Tiny homes not in the cards for county

No groundswell in demand for small homes in County

There’s a new trend in home and cabin building: living small. Tiny houses—defined by The Not So Big House author Sarah Susanka as a dwelling smaller than 500 square feet—are gaining ground, with companies like California’s Tumbleweed Tiny House Company making it possible for the most extreme homeowners to inhabit dwellings as small as 65 square feet.

But before Gunnison County residents start dreaming up eco-friendly, simplified dwellings in the shadow of Mt. Crested Butte, they’ll have to wait. Last month, the County Planning Commission decided not to pursue reducing the minimum residence floor area from 600 square feet to 400—for now.
County development director Joanne Williams brought the matter before the Planning Commission after receiving a request from a Schofield cabin owner for a waiver to the minimum. With the exception of park homes (seasonal dwellings delivered on a trailer and unloaded onto a foundation) requested for developments like Three Rivers Resort, the issue of small dwellings hasn’t been a big one in Gunnison County. But the waiver begged the question: if it is possible for 400-square-foot dwellings to be built to code, should the county allow them?
“Is there a reason for a minimum size house?” commission member David Owens asked.
“Yes. People living in sheds, basically,” Williams said. “It’s protection for people to have enough space to be considered habitable.”
There are financial considerations as well, according to planning commissioner Ken Fulton.
“From a lender’s standpoint, after five or six hundred square feet, you can’t get financing on a structure like that. Like condos. You can’t touch anything under 500 square feet,” Fulton said. “We end up with housing nobody can buy. Banks end up with it, and nobody can deal with it.”
And some concerns have been raised by county inspection staff regarding how well these homes are maintained and regulated.
“Building inspector Rich Wojdakowski has some concerns about lowering the minimum size, based on his experience dealing with situations where dwellings are put up without a building permit, and they are in pretty bad conditions,” Williams said on his behalf.
“What Joanne’s talking about is a problem, but not a problem with minimum square footage,” responded commission chair Ramon Reed. “One advantage is really remote mountain property. I think that smaller is more environmentally friendly. The bigger the structure they build, the more impact there is on the environment, especially when you get into remote areas. Having a small cabin would be preferable in some places.”
And it is possible to build smaller dwellings that meet code. According to Wojdakowski, building codes for each individual room in an efficiency dwelling or multi-family home bring the possible minimum floor size to just under 400 square feet. Yet he shared concerns with the commission that changing the minimum to 400 square feet might create challenges with property owners previously held to 600 square feet, or create a flood of small dwellings.
But the discussion among the commission focused primarily on whether it made sense to change the code in light of so little demand. While future developments—like Reed’s suggestion that a mine project might want to build employee apartments—could generate more demand for small residential dwellings, they are hypothetical now. And current codes do allow property owners to build sleeping quarters with partial kitchens—like a microwave and refrigerator—of less than 600 square feet. The fact remained that only one person had requested a waiver.
“There are people who are asking, but they’re not adamant about pushing forward or saying you guys need to do something about it. I don’t think we need to drop to 400 square feet because one person is asking for a waiver,” Fulton said.
So while many commission members were not opposed to the recommendation to reduce the minimum square footage of a home, the board decided to take no action at this time.