastest-growing metros in the country as the population has shifted South. It has also seen prices rise at a clip even faster than the national rate.
Practitioners can face a variety of obstacles when trying to build innovative small- home projects. The multiplicity of regulations on everything from lot size to setback distance to floor-to-area ratio, as well as their wide variations between cities, all contribute to stifling new ideas for housing. Kudos to the South Park Cottages team building this pocket community. We hope to see more like it.
Satchel Walton is the Mencken Publishing Fellow on Urban Development.