Wanted to quickly thank Mayor Bryan Paterson at the City of Kingston for a great meeting over coffee this morning to discuss how to add tiny homes to the city’s Affordable Housing & Homelessness Strategy for Kingston, Ontario. I will certainly incorporate your recommendations into my proposal to the Mayor’s Task Force On Housing for a strategy to include tiny homes.
Looking forward to more coffee chats.
On my LinkedIn feed I came across a post by THAC about rental issues, so I checked out the article relating to issues in Alberta. I followed the data to the source and found some distressing statistics. Rental is a growing issue across Canada.
Here’s the details: http://www.rentalhousingindex.ca/en/#comp_prov
Our ARTO Program is a way of addressing some of issues right now that will improve with time.
Back in February, I began looking for a designer that I could interest in working with me to create a unique “tiny show-home”, the Logan32. I planned to take it across Ontario to promote tiny home living as an affordable solution in today’s economy. I reached out to Tiffany Pratt, as I had seen her on HGTV’s Home to Win for 2 seasons and was drawn to her personality and design style. Tiffany responded and after we chatted on the phone, we found we had more in common with the interest in affordable housing than I knew.
Tiffany was enthusiastic about the project from the start and agreed to work with me to help make Logan32 a reality. She has brought some of her corporate sponsors to support the build, and I am really excited that we are going to have a great looking model home for the tour and then to donate to Habitat for Humanity. With a 49-city tour of Ontario planned to begin this spring, the Logan32 will be the first tiny home to be seen everywhere.
Coming from a for-profit business background, into starting a not-for-profit association, I have come to realize how special the relationships you develop through the things you do are. Not just for the success of the project, but for the genuine interest that people take, and the effort they put into it. Thanks, Tiffany this would not be happening without you. I can’t wait to see what you create!
A network of Tiny Towns located within commuting distance of every major city in Canada means you can move within the network and live by the city of your choice. Our network will make tiny homes a real housing option, just like apartments, condos, semi and detached housing.
Today, if you rent an apartment or own a home, you can easily move from city to city to meet your needs. Once the Tiny Town network is established, you will have the same freedom to relocate, but the process will be easier because you won’t need to deal with leaving your current home.
Using the online booking portal, you simply locate a new site in the town nearest the host city you want to relocate to, book your spot for when you want to arrive and not renew the site that you are leaving. Then it’s just a matter of packing the things in your tiny home that could get damaged when you move, disconnect your home on moving day and then drive it to the site in your new town. Connect and you’re done.
We are working to set up a national tiny house moving service as well, so if you don’t feel comfortable moving your own house, or you don’t want to keep a pickup truck, just for the occasional move, you can book the service online. They’ll arrive on the appointed day, hookup your tiny home, move to your new Tiny Town and park you in your site. Just connect and you’re home! Best of all you will know the cost of your move, once you’ve selected your next Tiny Town before you book it!
Our network is the key to making tiny homes a viable housing option by providing legal places to live and facilitating the ability to move from city to city, just as you can in traditional housing.
Why own the land you park your tiny home on?
It’s an asset that ties you down, limits when and where you can go, plus it’s a huge expense. In addition to purchasing the land, you will also need electricity, water, sewer, internet, and gas. These utilities require a further investment, they will need to be maintained and they add to the things that tie you to your land. At some time in the future, you may want to move. What then? Do you sell your tiny home with the land the way traditional homes are sold or do you try and sell the land alone? Either way, moving has now become a chore.
Tiny Towns will be owned by the not-for-profit Association so that revenues can be re-invested in the development and maintenance of the towns. Rents are planned to be kept low by using renewable resources to provide the utilities for its citizens. Citizens are free to move within the town and between towns by simply booking their new location online. All sites will provide complete hookups (included in the monthly rent) so it’s just plug-n-go to connect to your site. Services provided will include water, sewer, electricity, gas, TV, internet (fiber optic connection to each tiny home). We have designed our towns with 12 tiny homes to the acre, which we call a Pod (like a mini-neighborhood). Each site has a concrete pad with tie-downs to park on, lots of green space, a central common area and gardens for the residents of each Pod. Common areas are community maintained and socializing will be available for those that want to participate.
Tiny Towns complete the concept of tiny homes as an affordable housing option by removing the biggest upfront costs, the land purchase and utility installation. Looking forward, they will enable a tiny home’s mobility through plug-n-go and provide a network with access to all major cities. We believe that while tiny homes will expand our housing options, they also have the potential to expand other areas of our lives.
We are thrilled that Timbercraft Tiny Homes is creating custom plans for our Logan32 tiny home which will be touring 49-cities across Ontario this year before being donated to Habitat for Humanity, Canada. They are donating the plans to us, so if you are looking for a company to build you a tiny home, check out their website. Great people building amazing tiny homes http://timbercrafttinyhomes.com
This is a question I am getting asked more and more often from people across Canada: “I want to move into a Tiny Town in my city, when can I?” I would love to be able to say we’re coming your way this year, but realistically, that’s not likely.
For us to build a Tiny Town in a new city, a number of things need to happen. First, we need support and interest from a number of people that want to own a tiny home and park it in a Tiny Town. It’s a large expense to build a Tiny Town and we need people that will move into it to support it, once it’s built. More importantly, we need each city that hosts a Tiny Town to want to work with us, along with the municipality where the Tiny Town will be. They are the ones that ultimately determine if we get the zoning and building permissions to construct and operate the Tiny Town.
You can speed up the process and get us there faster! You can become a Tiny Town Ambassador. An Ambassador is a local champion for getting a Tiny Town to their city and they are willing to invest some time and effort to make it happen. To begin, join the Association (it doesn’t cost anything). When you register, indicate that you want to be an Ambassador. After you register, log into your account and complete your profile, most importantly indicate the city you want to be the Ambassador of.
Next start to work on getting support. This is your biggest job as an Ambassador, to build up interest and support for getting a Tiny Town to your city. Start talking about Tiny Towns with your friends and social contacts. Get them to join the Association and get them to get their friends to join the Association too. It doesn’t take long through friends, of friends, of friends, to build enough support that we can bring our proposal to the city council and the municipality. If we present our proposal to the city/municipality and say we have someone that wants a Tiny Town to be built here, no one takes us seriously. But if we say we have thousands of local supporters, real people that want a Tiny Town built in their city, the council can see that that there is a good reason to move forward, allowing us to built.
We are working to build support for Tiny Towns in various cities and as an Ambassador, you can speed the process of getting us to your city, simply by building support. We’ll set up a new area of the website that will talk more about being a Tiny Town Ambassador and ways that you can help the movement become a reality all of the 120 cities across Canada where we want to build a Tiny Town. (While our plan is to build 133 cities in Canada, we are targeting just 120 cities to start.)
We believe that mobility is a key feature of a tiny home. The fact that you pack-up and move your entire house, rather than the contents of your home makes so much sense to us (we all dislike the moving experience).
Many second-hand tiny homes on the market today, are located on a piece of property. A lot of effort goes into finding a property and setting up the services for a tiny home. Unless the property is sold to another tiny homeowner, this is a significant expense that would not be recovered. The easiest way to recover the expense is to sell the tiny home with the lot. Sort of like you would do with a traditional home.
Buyer beware! Often the tiny home is legally parked on a lot because the homeowner has applied for a building permit for a traditional home. This allows them to reside in the tiny home for 2 +/- years while they are “building” their traditional home. This is a somewhat short-sighted approach as, during the permit period, the municipality that issued the permit expects that a conforming home will be built. They may extend the building timeframe for an additional year, but in most cases that is all.
Our Tiny Town plan is to locate our towns within commuting distance (15 minutes) of large cities. We refer to them as “Host” cities. These cities can provide jobs, markets for products and services, shopping and entertainment. Our Tiny Town will have services to each tiny home lot and plenty of common area around them. Tiny homeowners will be able to pull in, connect to the services and be set up in the new town in little time. Because they do not own the site, they are free to move to another site or town whenever they want. Moving is as simple as booking the new site online, then moving on the schedule they select. Rents (including all utilities) are planned to be modest, as we are designing the town services using renewable resources.
Many tiny enthusiasts seem to be drawn to escaping everything, heading off into the wild, living totally off-grid, really getting back to nature. This is a lot of work, and if you are trading the hustle of city life for the peace of solitude, you’re not going to find it in a tiny in the boonies. It’s a lot of work to live this way and you will find you are trading one type of servitude for another.
Our Tiny Town model offers shared utilities and services. Rather than running your own solar system, composting toilet or septic system, well and water system plan to plug into the town. We’re designing the towns with a central solar collection storage system. We’re planning an anaerobic town-wide sewage system to convert sewage into natural gas to run heater and stoves. We’ll have our own water storage and processing, as well as a central garbage collection, recycling program, roads maintenance and mail services, plus lots more planned. So, don’t think off-grid tiny home, think off-grid Tiny Town.
Here are the 49 Ontario cities we are planning to visit on our #TinyHomeTour2018. Which one will have the unique distinction of hosting the #FirstTinyTown
Ajax, Aurora, Barrie, Belleville, Brampton, Brantford, Burlington, Caledon (Bolton), Cambridge, Chatham – Kent, Clarington
(Bowmanville – Newcastle), Cornwall, Georgina (Keswick), Greater Sudbury (Grand Sudbury), Guelph, Haldimand (Cayuga – Caledonia – Hagersville), Halton Hills (Georgetown), Hamilton, Kawartha Lakes (Lindsay), Kingston, Kitchener, London, Markham, Milton, Mississauga, Newmarket, Niagara Falls, Norfolk (Simcoe), North Bay, Oakville, Oshawa, Ottawa, Peterborough, Pickering, Quinte West (Trenton), Richmond Hill, Sarnia, Sault Ste. Marie, St. Catharines, Thunder Bay, Timmins, Toronto, Vaughan, Waterloo, Welland, Whitby, Whitchurch – Stouffville, Windsor, Woodstock
We plan to be in each city for 1 week and will hold open houses for the public, media, and local government. Stay tuned for dates and times. #affordablehousing #homelessness
