LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) - A Lincoln housing group is experimenting with the tiny house concept by building a larger - but still small - home on a nonstandard lot that most builders would reject.
The nearly 800 square feet (74.3 square meters) of livable space make the house big by the normal standards for tiny houses, which usually run 500 square feet (46 square meters) or less and are often built on wheels for transport. The Lincoln house will feature a main floor, some finished basement space and a detached one-car garage when it goes on the market next month. A price hasn’t yet been set.
The nonprofit Affordable Housing Initiatives joined the city’s Urban Development Department in using federal funding to build the home close to downtown.
“Mini-houses are part of the fabric of housing in other areas, and we thought it would be great to have an experiment here,” Dave Landis, development department director, told the Lincoln Journal Star (https://bit.ly/2o1LKek ).
And, said City Councilman Roy Christensen, they could help fill a housing need in Lincoln. Traditional housing projects can be good for neighborhoods, but can harm poor people in them by raising property values.
“I started thinking about what options do low-income people have, and I started looking around, and I found tiny homes,” Christensen said.
The nonstandard lot where the new house sits is one of many the city owns and that most builders avoid as impractical.
“We know there are lots that people call unbuildable, but they aren’t unbuildable,” Landis said. “They’re just unbuildable if you build a regular-size house.”
Putting a tiny house on such a parcel also puts property tax revenue in city coffers, officials said.
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Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, https://www.journalstar.com
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