Can the tiny-house movement grow big in Kansas City?

Terry Rouse, a wiry 67-year-old engineer, has spent the better part of the past year building his dream home: a 60-square-foot box on a trailer that he can attach to the hitch on his Crown Victoria sedan and haul to, presumably, his dream lot.

From the outside, the structure resembles a child’s playhouse, a deluxe version of a certain kind of suburban backyard architecture. Inside, it is equipped with almost all of the basic amenities enjoyed by humans in the Western world, almost all of said amenities scaled to miniature size.

Rouse so far keeps his tiny house — as such structures are known — parked behind the Arts Asylum, a former church at Ninth Street and Harrison that has been converted into artists’ studios. I met him there the first Saturday in May. He was wearing a neon-green T-shirt tucked into his jeans. On the gravel beside his tiny house, he was cooking steak in a GoSun Stove, a solar-powered device that he had recently purchased. He pulled out a little tube to reveal small, sizzling slices of sirloin that he had bought that morning at a farmers market. “The other day, I used this to make these apple-pie — I guess you’d call them empanadas,” he told me with an earnest smile.

Rouse was initially inspired to build his tiny house by a news item he saw a few years ago, about a guy who claimed that he could pull his entire living space behind him on a bike. “I wanted to see if I could go that small and really simplify things,” Rouse told me. “It seemed like an interesting challenge.”

On Craigslist, he found a flatbed trailer, built from rot-resistant teak decking, for $500. He spent another $275 modifying the trailer so that a house could be erected on top of it without blowing away in the wind. He put up the walls — 7 feet by 10 feet — and siding, and made openings for a few windows. He bought a wind-resistant Ondura roof from Lowe’s. He installed a battery box and a connector so that he could plug into the electrical grids common at RV parks. He added a propane heater: a Dickinson Newport, familiar to boat owners.

“On the coldest day this winter, I was able to heat this space with 475 watts,” Rouse said. “That’s about five light bulbs.”

Eventually, Rouse will outfit the house with solar panels, at a cost of about $3,500; for that upfront expense, though, he’ll have power, he said, to “basically last me the rest of my life.”

Inside the house, there’s a mini refrigerator that opens from the top and uses less than 115 watts a day — “less than a fluorescent light,” Rouse said. (Charging his laptop is what consumes the most electricity.) In a space that adds up to about the size of a school janitor’s closet, there is also a sink, a small stove, two upright seats that can slide into each other to form a bed, and three 5-gallon brewing kettles — one insulated for hot water, another containing a purification system — that power a shower area that also contains a compost toilet. Two spray hoses dangle in the area between the sink and the shower. One is for the dishes, the other for the body. A wall of the shower folds down for additional kitchen-counter space.

“I got a lot of these ideas at an RV convention I went to last year,” Rouse said. “Those people have spent a lot of time and energy figuring this stuff out already. That reminds me, you haven’t seen my guest bedroom yet.” He pointed out bolts that he had installed on each end of the house, from which he can hang a hammock. “I like the hammock because it’s elevated higher than the bed is, so on a nice day, you can lay on it and see straight out the windows.”

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Rouse figured that his cost to put up this tiny house would end up between $12,000 and $15,000. (It’s on the tiniest end of the tiny-house spectrum; most tend to be three or four times larger and cost between $20,000 and $40,000.) Going smaller than small has allowed him to indulge in a few filigrees.

“I’ve got a tin ceiling in here,” he told me. “I could never afford that in a regular house. But since there’s so few materials, I can afford it in here. I try to surround myself with beauty. To me, beauty enhances the earth and doesn’t detract from it. That’s the appeal of tiny houses for me.”

Rouse owned a home in the Volker neighborhood for 20 years — he’s a distant relative of the Volker family’s, he told me — but he recently separated from his wife and sold that house. He has been more or less living at his studio at the Arts Asylum for the past year as he finished up his tiny house. He hopes to have it completed by the time he semi-retires next month.

Rouse began the project without a firm destination for where he would ultimately park it. “It was kind of a vulnerable undertaking in that way,” he said.

Around here, he has a few options. A friend of his who owns some wooded property in Wyandotte County has offered to let Rouse park his house there. There’s also space in a friend’s Volker backyard if he wants it.

But both are situations in which he’d be living in a legal gray area. Local laws haven’t formally caught up with the growing subculture of tiny-house enthusiasts. Is Rouse’s home an RV? Is it a house? What zoning and coding ordinances is it subject to? These were questions that hadn’t been asked in Kansas City just a year ago. Now, as more people become interested in downsizing their lives, for economical or environmental reasons, these questions are being posed more often. And answers are beginning to arrive.

“It’s funny to think about how my views on housing have changed in just the last few years,” Josh Farmer said one morning in mid-April, sitting in the passenger seat of my truck. “Just in terms of what you need and don’t need. You grow up thinking you need all this space. And really, you need so little of it. Or at least that’s how I’ve come to feel. Here, take a right on Indiana.”

Farmer, a bald, bespectacled man in his 40s, is the unofficial ringleader of Kansas City’s tiny-house movement. Earlier that morning, about 15 people — a white couple in their 20s, an elderly woman, a Hispanic couple with two small kids, a woman named Joyce who had driven from Tulsa to attend — had gathered in a conference room at the Lucile H. Bluford Branch of the Kansas City Public Library, at 3050 Prospect. Farmer wore a Hawaiian shirt and gave a brief tutorial about how to search the Land Bank of Kansas City. Now he was leading a tour of East Side properties and vacant lots for sale that he thought might make good spots for tiny houses — even for a tiny-house community.

Farmer came to Kansas City from New York in 2012. His background is in education, and he has worked for a variety of nonprofits, including community centers and day-care programs. In 2010, while living alone in a four-bedroom house in upstate New York, Farmer contracted Lyme disease while on a hike. It went undiagnosed, and he became very sick. When he did receive treatment, his medical bills piled up fast.

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“That experience put me face to face with the idea that anything can happen to anyone,” he told me. “I was doing well financially at the time. But if you’re living a lifestyle that is enormous and your ability to finance that lifestyle is taken from you, you’re left with dire circumstances. So that’s when I started investigating new ways to live.”

He picked up freelance writing assignments covering organic-farming issues and moved to the Kansas City area after meeting some people here while researching that topic. “I couldn’t believe you could buy an entire house here for what would be a down payment in New York,” Farmer said. (He’s now working as a property manager in a shared living space in Independence, and he still does some freelance writing on sustainability issues.)

In December, Farmer linked up with Kendall Quack and Jeremy Luther (Luther is the art director for The Pitch), who had just begun the process of building a tiny house, to form a Facebook page called Tiny House Collective Kansas City. The collective now has more than 1,000 members and serves as a forum for technical construction questions as well as water-cooler talk about tiny living. They have also formed a nonprofit land trust of the same name that intends to establish tiny-house communities and villages in partnership with Kansas City neighborhoods. The nonprofit will also offer education, material support and information to those wishing to pursue their own tiny houses.

“I got into the tiny stuff originally back in New York, theorywise,” Farmer said. “Out here, it became more real. I was facing my own circumstances of having a reduced income but still wanting a place of my own to call home. And I had seen tiny projects take off in other municipalities. So I started looking into how that might happen here. And slowly, the pieces seem to be falling into place.”

More than anybody else in Kansas City, Farmer has worked with Kansas City, Missouri, officials to translate the laws that affect tiny housing. As a result, tiny houses in Kansas City are inching closer to a safe emergence from the shadows.

Tiny houses can run as small as 50 square feet and up to about 600 square feet. They fit into two general categories: tiny houses on wheels (like Rouse’s) and tiny houses on slabs (designed to be permanent structures akin to a carriage house or a shed).

In Kansas City, tiny houses on wheels do not have to reckon with housing codes; they are technically legal dwellings only on the grounds of an RV park. Tiny houses on slabs would theoretically have an easier time becoming legally compliant, Jeff Lee, an engineer in KCMO’s City Planning and Development Department, explains.

“There haven’t been enough [tiny-house-related inquiries] that’ve come before us to where something new would need to be written into an ordinance yet, but there’s nothing really prohibiting them [tiny houses],” Lee says. “Any home in the city must have one room that is 120 square feet, no matter what. So, in theory, you could have a 120-square-foot living room that doubles as a bedroom to meet that requirement. Then all other habitable rooms must be no less than 70 square feet. That includes the kitchen, so you need 70 square feet for that. A bathroom is not a habitable room, so it can be smaller. But to fit everything we require into a bathroom, you need about 40 square feet. So if you add that up, you could probably build something that meets the minimum requirements of our building codes that’s about 230 square feet.”

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Lee adds: “But you have to remember, that isn’t taking zoning into account. The city has no true minimums on zoning, but a lot of subdivisions do, and we have no control over that. So even if you’re clearing with our codes, you still would have to check subdivision covenants to see if it’s allowable. Generally, I think a person would have a harder time clearing something like this with the subdivisions than with the city.”

There are other wrinkles to be ironed out, Farmer told me. “There are codes for ordinary housing that make perfect sense for normal houses but make no sense at all for tiny houses. For example, wiring — a regular house is required to have something like a minimum of 10 circuits. But a tiny house really only needs one or two.”

A couple of people I spoke with, who wished to remain anonymous, have skirted some of these laws by converting sheds and garages on their properties into tiny homes. I’ve also heard it suggested that a person could purchase a dilapidated house from the Land Bank — many go for $1,000 or less — and then construct an accessory building on the property and convert it into a tiny house.

There’s also the option of pursuing a planned tiny-house district, which would begin with a proposal to City Planning & Development and then require approval by the City Council. A pilot program soon to be launched by Habitat for Humanity Kansas City may attempt just that — and, in the process, help resolve some lingering questions for those who want to build small within city limits.

That program, says Habitat KC’s executive director, Jessica Ray, will probably involve 13 new tiny houses built in a cluster, on property that will be purchased by Habitat KC at 30th Street and Highland.

“We initially planned to do two houses, but it quickly began to seem as though demand was much greater than that,” Ray says. “We now see it as an opportunity to be a bigger, more transformational thing for the neighborhood and the people who live nearby.”

These houses will likely be in the range of 500–600 square feet — the larger end of the tiny-house spectrum — and cost “hopefully under $50,000,” Ray says, “though nothing is finalized yet.” Habitat will carry the mortgages for these homes. (Tiny houses have historically been difficult to finance with traditional mortgages.) The organization is in talks with some local architects to possibly design the houses — “We’ve seen a lot of interest in this from the local design community so far,” Ray says — but may also use house plans that are available for free at tiny-house websites.

For those interested in the program, Habitat KC is hosting an informational session at its office (1423 Linwood) on Wednesday, May 13. Ray says the application process is similar to that for other Habitat KC housing. Applicants must be employed, make less than $35,900 a year (or $41,050 if applying as a couple), and have less than $1,000 in credit-card debt. (Student-loan debt, medical debt and vehicle debt don’t factor into the calculation.)

“We’re looking for people who are either currently paying high rental rates or who are living in less-than-favorable conditions,” Ray says. “That includes college graduates who are living in their parents’ basement because of student-loan debt. Those are the kinds of folks we love bringing into our program.”

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In exchange for the zero-interest loan and the Habitat-constructed tiny house, successful applicants are required to perform 250 hours of labor on their own house or others’ houses, and to complete 30 hours of homeowner education. Eight hours of that instruction — on downsizing and tiny living — will be conducted by the Tiny House Collective.

“I think, increasingly, people want to live more simply,” Ray says. “But they still want their own homes. And there’s two roadblocks to that: construction experience and money. And Habitat can address both of those. We offer volunteer opportunities so that members of the tiny-house community can get experience with building. And we’re offering funding through our program to those who need it. And by building these tiny houses close to one another, the goal is to build community while giving people an opportunity to live more affordable lives.”

Kansas City is far from the Pacific Northwest, where tiny abodes can be found in relative abundance. (In 2013, accessory dwelling units — civic legalese for tiny houses — accounted for a full quarter of all new single-dwelling permits issued in Portland, Oregon.) But given the high quantity of cheap, vacant land in Kansas City’s urban core, there’s real opportunity for the trend to take off locally.

This will require not just the blessing of City Hall and the comforting hands of Habitat KC but also the spirit of pioneering. Rouse isn’t alone in his quest, and reasons for pursuing the tiny lifestyle vary.

Michelle Kite, a 46-year-old woman in Independence, Missouri, is living in a 206-square-foot tool shed that she converted into a living space. She’s confident that a tiny-house village will materialize in KC sometime in the next year, and she plans to move into the city and join it when it does. (Kite is an officer in the Tiny House Collective nonprofit.) In the meantime, she’s using her Independence ADU as a test run.

“My husband died 11 years ago, and me and my kids had to downsize from a 2,220-square-foot house to a 650-square-foot house,” Kite told me. “When my kids moved out, I decided I didn’t want all the overhead and mortgage of a regular house. It was a financial decision. So I moved in here and finished the walls, drywalled the ceiling, got electricity running out to here, and I’m about to get water run out to here. I’ve got a sketchbook filled with tiny-house pictures, I’ve watched all the Jay Shafer videos and read the Dee Williams book [The Big Tiny] and gotten pretty plugged into the movement.

“My son lives in California, and he’s about to have a baby,” Kite continued. “I want to be able to lock my little door and use the money I’m saving on a mortgage and utilities on traveling to see his son. I would rather put my money into memories than possessions at this point in my life.”

Not far from Kite, Sami Jo McFarland and Matt Berry, a couple in their mid-20s, have been building a 144-square-foot tiny house on wheels in McFarland’s parents’ Independence driveway over the past eight months. Apart from the insulation of the roof, they’ve done everything themselves, consulting YouTube videos and the Tiny House Collective for instruction. They’re hoping to have it completed by June 4 in order to drive it to Cape Cod, where McFarland has a summer job lined up.

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“I’m a go-green type of person — I was in the Peace Corps, I worked in the Amazon jungle with indigenous communities. I’m all about alternative energy and solar panels and ‘use less, waste less,'” McFarland told me. “Matt is more into it for creative and financial reasons. He likes the idea of being 26 years old and owning his own home and having no mortgage or utility bills. And he’s put a lot of time into artsy things like making the bathtub from a horse trough, things like that.”

She went on: “I’ve traveled a lot but would always get homesick, not necessarily for Kansas City but for my belongings and my cats. So I think it’ll be really nice to be able to travel and live with those things — to bring a sense of familiarness to traveling but also to be able to stay in one place as long as we want. And when you’re 26 and own your own house, it frees you up to do other things financially.”

Inside KC’s city limits, on two lots just off Chestnut Avenue in the Historic Northeast, Roger MacBride has built a cluster of cottagelike structures that he calls his “pirate ship.” It includes a 400-square-foot carriage house, a 200-square-foot “birdhouse”-slash-music room, a shipping container that has been remodeled and repurposed as a shed, and a 700-square-foot residence that faces the street. Fenced in the back corner of the yard, chickens lay MacBride four eggs every day. He bought the property for $7,000 back in 2001.

“Most of what I’ve built here was done using stuff I’ve hauled out of construction-site dumpsters,” he told me. “You wouldn’t believe what gets thrown out. I got guys who’ll tip me off and say, ‘Hey, there’s a bunch of two-by-eights at this site. They all have nails in them, but if you want to pick out the nails, they’re yours.'”

MacBride added: “That 1950s mentality really fucked this city up. They basically outlawed chickens and gardens in the city for a long time. And everybody OD’d on the size of houses. You want a big house, that’s fine. Live out in Johnson County or somewhere else. People like me should still be able to do our small, weird, efficient thing in the city. The good news is, it seems like the city is becoming more receptive to people like us.”

In a secluded, wooded area in the Volker neighborhood, Quack and Luther are about halfway through construction of their tiny house on wheels, which will double as HQ for Tiny House Creative, their design studio. They’re motivated in part by Luther’s student debt — he currently pays $900 a month — an amount that will become much more manageable after they X out the $800 a month in utilities and rent they’re paying at their apartment.

There are almost certainly many more Kansas Citians in various stages of tiny-house building. Some may turn up Saturday, May 16, at Troost Festival, where the Tiny House Collective will have a booth with information about tiny living, financing tiny houses, and everything else under the tiny sun. It coincides with more news from Farmer, last week, that the Tiny House Collective is entering into a partnership with the library’s Bluford Branch to establish a tool library, a place where tiny builders can check out tools for free.

Meanwhile, the Tiny House Collective nonprofit continues to think big.

“I’ll be spending a lot of time in the next few months combing through charitable foundations and large corporations who do community giving and block grants, amassing a list of potential donors,” Farmer told me last week. “The grants range from $5,000 to a million. That grant cycle won’t start until 2016. In the meantime, we’re trying to do some private fundraising, also” — including an Indiegogo campaign to help with upfront and operating costs of the nonprofit.

“I know — it’s hard to keep track of it all,” Farmer continued. “There’s so much tiny stuff going on right now. Big tiny stuff!”