Since NW Tiny Homes opened on Columbia Boulevard in Portland, Oregon, last July, business has been good. By September, the company had already hit its sales goal for the year. It sells stylish park model RVs ranging from $49,900 to $83,000, making them great options for people who are otherwise priced out of the housing market. Unfortunately, owner Jimmy Hickey frequently has to deliver bad news to prospective customers: in their city, it's illegal.
Hickey told Sightline:
"Pretty much every week or every couple days, we're running into someone that's excited for one of these and then, 'oh sorry.'"
He recalls one family in Gresham, Oregon, that was hoping to move their mother out of a nursing home and have her live with them.
"We had tears of joy turned into tears of sadness in the same transaction."
Portland is one of the few cities that allows people to live in mobile dwellings on any property that already has a house. But elsewhere across Cascadia, local zoning codes prohibit them, forcing people with limited financial means into scarce manufactured housing parks or living under the radar and hoping for the best. City and state officials are trying to change that, with Washington State Representative Mia Gregerson leading the charge. Her proposal, HB 1443, would allow these low-cost dwellings in backyards around the state.
Living in RVs, like the ones NW Tiny Homes sells, has been allowed in Washington state for nearly twenty years, but only in manufactured housing parks. Opportunities to live in these communities are limited. The ten manufactured home parks in Bellingham, Washington, for example, can fit just two percent of the city's households combined.
Since the Great Recession, demand to live in these places has soared. Jax, who lived in White River Estates in Auburn, Washington, saw the change firsthand. The 204-home park had been purchased by a California company, which raised her rent every six months. Over the years, her monthly rate more than doubled, from $400 to $900. The financial strain was compounded by a car accident that left Jax disabled. She told Sightline,
"We realized, if we didn't do something, we were going to end up living in a car."
She estimated that by the time she left in 2015, only five families remained who had lived there prior to 2008. Even her three-bedroom trailer in the park had risen in value. She was able to sell it for $80,000, five times what she paid for it a decade prior.
Jax then purchased a tiny home for herself and her youngest son to live in for $45,000. Designed by an Oregon builder, their home is a certified RV that can go totally off-grid.
"Long story short, it has been the best thing we could have done. Our quality of life has been better because of that."
Since then, Jax and her son traveled regionally, towing their house behind them to Seattle, Gold Bar, and Seabeck, before buying a rural property of their own.
Despite the stability her tiny home has brought, what she's doing is technically not allowed.
"We own the land. We own the house. But technically, we're not living legally in either one."
Outside of manufactured housing parks, jurisdictions typically only permit RVs to be inhabited for a prescribed number of days or under special circumstances, like while you are building a permanent house nearby. This is a huge missed opportunity, according to Jax:
"Tiny homes are a perfect niche spot for affordable housing that is really not taxing on the government. You can put aging parents in the backyard and keep them out of the nursing home, and keep the corporate nursing home from stealing all the family income. I've seen too many of my friends lose their inheritance."
Jax warned this issue would worsen as the population ages.
"There are a lot of people who are seniors—in their 50s and 60s, a lot of Gen X—who are going to need tiny homes. We don't have retirement. We're screwed as a generation."
Jax has been advocating to legalize tiny homes for years, emailing legislators ...