Tiny Homes With Innovative Designs and Even More Attractive Prices

Innovative Tiny House Design by Rural Studio

This tiny house design by Rural Studio is changing things up with its innovative design. The tiny house design is changing the way people look at housing from mortgages to zoning laws. For over a decade, the architecture students in the design-build program at Rural Studio, Auburn University's in the tiny town in West Alabama, have worked on a problem that was a bit tricky. The problem is on how to design a home that someone who lives below the poverty line can easily afford. The home would also provide an income for the contractors building it. After several years of coming up with different prototypes, they created their first pilot project partnering with a commercial developer outside Atlanta, Georgia in an area called Serenbe. They designed and built tiny one bedroom homes that cost only $14,000 each.

Overcoming Challenges to Make Homes Available

Once they were finished with the initial project, they now had to make these $14,000 homes available to people. There were many adjustments made and thousands of hours that went into creating the perfect home for those needing affordable homes. One of the challenges the teams faced was the zoning codes and bylaw codes, how to find the right contractors to build them, and then how they would be able to be mortgagable in the future. From an outside perspective, the homes look pretty regular, but they are definitely high-performance tiny home designs in every way possible.

Innovative Building Techniques for Efficiency

They exceeded the structural requirements and used building materials much more efficiently. The foundation of the tiny house uses cantilevers that help to save wood and concrete, thus saving money on the overall build. These innovative building techniques also make the house stronger too. Since these design concepts aren't included in typical building requirements or outlines, they had to explain in detail how everything worked to the code officials. So they created guides, much like those you would find with a piece of furniture from Ikea to explain how everything works.

Addressing Mortgage Challenges for Affordable Housing

Another issue was the mortgages on the small homes. A bank that works with Rural Studio is Regions Bank explained that while a mortgage for a $100,000 house costs the bank around $2,300, a mortgage for a $20,000 house also costs $2,300. So there is a lack of scalability which the bank also has to reform to create a new mortgage that those who don't have a lot of money can afford. The results of the team's work has paid off as you can see with these awesome tiny houses that have been built. It looks like these innovative tiny house designs will be changing the way we look at housing in the future, giving people more options than ever before with what they want their homes to look like. With affordable housing for everyone on the horizon, it will change life for many people across the country, and hopefully, help with issues like homelessness and home affordability. The tiny home designs are an exciting concept that people are sure to love and take interest in even if they don't want to actually live in one themselves.