Frustrated with the Bay Area’s absurdly expensive housing market, Siena Shaw and her husband, Brian Rubin, spent the past two years parenting and working full-time jobs — and constructing the Mighty House.
The couple and their then-2-year-old daughter had relocated from New York and were living with Shaw’s parents in Menlo Park.
“We didn’t know where we were going to live and couldn’t figure that out right away because of housing costs,” she said. “We were like, ‘There has to be a better solution to this.’”
Their passion for building sustainable structures combined with a desire to get out of her parents’ house, Shaw said, resulted in the Mighty House, a 250-square-foot tiny home on wheels. The Mighty House sits on an 8-by-24-foot trailer and has a sitting area, kitchen with fridge, stove and oven, a bathroom with a shower and toilet, plus a lofted area for a mattress. The median cost for a home or condo in the nine-county Bay Area was $815,000 in November, but the Mighty House prototype cost just $45,000 to build, Shaw said.
She and her family have since settled in Santa Cruz while the recently completed Mighty House sits empty in Menlo Park, but the 36-year-old architect has ambitious plans for the structure: Once the project can be scaled, they want Mighty Houses to shelter those living on the street.
Tiny homes have been cropping up here and there around the Bay Area in recent years as an inexpensive way to house homeless people. Advocates see the small domiciles as an interim solution, because they’re cheaper to build and maintain than permanent supportive housing, and they can be erected quicker. Officials in Oakland, San Jose and Sonoma County have embraced different versions of the tiny home movement in the form of sheds or villages to get more people off the streets.
Shaw has a passion for building energy-efficient homes, but it wasn’t until she met Gloria Berry, a former candidate for District 10 supervisor in San Francisco, that Shaw contemplated the Mighty House’s potential as a solution for the city’s housing crisis. Berry visited the Mighty House while she was on the campaign trail.
“The dignity it had, compared to the sheds in Oakland, the level of humanity that the Mighty House has is through the roof,” Berry said. “A shower, toilet, kitchen — the houses in Oakland don’t have any of that.”
But not all advocates for the homeless are as excited about the tiny home movement.
Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination: Home, a San Jose nonprofit aimed at ending homelessness, has questioned the tiny home trend as a tenable solution, in part because they do little to address premium land prices in the region.
“When you think about building tiny homes, that’s not a very densified development. Generally, those are one story,” Loving said. “Are tiny homes the best use of land in an area like the bay? Each acre of land is very precious.”
Instead, tiny homes should be used in the same way municipalities use shelters and navigation centers: temporary housing until people can secure permanent living spaces, she said. However, city officials have repeatedly resisted building individual tiny homes in the past, opting for structures that are even more space-efficient.
As a compromise, officials and housing advocates have explored modular housing, or small units that can stack on top of one another to make better use of scarce real estate. In September, San Francisco Mayor London Breed committed $100 million to building modular units to house people living on the streets. Some modular housing already exists in San Francisco, but it’s market rate.
Though Berry didn’t win her race for supervisor, she wants to see Mighty Houses take root in her district, which has the second-highest number of homeless people in San Francisco, according to the city’s last count.
Berry and Shaw are working on obtaining a permit so they can move the Mighty House from Menlo Park to San Francisco. To scale the project, Shaw hopes to incorporate a sweat equity component for eventual residents, similar to Habitat for Humanity, an organization she’s worked with in the past.
In her work with Habitat for Humanity, Shaw learned that many of the first-time homeowners the organization helps have trouble maintaining the costs of living in a home, such as electricity, gas and garbage. What sets Shaw’s tiny home apart from other models is its energy efficiency, she said. The Mighty House consumes 90 percent less energy than standard homes, bringing those costs down, Shaw said.
“It’s really empowering to physically build a space and be able to walk away from it and be like, ‘I made that,’” she said. “People own the space and also feel like they’re responsible for it in some way I think could be powerful.”
Ashley McBride is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ashley.mcbride@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ashleynmcb
Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Mighty-House-A-new-tiny-home-for-Bay-13496285.php