City planners and neighborhood advocates contend with urban downsizing

For a long time Jody Davis has harbored a desire to pare down and simplify his housing, or “go tiny,” as he put it, and his partner Will Champion was down.

“There’s this Buddhist idea: If you haven’t touched it in a year, you should get rid of it,” said Davis, sitting in the living room of the house he shares with Champion on a street full of modest 1950s-vintage, aluminum-sided homes on the north side of Greensboro. “If the house was on fire and you’ve got seven minutes, what do you grab? What is worth saving? Not that much. The artifacts of our lives, some pictures maybe. We don’t need the CDs. The pets would be first.”

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“Definitely the pets,” Champion agreed.

“Not even the TV,” Davis continued. “Well, maybe the TV if we had another 30 seconds.”

Davis, a 34-year-old massage therapist, and Champion, a 50-year-old dog trainer — their names have been changed for this story — have owned their house since 2004, and plan to pay off the mortgage by the end of this year. They’re both self-employed. Champion works with dogs that have behavioral problems like aggression towards people or other animals. Sometimes he makes house calls, and sometimes he brings them back to his place, where he lets them run the yard with Keiko, his rehab dog. Davis helps out with his partner’s business, and has been looking to transition to a new career since massage therapy is beginning to take a physical toll on his body. He tried working as a bank teller for a while, but found it wasn’t as fun as it looked.

The primary motivation behind their interest in living in a tiny house was aesthetic. But the financial rewards of conserving space are a definite bonus.

“I think this gives us more financial freedom,” Davis said. “We’ve been playing the mortgage rat-race for too long and we’re wicked sick of it.”

When a friend invited Davis and Champion to attend a seminar on tiny houses at Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden in Kernersville last summer, they figured they had nothing to lose by checking it out.

The seminar was led by John Williams, a 63-year-old Iowa native who built earth-covered homes in the late ’70s and has recently started experimenting with retrofitting steel shipping containers. The idea of making a home out of a shipping container appealed to Davis.

“One of my only fears of going tiny is inclement weather,” Davis said. “I’m a little bit worried about tornados. The shipping container’s made of solid steel. It’s definitely not going anywhere.”

Now, only eight months after the seminar, Davis and Champion have a red, 40-foot K-Line shipping container in their backyard running most of the length of their northern property line.

A fabricator hired by Williams has scored cutouts for double French doors in the center and three windows, using a plasma cutter, along the south side to capture heat and light from the sun. The top is also cut out at both ends A rendering on a small piece of wood laying along an inside wall depicts the eventual profile of the structure: A roof pitched from the center slopes downward to the west end to provide adequate head room for a loft. At the east end, a separate roof slopes from the center to the east end, albeit with a gentler pitch. In the middle, the top of the container provides a platform for a deck accessible through the loft with rails on either side following the pitch of the east-facing roof.

“I refer to this as a ‘Pop-a-Top 40,’” John Williams said on a recent sunny afternoon as he met at the site with Ralph Duke, a contractor who will be overseeing construction, and John’s brother, Tony, who will be doing much of the work. The shipping containers, which John procures from a broker in South Carolina, are typically 40 feet long, although he sometimes cuts them in half to make two 20-foot tiny houses. And while Davis and Champion’s backyard tiny house will feature siding to match the principal dwelling on the property, the rooflines at either end suggest the profile of a pop-top camper.

At John Williams’ suggestion, Davis and Champion are calling their future home a “studio” in an effort to side-step municipal zoning regulations. Champion said he and Davis have not obtained a building permit for the project. (Their names are changed in this article to protect them from adverse regulatory consequences.)

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Whatever the owners call their tiny house, it likely falls under the city of Greensboro’s accessory dwelling ordinance. Guidelines for accessory dwellings in Greensboro broadly conform with those in Winston-Salem, Durham and Charlotte; Raleigh, alone among the state’s five largest cities, does not allow such structures. The ordinances typically allow only one accessory dwelling unit per lot, require additional off-street parking space and stipulate that the property retain the appearance of a single-family lot from the curb. Requirements for setbacks, minimum lot-size requirements and limitations on the size and height of the accessory dwellings vary from city to city.

City planners in Greensboro and Winston-Salem have noted a growing interest in tiny houses from an array of constituencies ranging from builders to people experiencing homelessness, and have expressed openness to regulatory adjustments to accommodate the changing demands of the marketplace.

“We are always interested in working with the community to make sure people have affordable housing,” said Hanna Cockburn, the city’s long-range and strategic planning manager. “And what that looks like changes.

“Our ordinance already allows a huge amount of flexibility,” Cockburn added. “An ordinance is a living document that reflects the desires of the community and the demands of society. The purpose of the ordinance is to ensure that people will be safe, and to do that we have to take in a universe of considerations.”

Mike Kirkman, the city’s zoning administrator, said interest in tiny houses fits into paradigm shift towards urban downsizing, likening the transformation to the large-scale introduction of multifamily housing in North Carolina cities some 65 years ago.

Cockburn, who lives in the Southside neighborhood near downtown, noted that many of her neighbors have accessory dwellings on their properties.

“What we’ve found is that it’s a recruitment tool as much as anything else,” she said. “It introduces people to the neighborhood, and they want to stay. When a house comes on the market, they will often jump at the chance to buy it.”

Builders, homeless advocates and others have already approached the city with an interest in building clusters of tiny houses in one location — or tiny-house villages.

“We’ve had three or four groups come to the city saying, ‘We know this is a developing trend; what can we do to make this work?’” Kirkman said.

City staff has a meeting scheduled with a group interested in building a tiny-house village on a 0.34-acre lot zoned for multifamily on Guerrant Street on the east side of the city, not far from the National Guard Armory on Franklin Boulevard.

“I think they’re talking about four or five units, kind of a small-scale grouping of dwellings with a community garden, maybe a community center — I’m not sure,” Kirkman said.

He added that staff is open to the idea of reviewing the code of ordinances to make it easier to build and site tiny houses, but they need more definitive input from advocates on what changes would be helpful before they get started.

Urban planners in Winston-Salem have similarly embraced the downsizing movement in housing. The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Planning Department undertook a review of its accessory dwelling ordinance in August, albeit for reasons of legal compliance rather than proactive innovation. Unlike Greensboro, where there are no restrictions on the types of people who may rent accessory dwellings, Winston-Salem’s accessory dwelling ordinance limits the residency of so-called “granny flats,” in-law apartments, guest houses, carriage houses and laneway/alley houses to relatives, adopted persons, dependents and servants. The review was prompted by a warning from the city attorney’s office that the restriction may not be legal, based on a 2008 North Carolina Court of Appeals decision establishing that cities do not have the right to regulate land use based on the identity or status of the users of the property.

Paul Norby, the director of planning and development services and a vocal proponent for urbanism and affordable housing, trumpeted accessory dwellings as helpful in achieving the city’s goal of “gentle density” in a memo last August to Mayor Allen Joines and members of Winston-Salem City council.

Citing the city and county’s Legacy 2030 plan, Norby wrote, “It is expected that the population of Forsyth County will grow by approximately 120,000 individuals over the next two decades. Creative housing options such as accessory dwellings can help accommodate this population influx within the existing municipal limits, and can offer a number of additional community benefits. Accessory dwellings are likely smaller than and more affordable than other options currently on the market. These units can also utilize existing infrastructure and can generate income for the owner of the principal structure, increasing affordability for the owner. Lastly, accessory dwellings can provide an opportunity for aging in place for the elderly, sick or those on fixed incomes that need to be close to family or simply desire to remain within their neighborhoods.”

An evangelist for the tiny-house movement, John Williams has been in a near constant state of motion in the past couple years.

He worked as an appraiser in the Des Moines Tax Assessors office and taught at a community college there in the early ’70s. Through his teaching job, Williams had the opportunity to attend a seminar on alternative building techniques at the University of Minneapolis, which instigated his interest in earth-covered homes. He came to Kernersville in 1995 at his sister’s prompting to help with a downtown revitalization plan and wound up working as an IT at the Winston-Salem Journal before retiring after 15 years. He started retrofitting shipping containers for housing as a retirement hobby last spring, and people began seeking him out for advice when he posted photos of his handiwork on Facebook and Pinterest.

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Williams teamed up with Kelly Mattocks, who owns a four-acre spread south of Kernersville, to form Camp Tiny House. Mattocks’ four-acre spread outside of Kernersville provides a staging area for the assembling materials and building new units. A 20-foot modified shipping container on the premises that is covered with tongue-and-groove knotty pine and black contemporary-style trim served as a showpiece at a street festival in downtown Winston-Salem and at the fall 2015 furniture market in High Point.

“We are a tiny-house co-housing incubator of tiny-house builders,” Williams likes to say. “We hatch out tiny-house people.”

Salvaged shipping containers throng the back corner of the property, some of them awaiting retrofitting while one is reserved as a storeroom for materials. One of Williams’ projects includes stacking two containers crossways, creating a shelter for a carport.

“It is up-cycling and it is repurposing surplus material,” he said. “The benefit is it is hurricane proof and storm protected. The structure is already here.”

Not everyone agrees. Kirkman, the zoning administrator in Greensboro, said concerns have been raised about the structural integrity of shipping containers, although he said the issue arose with a project involving two stacked containers.

In contrast, Dan Dockery, the chief building official for Winston-Salem and Forsyth County, said there’s no question about the durability of shipping containers.

“These things are built to withstand anything — being tossed and turned on the ocean, wind when they’re going down the road, vibrations on a train, being banged together by a crane when they’re being put on a ship,” he said. “These are tough as nails.”

Further illustrating the point, Dockery noted that shipping containers are stacked up to six units high on ships and are designed to withstand the compression of a vessel pitching 30 degrees in either direction.

“Like all bureaucrats, we don’t know the answer, so we just say no,” he added. “We’re the back of the wave. It’s a terrible way to run a railroad.”

While shipping containers are his primary medium, John Williams is interested in all kinds of non-traditional, small-scale building, including tree houses, pods, houseboats and converted school buses.

Williams first came to the attention of the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Planning Department through a complaint from one of his neighbors. The premises of his low-slung ranch house in suburban Winston-Salem near Salem Lake is quite a bit more cluttered than the tidy spread at Mattocks’ place. Williams’ backyard teems with salvaged materials: a stage that was used as a rotating stand for a Lincoln Continental at a car show; a 26-by-eight pontoon that he’ll use as a platform for a tiny house; a 40-foot school bus in good working order that’s outfitted with a Jacuzzi; and wooden pods, which were also salvaged from a car show, that will be used to assemble a “five-plex” tree house. And where the property slopes down towards a small lake on a neighbor’s property, he’s made a deep cut into the earth for a planned “Hobbitville,” where he plans to bury two shipping containers to build earth-covered, solar passive dwellings.

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Williams, who divorced a couple years ago, rents out four rooms of his house to tenants who share his interest in alternative building techniques and sustainability. He has chicken coops in the backyard, but had to give up the fowl last summer because he got too busy to take care of them. He has a vertical garden on the southwest wall that cools the house in the warm months.

For Williams, the logic of downsized housing is inescapable.

“The college students with student loans to pay off, they don’t need to go out and conform to the social expectation of the castle on the hill and amass as much material wealth as you can,” he said. “The young people are saying, ‘I don’t need that social status anymore.’ This can be a starter home. This can be a house on wheels.”

He rapped on one of the shipping containers.

“This can be put on a rail car and moved across the country,” he said. “It can be trailered, trucked or railed. That’s what it’s made for.”

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In Winston-Salem, the desire among tiny-house advocates to increase affordable housing options is running squarely into reaction from neighborhood associations whose leaders are concerned about preserving the value of their members’ investments.

“For most people who are able to buy a house, their house is their biggest purchase,” said Eric Bushnell, president of the Winston-Salem Neighborhood Alliance, after the City/County Planning Board voted to continue the proposed amendment to the accessory dwelling ordinance on Feb. 11. “I worry about deteriorating values. How well your neighbor’s property is maintained has a lot to do with how well your own property retains its value. When you make a really sweeping change, for people who have invested their lives in their property, it’s really scary.”

No one signed up to speak in support of the proposed amendment during the public hearing. Four people, including Bushnell, spoke in opposition.

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“We have a neighborhood where one of the charms is the quiet enjoyment of our backyards,” said Bonnie Crouse, a resident of Ardmore. “And if someone on each side of, say, my yard could build a structure that was basically a sidewalk’s width away from my property line on both sides, and on my back side my backdoor neighbors maximize the access of the setback requirement that they were allowed, I would be living in a box looking up on three sides at 24-foot structures with substantial reduction in the pleasure and the appeal of my property.”

Crouse and other speakers said they want the accessory dwelling ordinance to include a ban on manufactured housing. Sunny Stewart, a resident of Washington Park, added, “We would like to suggest that temporary structures be prohibited, that structures be required to be placed on a permanent foundation so that we don’t have tiny homes on wheels, for example, as something that would be allowed.”

As a separate issue, Stewart said she wants planning officials to look into the possibility of prohibiting people from renting out their accessory dwellings on a nightly or weekly basis, referencing the San Francisco-based sharing-economy pioneer Airbnb.

The Winston-Salem City Attorney’s office believes that it would be legal to prohibit short-term rentals, according to a staff memo, which also noted that “such a provision would be very difficult to enforce, and planning staff would not recommend its addition to the ordinance.”

The planning board will likely consider neighbors requests to add additional parking restrictions to the ordinance, Principal Planner Kirk Ericson said, before the ordinance comes up for a vote again in March.

“We’re getting close to becoming the most restrictive city in the state other than saying you can’t have accessory dwellings at all,” Planning & Development Services Director Paul Norby told the board.

The current draft limits detached accessory dwellings to lots of a minimum of 9,000 square feet where the principal dwelling takes up no more than a third of the area. Under those restrictions, a November 2015 staff memo notes that compact neighborhoods like Washington Park, West End, Sunnyside, West Salem, Waughtown and East Winston would only allow detached accessory dwellings on larger lots, while more spacious neighborhoods like Ardmore and Konnoak Hills would have “pockets” where they couldn’t be constructed.

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Ralph Duke paced the chopped container behind Jody Davis and Will Champion’s house in Greensboro. Duke sized up the space as John Williams enthused about plans for a rain catchment, a composting toilet and perforated pipe along the fence line to drain off gray water. His brother, Tony, mostly hung back, occasionally venturing a suggestion.

Duke squinted, deep in thought. He let his back slide down along the interior wall into a squatting position and fished in his breast pocket for a cigarette. He lit it and took a couple drags as he let his mind scan over the details of where the dog kennel would go, how the top of the kennel would make a bench seat, where storage compartments and a television would be located.

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He worried aloud about water condensing in a cavity above the showerhead.

Although Duke holds 40 years of experience as a carpenter, he acknowledged that his experience with metal is fairly minimal. He predicted that one of his biggest challenges will be bolting the loft floor to the steel sheet of the container.

“This is not gonna be an easy drill,” Duke said.

“It goes pretty good,” John Williams assured him. “I’ve done it with toilets.”

The codes for typical residential construction don’t apply within the relatively tight confines of a habitat fashioned out of a shipping container, Duke said.

“The old adage is, plan your work and work your plan,” he said. “If a person had the knowledge that the mobile-home industry had, you’d want to use every square inch, save material and eliminate waste. That’s key.

“With this, you’re skirting the codes,” he continued. “You have to adapt. You have to keep things like head room, attachments, stairs and venting in mind.”

With siding on the outside of the steel envelope and drywall on the inside, the builders will have to ensure that the walls can breathe adequately so the two cavities don’t collect moisture.

Sequencing will be essential: Bolting the loft floor to the steel walls will come first. Then exterior siding. And finally drywall on the inside.

John Williams offered to give Duke a tour of Camp Tiny House outside Kernersville so he could get some ideas about how to fasten wood to metal.

“At this moment in time I don’t want to contaminate my mind,” Duke said.

“With what I’ve been doing,” Williams said, finishing his sentence.

“That’s the nicest way to put it,” Duke said.

After he comes up with a plan of his own, Duke said, he might look at Williams’ work to draw a comparison.

“I’m like John Lennon,” he said. “I want to hear my own music.”

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