Jay Austin’s Beautiful, Illegal Tiny House

“Jay Austin’s Beautiful, Illegal Tiny House,” produced
by Todd Krainin. About 10 minutes.

Original release date was August 7, 2014 and original writeup is
below.

Demand for housing in Washington, D.C., is going through
the roof. Over a thousand people move to the nation’s capital
every month, driving up the cost of housing, and turning the city
into a construction zone. Tower cranes rising high above the
city streets have become so common, they’re just part of the
background.

But as fast as the cranes can rise, demand for housing has
shot up even faster, making DC among the most expensive cities in
the United States. With average home prices at
$453 per square foot, it’s every bit as expensive as New York
City. And the struggles of one homebuilder shows just why the
city’s shortage looks to continue for a long time.

“I got driven down the tiny house road because of affordability,
simplicity, sustainability, and then mobility,” says Jay Austin, who
designed a custom 140-square-foot house in Washington, D.C. Despite
the miniscule size, his “Matchbox” house
is stylish, well-built, and it includes all the necessities (if not
the luxuries) of life: a bathroom, a shower, a modest kitchen,
office space, and a bedroom loft. There’s even a hot tub
outside.

Clever design elements make the most of minimalism. The
Matchbox’s high ceilings, skylight, and wide windows make the small
space feel modern, uncluttered, and open.

At a cost that ranges from $10,000 to $50,000, tiny homes like
the Matchbox could help to ease the shortage of affordable housing
in the capital city. Heating and cooling costs are negligible.
Rainwater catchment systems help to make the homes self-sustaining.
They’re an attractive option to the very sort of residents who the
city attracts in abundance: single, young professionals without a
lot of stuff, who aren’t ready to take on a large mortgage.

But tiny houses come with one enormous catch: they’re illegal,
in violation of several codes in Washington D.C.’s
Zoning Ordinance. Among the many requirements in the 34
chapters and 600 pages of code are mandates defining minimum lot
size, room sizes, alleyway widths, and “accessory dwelling units”
that prevent tiny houses from being anything more than a part-time
residence.

That’s why Austin and his tiny house-dwelling neighbors at
Boneyard Studios don’t
actually live in their own homes much of the time. To skirt some of
the zoning regulations, they’ve added wheels to their homes, which
reclassifies them as trailers – and subjects them to
regulation by the Department of Motor Vehicles. But current law
still requires them to either move their homes from time to time,
or keep permanent residences elsewhere.

The DC Office of Zoning, the Zoning Commission, the Zoning
Administrator, the Board of Zoning Adjustment, and the
Office of Planning all declined to comment on the laws that prevent
citizens from living in tiny houses. But their website offers a clue:

Outdated terms like telegraph office and tenement
house still reside in our regulations. Concepts like parking
standards and antenna regulations are based on 1950s technology,
and new concepts like sustainable development had not even been
envisioned.

Complex as it is, the Zoning Ordinance of the District of
Columbia was approved in 1958. That’s over five decades of cultural
change and building innovations, like tiny houses, that the code
wasn’t designed to address.

Exemptions and alterations to the code are possible—many are
granted every year—but they don’t come cheaply. Lisa Sturtevant of
the National Housing Conference
estimates that typical approvals add up to $50,000 to the
cost of a new single-family unit. That’s why large, wealthy
developers enjoy greater flexibility to build in the city, but tiny
house dwellers… not so much.

Fortunately, a comprehensive rewrite of the zoning code has been
in the works for much of the last decade. Efforts to allow
more affordable housing are underway, although many of these
solutions favor large developers. Future plans still forbid tiny
houses. Austin estimates that, given the current glacial pace of
change among the city’s many zoning committees, tiny houses are
“many years, if not decades out” from being allowed in the
city.

For now, Jay Austin is allowed to build the home of his dreams –
he just can’t live there. The Matchbox has become a part-time
residence and a full-time showpiece. The community of tiny houses
at Boneyard Studios are periodically displayed to the public in the
hopes of changing a zoning authority that hasn’t updated a zoning
code in 56 years.

Runs about 10:30

Produced, shot, written, narrated, and edited by Todd Krainin.

Additional music by
Lee Rosevere.

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