PITTSBURGH — Tiny houses are big right now.
There are hundreds of blogs and websites devoted to them and the design website Houzz currently has 2,716 stories on the subject. Television shows such as “Tiny House Nation” and documentaries such as “Tiny: A Story About Living Small” have Americans dreaming of radically uncluttering their lives and living with less stuff and a lot less square footage.
The major attraction of tiny houses is the idea of living a simpler life with fewer possessions. But affordability also is a draw. The low price tag of most tiny houses means financial freedom, at least from a mortgage, in places like California where housing costs are high.
Elaine Walker, co-founder of the American Tiny House Association, says a tiny house can be built for $20,000 if you build it yourself and use donated or recycled materials. Experts at tinyhousebuild.com say it can be done for as little as $10,000 if built off-site and transported to a lot. Walker’s 120-square-foot home in Palmetto, Fla., is portable.
“I have a beautifully crafted home that’s fully paid for and that I can take with me if I need to relocate,” she says.
Not everyone is content with such a no-frills tiny house. One done by a luxury builder can rise to $80,000, Walker says. “On average, many are around $45,000 but the trend has been to make them both bigger and more expensive.”
So why does Pittsburgh’s first tiny house cost more than twice the average? The house, located in the Garfield neighborhood, actually cost much more to build — $191,000 — than its asking price, according to Eve Picker, the architect and urban planner from Australia who spearheaded the project.
Picker, who has been rehabbing old buildings in Pittsburgh since the early 1990s, is CEO of CityLAB and leads no wall productions and we do property management, inc.
Half of the construction cost went toward remediation of the land, which included removing an old foundation, digging a basement and excavation for a sewer line, said Ben Schulman, communications director of Small Change, a real estate equity crowd funding platform.
The two-year project was also complicated by delays in getting city permits and variances for smaller setbacks and other requirements, Schulman says.
The house, which was still being finished late last month, sits on a 1,050-square-foot lot between two much older, three-story houses near the corner of North Atlantic Avenue and Broad Street. Unlike its vinyl-sided neighbors, it’s covered in lavender fiber cement siding and set back farther from the sidewalk.