A house can take years to plan and build, but Andy Dragt and his wife can finish one in about five weeks. Norm Van Eeden Petersman joins Firefly Tiny Homes founder Andy Dragt, whose work has moved far beyond the tiny-house lifestyle people often see on HGTV or social media. Built for permanent living and movable when circumstances change, these homes can serve as a starter home while giving people more flexibility about where that home sits over time. They offer something the housing system has struggled to produce: a small, attainable home for people trying to get started.
Welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and a key part of what we do with this podcast is talk to people building change in their communities, building the conversations that need to happen, building the connections that need to be in place in order for change to occur, but in this case, actually building some of the physical artifacts that are necessary in order to not just introduce the change that we need to see, but make it more possible and available to way more people.
Joining me today is Andy Dragt. Andy is a passionate Strong Towns member in Spartanburg, South Carolina, who's tackling the housing crisis by building tiny homes. He's the founder of Firefly Tiny Homes, and he builds custom homes for families, for individuals, for people that are in transition, but also people that are looking for a place that they can just call home. This is serving a really critical segment of the housing market that we know is still overlooked and often undersupplied, and so I'm glad to have Andy here. Welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution podcast.
Thanks, Norm. I am just thrilled to be here. I spend most of my days building small homes for people and consuming every podcast, every audiobook, every article that I can turn into audio. I just feel like we need more people who actually construct, who actually swing the hammers, to get involved, take the time, put the hammer down, and show up on a podcast once in a while.
Yeah, I totally agree. I think that front-row or front-seat experience is so important. Can you describe what's right behind you? This is an audio podcast, but right behind you is a key part of your story. Do you want to share what I can see and describe that for others?
Behind me is a two-bedroom small home. It's meant to be a home for a young sheriff's deputy up in North Carolina who's just getting started in life. I think he was coached by his mom to not just purchase an aging house that might take up all his time. They found us, and we built him a two-bedroom home that can be installed on some family property they have up there.
He can move right in within days. It took us weeks to build, and he can have it installed in a matter of hours, and it'll be his new home.
Wait, days, weeks, and hours. That's a whole other category of timeframe than what we're used to, which is years, years, and more years. What is it about this process and the work that you're able to do that really makes that difference?
Part of it is just the repeatability, the known quantity of the environment that we're working in. We don't have to roll up on site and deal with uncertain site conditions. I can have all the materials delivered with a forklift into the shop and a chassis pulled in, and literally this two-bedroom house takes us about five weeks to build.
It's just two people. It's just my wife and I. We have zero employees. I pay someone to put the countertops in. That's it.
Yeah, that's awesome because it reminds me of the fact that when I worked in construction for a couple of summers, we had an hour to an hour and a half of driving time to get out to the site. Then a fairly significant amount of time was spent rolling out the hoses and cords again and making sure that anything we'd had to lock away was brought back out. We also had weather conditions, and I was a rookie, so I was always trying to put on waterproofing membranes in less-than-optimal conditions.
Now I could have a cold sweat if I think about how some of those buildings are performing. I tried to do good work, but at the same time, all of the conditions sort of conspired against me.
You're trying to not just build tiny homes, and I think you've figured out a really good process for this. I'm sure you've also learned a lot from what other people building smaller homes or off-site manufactured homes are doing. But for yourself, how does this fit into a deeper vision? Not just to build something, which is really important, but to build something that is distinct and does serve that overlooked and undersupplied community.
We started out in 2020, and I have decades of experience and an undergraduate degree in construction management. I was a superintendent for a large national builder, but eventually it got to the point where Gina and I wanted to do something together. We were at a point where we could take a risk, and it wasn't a huge risk to buy a trailer and build a tiny house together, so we did that, and it went really well.
We ended up with a couple more orders, and I think maybe the fourth or fifth tiny house we built was for a festival. We built it for the festival and had amazing feedback, and then we put that house up for sale. It ended up being bought by a young couple in San Luis Obispo, California, and a number of things happened there. All of a sudden, I realized my market was the entire country.
Our costs are pretty low compared to the coast of California, so someone in California looking at the price of the homes we could build was like, "Yeah, sure, I'll pay $7,000 to drag that thing all the way across the country." This was a young couple making decent money. They both had six-figure incomes, and they continually felt like they were falling behind. They grew up in San Luis Obispo. One of them worked in San Luis Obispo. They wanted desperately to stay in that town and live the car-free or nearly car-free, walkable life that the city provided, but they just couldn't get into the housing market.
One of their parents offered to carve up half their backyard, and they bought the tiny house from us. I filled out some paperwork because San Luis Obispo is one of the municipalities in California that allows tiny homes on wheels to function as permanent ADUs. I had to fill out a few forms. It wasn't that big a deal.
It got delivered, and they decided that rather than rip a fence down temporarily, they would just hire a crane. They sent me pictures of the home we built hanging in the air over their parents' house and being put in the backyard. That completely changed things for me, because we started out building the cute tiny homes you might see on TV shows, things people use for vacations or that were made popular by young people building them themselves.
But my mind started firing on all cylinders. Backyard housing could be made much simpler for homeowners and buyers. Instead of asking them to make a huge bet on uncertain construction costs - and I think earlier this month you hosted an Upzoned podcast about the ADU that went from $300,000 to $600,000 - I think you were optimistic and positive about that, saying, "Hey, look what they're allowed to do now, at least."
But yeah.
I think a lot of people hear that story and they're like, "Whoa, maybe we can't afford to think about building an ADU in the backyard." Sending that tiny house to a backyard for a permanent home for a young couple to get started in the place they want to live, close to their job and close to their family, just changed everything for me.
We redesigned all of our models to be all on one level to make permanent living more functional and nicer. You don't have to climb up into a sleeping loft or things like that. I didn't like climbing up there to finish them off, so I couldn't imagine people climbing up there to sleep every day. We redesigned our tiny homes more as movable ADUs, and that's how we think about them now.
Yeah, I love that. At Strong Towns, we've sometimes said ADU sounds like a very technical term. Chuck, I think, has a line in his talk where he says, "We call these tiny homes, but they're just homes." They're what used to be pretty normal in a lot of places. People lived in mobile homes, people lived in wagons that were converted, people lived in farm sheds, whatever that looked like.
The language doesn't always matter too much because the core element is what it enables, what it makes possible. Can you talk about some of the people you've already shared about? They just said, "I can't afford to commit vast amounts of resources to one type of thing that I need in my life, which is shelter," especially when an alternative already exists. But it feels like those alternatives are still being suppressed in all kinds of ways.
We have Mint Tiny Homes in Delta, British Columbia, and I believe it is still the case that they sell homes in our city, they pay business taxes in our city, they employ locals in our city, and you cannot install a Mint tiny home in our city. It's madness. If the concern is that somebody out there might take advantage of you because they might plop something down that is unsustainable, poor quality, and a death trap, what about the company in your own community that builds it? Of anybody in your community that should have an exemption from all of these silly rules, that should be us.
You must at times just shake your head because you're like, "Look, I'm willing to sell this, but your community won't let you have it." Can you talk about some of that frustration, but also what can be positively done to break that trap?
Sure. Mint builds a really nice tiny house. I've seen some of them in person. They do a great job.
I think what it comes down to is that, in Strong Towns, I was immediately captured by this idea of lowering the size of the bet it takes to get started and create change in every way, whether it's quick-build infrastructure for bikes or walkability. Even our town, during the pandemic, did a quick-build intervention to close down a main street, and they decided to keep it. It's one of the reasons we relocated from 30 miles away to Spartanburg, because now we have this pedestrian-only, car-free zone, and we were looking to increase the size of our shop anyway.
I think there's a necessary mindset that needs to change about tiny homes or other things, like single-room-occupancy sorts of hacks. How can we lower the bet and create some on-ramps so that we have something like a quick-build intervention for housing? There are a lot of great ideas out there for zoning changes and missing-middle housing. It took us a couple generations to dig the ditch that we're in, and it's going to take a while to dig ourselves out. But people need affordable places to live right now.
Even an ADU - the article we were referencing is maybe a little extreme, but in another sense, it's not really. The average price of an ADU around the country is well over $250,000, approaching $300,000. More importantly, it can take more than a year on average for the whole process to get going.
If you're looking to house an aging parent, a young person, or a nurse who moves into the area, or if you spend all that money building an ADU and decide you don't really like people renting in your backyard, there are risks. Another story is a retired woman who contacted us and wanted a tiny house. She was living in a three-bedroom house by herself. She was tired of taking care of it. She didn't need it.
The triggering event for her was that her daughter lived fairly nearby, but 20 minutes might as well be two hours sometimes. Her daughter was about to have her first grandchild, so they hatched this plan for Grandma to live in the backyard and to have something built for her on site. That complicates the ownership of the property because she's paying for it. How does that work with the family money and all that kind of stuff?
But also, the time it would have taken meant that granddaughter would have been over a year old. She would have missed all that time. Instead, she was able to put her house on the market. We built her house in less than four weeks. It took a day to install on site. She had maybe a week of landscaping and a deck being built, and now she has a wood-chip path right to her daughter's back door.
Now she sends us videos sometimes. She sent us one recently of this little toddler. She's been there about a year now, and her grandchild just gets let out the back door, and she's calling, "Come to Grandma," and this little toddler is toddling her way to Grandma's house in the backyard. All of that just wouldn't have happened if the size of the bet was bigger.
She would have stayed where she was because it would have taken too long, been too expensive, or just been too hard. But because where she was allowed her to have a well-built, inspected, certified tiny home on wheels installed as an ADU, she was able to make it happen.
Never mind the fact that her house was bought by a young family desperate to get out of an apartment building and needing those extra bedrooms. Now three generations of housing have been affected. No new land was necessary. No new infrastructure was necessary. That's a super powerful story that keeps me going, and I tell it all the time because it clarifies for me why I'm doing this.
I could make more money developing property or doing other things at that point, but Gina and I love this life. We love building homes for people who need them. The necessary next step, as you said, is how do we convince or help people in positions of authority, or in places considering this, understand that there are examples all across the country where this is basically a solved problem?
Fresno, San Luis Obispo, places in Colorado, the entire state of Maine - there are examples. A lot of times, if people are really worried and the political will isn't there for them to be permanent, you can look at Fresno, L.A., or San Luis Obispo, where they put time-limited permits on them. You can say, "We're not going to let you put something on wheels forever and always." Especially in the South, people point to some really bad examples of homes on wheels from 60 or 70 years ago, and we can't get rid of them. They're really scared of that.
Well, okay. Issue a five-year permit. Attach a fee to it so you cover some of your extra fire and police costs. The truth is that we have all of these close-in suburbs or neighborhoods that are either near our city or in our city, where we've spent generations mandating fairly large lot sizes. Many people aren't using all of that land that was required to come with their house.
The other thing is that most of the infrastructure was built for more people. The neighborhood we live in, which is just a few miles from the center of our town, 30 or 40 years ago had four-plus people per household, and we're hovering around two now. If we could put a tiny house in every single yard, we'd barely be back to the heyday of the 1960s, when the sewer, electric, and water all functioned just fine. The streets can handle those people. It's fine.
Top-load washers consumed as much water as an elephant drinks in a year, right? Now it's replaced with high efficiency, and we certainly see that the actual cost per individual, or the load, has shifted, but also the density.
You're right that you've got all of these neighborhoods that are so lightly developed, and people are understandably very hesitant to say, "Well, I don't want to trade that away." They feel like they've earned an opportunity for themselves to enjoy a quiet life in a peaceful place.
Tiny homes are actually a brilliant way to bring that in, or modest homes within the existing fabric of a neighborhood, because you don't have to have an ongoing project that wipes away an entire block and replaces it with something totally different. It totally meets the moment that we are in.
One of my big pushes is all of our ample front-yard setbacks are actually a prime opportunity. As much as one might regret that they were ever imposed in the first place, and the wastefulness of land that it created, it's a great opportunity to put something in the front yard. With a little bit of tasteful decorating and landscaping, you can do an amazing thing to actually introduce another household there. For the primary family living in the main home, they still have their whole backyard if they want, and nobody is worse off. There's less lawn to mow up front. You can see a lot of those benefits.
I wanted to ask about some of the social elements because there's been a focus for veterans and people experiencing homelessness to create tiny-home villages and clusters in that way. They certainly are a great tool if you want to do something like a cottage-court cluster. What you've described are a few stories of individuals, a single home unit being installed in a place. On that spectrum from clusters of homes all the way to a single home, where do you see opportunities emerging?
I definitely think the backyard house is among the smallest bets, the easiest on-ramp, especially since you can separate the risk. You could have a program in the city where you give low-interest loans or grants to install the utilities in a corner of the backyard. People who are struggling to keep up with their property taxes because housing values have gone up in the city, and who we might otherwise lose as long-term residents, could rent a pad in the back corner of their lot and make $500 or $600.
There are tiny-home owners or people who would like to own a tiny home. We get emails all the time: "Where can I put one? Where can I put one?" Usually the answer is mostly an RV park outside of town. There are people who would love to do this, especially traveling nurses and others.
I think that is the easiest on-ramp. You could create programs, help people get these pads and utilities, and we could have housing in places where infrastructure already exists. You have an opportunity to thicken up a little bit of density and bring back some corner stores in neighborhoods. Maybe the bus makes a little more sense because we're back up to densities that we had 50 years ago.
But I also dream. I've talked to our city in particular about this. Most cities have some unbuildable lots or some land that's just tough. They're hanging on to it waiting for the right thing, or they're paying people to mow it and watch over it.
Gina and I alone can build our smallest model, which is a nice, dignified 32-foot-long chassis. It's more of a studio sort of thing, but it's got a bathroom, a really nice kitchen, and an open area for living and sleeping. It even has an integrated porch on the back end. We can build that in three weeks.
We built one of those early this year in three weeks, and it left our shop in the middle of the day. It showed up the next morning in Connecticut. By the end of that day, eight hours later, that single retired woman was living in her new home, much closer to her family.
Imagine what we could do with a community build, where we had some sort of program and a bunch of people who cared got together. There are things we do, like really nice flooring and quartz countertops, that we wouldn't necessarily have to do. We could strip things down and still have nice materials that cost a little less.
The average supportive housing unit is shockingly expensive. Even at our quality standards, the unit cost on our smallest one is around $30,000 in materials, and then all our labor and everything. I think we could get a lot of that volunteered.
I'm rambling because I think it would be awesome to take some of those city lots that are basically useless, stick four tiny houses on there, and then do something else I think would be amazing. Our city has some downtown ambassadors, people who are paid to be almost like caseworkers, interacting with and keeping tabs on our neighbors who happen to be without housing at the moment.
What if we gave people like that a free tiny house to live in and said, "Hey, these are your three friends. Help them get on their feet." It would be housing first. I think there is an opportunity.
If it doesn't work, if that location doesn't work, or if the neighborhood revolts, it's not permanent. You can say, "Hey, we're going to try this." It makes a huge difference if we can get people who need help to live within a community that cares. Let's try it. Could we try it? If it doesn't work, those units still have value. You could try somewhere else.
I think that makes a ton of sense. But Chuck has mentioned this on occasion: sometimes they get stuck on the edge of town where there's no transit, there's nothing around, and I do agree with that. That seems like a silly, almost self-defeating sort of thing, like, "Let's put them out of sight."
Almost like an RV park at that point. Yeah, I don't think that's helpful for a community.
It's not helpful for those people. I think tiny homes on wheels could be an interesting solution. But really, it comes down to community will and supporting those people. Housing is just one part of it. We could get less expensive housing, but it still depends on the will to actually help those people who need help.
But what I think you're really underlining too is the missed opportunity we have. Instead of saying, "Well, we have vacant land. It would be nice if someone did something with it," you can actually say, "All right, in a timed way, we're going to install homes here."
We make it really clear up front, much like when you move into a dormitory at a university. You're not planning to live there for the next 80 years. You know that it's time-bound. There would be things like this.
It also immediately brings to mind one of my big passions, which is caretaker cottages in all of our parks. If we could return to a time-tested practice, this is the other thing I think you're describing: this increment of housing is normal. This increment is also time-tested, and so we know we have a need for it because others like us have had a need for it in the past.
The caretaker cottage on municipal parks was once just a normal feature. The result was that you didn't have to have a work crew driving around in a big diesel truck to collect two bags of garbage, which drives me bonkers. I'm glad that's being done, but there's got to be a more efficient way. You have constant on-site surveillance. You also have the benefit of providing ambassadors with a residence of their own.
Someone in my family was a caretaker. They were down on their luck. They managed to sort of luck their way into one of these old residual elements of what it took to build strong communities, and they benefited from it and were a benefit to the neighborhood as well. That can be such a huge part of it.
I want to ask a harder question. There's the HGTV or Instagram-Pinterest version of, "Oh, this is tiny. This is cute. This is something you do if you want to be artsy for a bit," and then you post your long-form video on YouTube titled something like, "What I Learned About Tiny Home Living and Why I'm Not Doing It Anymore." I feel like there's a cultural trap there that obscures the fact that normal people do this. Normal people are able to flourish in this way.
You probably engage with that at times where you're saying, "This is not a fad. This is just a tradition, and it's a tradition that we're picking up again." Do you want to share more thoughts on that?
Sure. We were kind of in that mindset when we first started out. We thought tiny homes seemed like a cute, interesting way to use my skills as a builder and our desire to work together. We sort of stumbled upon a different way to think about it.
This really could be, for lack of a better term, a way to bring back starter homes. We just cannot figure out how to develop small enough increments of land and labor and put a 500-, 600-, or even 700-square-foot house somewhere, without subsidies, and have it be affordable for people as a starter house.
So we started rethinking the design. Let's not ask people to crawl up into lofts. Let's put them all on one level. We went back to the drawing board with our chassis, and now we order chassis that are just two really beefy I-beams that happen to have axles strapped to them. We build a whole floor system on top of those I-beams, so you could put that in a backyard on actual permanent piers. You could pour concrete piers or block up concrete piers, and they would be no different than half the homes.
We live in a textile area where the mills built a ton of housing, and they are all on pier and beams. Those beams are now rotting away because those homes were not intended to last for 100 years, but we've been nursing them along for that long. These are steel I-beams. We have a steel underbelly. We use steel siding. We use metal roofs. We use fiberglass windows.
These homes are not just cutesy Instagram bait, if you will. We've made them a little wider. They do need wide-load permits, but they don't need follow cars. They can still be moved around the country.
The model that's behind me is the one my family of four currently lives in. I have two college-age daughters who didn't want to go back to the dorms for their last semester, so they're crashing with us in our 420-square-foot tiny house.
I understand there's a tension with the term tiny house because ours aren't as tiny anymore. But it's still an aspirational brand, if you will. People think, "I'm going smaller so that I can have nicer." That's oftentimes the trade-off people are thinking about when they think of tiny homes.
It just depends who we're talking to. Sometimes we call them movable ADUs. Sometimes we call them movable backyard cottages. Sometimes, as the name of our company says, they're Firefly Tiny Homes. That name, that brand, still has some value, but it does take some clarification. You're not wrong about that.
I'm curious, have you seen any instances where they're set above a storage shed or set above car parking, elevated in that way with some stairs up? Because that would be one of those things in cities that are concerned about what this means for parking. You can say these things can actually sit above the parking if you need them to.
I think that's a better application for modular construction. The real key here is off-site construction. But if you're going to take a structure off a flatbed, put it onto another permanent foundation, get the city to permanently inspect it, and permanently give a certificate of occupancy to it, that is governed typically by the HUD Code, the Housing and Urban Development Code.
That is almost exclusively set up for large factories. So we're back to this idea of depending on a centralized system, for the same reason that it's hard to talk large national home builders into building when the numbers don't work. Modular construction slows down when the numbers don't work too.
The nice thing about tiny homes is there are some third-party inspectors who have gained some trust and have come around small builders like us. They provide us with tools to inspect and certify our homes, and enough municipalities are starting to call that good enough to issue permits. Maybe not forever. Maybe it needs reinspection after five years or 10 years or whatever.
If you want to put it up over a garage or something like that, I think it's worth trying to find a modular builder that would work with that particular thing. It's probably not worth doing the whole wheels and axles and all that kind of stuff.
I really don't think tiny homes are the perfect answer to every single thing. But it's not just an on-ramp for homeowners and people with backyards who might think about letting a tiny house rent space in their backyard. It's a super-low bet for someone with some skills in construction to get started.
I know tiny-home builders who started in their driveway. They didn't have a shop like we have. They just decided to try it. It's not that huge of a risk because chances are, even if you find out you don't like it or you didn't do the bang-up job you thought you would, you could probably still sell a finished tiny house for whatever you have into it.
The truth is that if you have some skill and it feels like something you might like, you're likely to find out there's a market, and the market is the entire country, or actually the entire continent. You might find out that you learn some things, buy some better tools, build a shop, and all of a sudden you've got a business on your hands.
Once you start to figure out how to build small and repeatable and iron out the wrinkles, then you probably become like me, where I'm looking at every single lot in the city that comes up and thinking, "How can I fit a cottage court? How can I do it?" But it's still a huge bet. To get me out of my climate-controlled shop, where I don't get rained on or sunburned, and convince me to go out into the city and tackle a lot and do a cottage court, as much as I'd like to participate in that, the numbers really have to work.
I'm doing what I love right now. I see opportunity everywhere, but I think that really is what it comes down to. We just need more people because too many of the people who could potentially build us out of this hole, who could build the missing-middle housing that we desperately want, are happily and profitably busy building other places. Does that make sense?
Yeah, 100%. I see that all the time. I have a good friend who's regretting the fact that his company is building a home for an 80-year-old who just wants a spec home, and they're willing to plow $4 million into it. He just said, "Is this really what I should be doing?" I think it definitely touches on what you're passionate about.
Before we started the recording, I wanted you to pick up on the idea that we need a minnow strategy because pretty quickly minnows grow into fish, and those fish are much more competent, much more capable, and then almost forget what that minnow stage feels like.
We have to have a way for people who hang drywall all week to be able to do a project of their own on the weekends and earn their way into an opportunity for themselves. I think you followed that path. I'd love to hear your thoughts on ways that we can keep that beginning state really open and, as you said, make a way for a lot of small bets to be small enough that people can actually make them.
I have a number of ideas on this. One of my favorites is something I talk with our city and our mayor about quite a bit. He'd love me to just go ahead with it, but I'm using it as bait, making sure they actually follow through with the zoning code rewrite in our city, allow ADUs, and allow tiny homes on wheels as ADUs.
We are training more tradespeople these days. The truth is, the pay for plumbers, electricians, tradespeople, and carpenters has gone up, and a lot more young people are considering it. It's not a flood or anything, but it's going in the right direction.
More often than not, when they graduate from a trade program, or even right out of high school if their high school had a really good vocational program, they'll get snapped up and plugged into a very specialized box in the building world, typically sucked up into one of these large, centralized national builders, commercial or residential or whatever.
I know a ton of people like that who feel they learned only a couple of parts of the whole thing. Now they're making good money, maybe they've got a family, and the idea of trying to go back and learn it all is a hard sell for them, or a big bet, if you will.
One of my ideas would be to have incubators. First step: let's say yes to these things. If we're serious about affordable housing, there's no reason not to say yes. It's a solved problem. You can't tell me you care about affordable housing and still say no to these things. I'm all out of patience on that one.
The second is to find some disused industrial warehouse, or build a metal building on some underutilized land, and every summer get a handful of students just out of high school or still in high school and do a tiny-home summer. Let them build their own house. Raise money. It could be a house they sell to have capital to start their business, or a house they can live in so their expenses are low and they can consider doing it again and again with what they've learned.
You really just have to do it. It's not rocket science. It takes practice, and there's a little bit of an art to being a good carpenter and a good builder, but in the end it's just reps.
If we can put together some incubators, show these young people that there's a market, show that we said yes in our backyards to these things, you might end up selling into California. You might end up selling into the Columbia River Gorge. We just sent one there. It was a really expensive delivery charge, but it made it possible.
Yeah. I find it fascinating because I've consumed plenty of tiny-home content and tried to nudge my wife and say, "Hey, this could be a path forward," and she said, "Oh, I need more space." So it's grappling with that.
But the reality is, if our regulations allow, we can also install two, and you can have a second one for the additional part of the family that has arrived, or additional children. I was struck by the idea of you racing an expecting mother and basically being like, "Yeah, I will get your project done."
I'm thinking of many building contractors who would break out in a cold sweat at the idea that they are not just on the clock, but literally the seconds really matter because this family needs a home and needs it to be ready. You have a pretty clear system that makes it work and still allows iteration, figuring out people's particular needs, what they want to see in their home, to be able to express themselves, and then the price is the price.
Yeah, the price is the price. It's not, "Oops, it's now twice as expensive."
Right. Yeah. I'd be curious about the social benefits of living in smaller homes. On the one hand, we don't want to overtorque that and say it's the perfect end to the problem of loneliness around us.
But I do think, and this is anecdotal from some of the stories I've heard, people are more likely to be out on the balcony - or, not on the balcony, out on the deck - or out in the yard. They've sort of used up their amount of time that they can be in the smaller living room, and so they're happy to go out and about and visit third places and things like that.
They can afford to be a regular at a local coffee shop because they're not paying for HVAC for thousands of square feet that they don't use. Can you touch on that part? That appeals to the romantic in me, and I also think it connects with a deeper urge that we have to build truly strong towns, where everybody knows your name and you have that sense of belonging.
I feel like this is a catalyst for that, and I'm sure you've picked up on some of those stories. Do you want to share a little bit on that?
Yeah, it's been amazing. In one sense, we're eating our own dog food. For the last year, while we've been completing our new shop and house here in Spartanburg, we've lived in a tiny house ourselves.
If we want to have people over, we've got a nice little breakfast bar. Gina and I can eat lunch there, and it's nice. But if we want to have a family dinner, if we want to have people over - and we're the kind of people who don't want to stop doing that for even a year - we have to do it on our deck. Our deck has room. We've had 12 people for dinner on our deck. It's not that hard.
To your point, people see us. Our neighbors see us. People wave to us. We've got the nice porch lights, and people see us having a party on our deck. Sometimes someone walking their dog says, "Hey, you had a party." So yeah, it does happen.
The other thing I think, especially about putting these in backyards, is there's a supportive relationship that is just easy at hand here, especially for aging people who want to age in place but don't have any options in their neighborhood. They don't want to leave their neighborhood or find a new church, or they happen to have family close by, but they're having a hard time taking care of the lawn.
We moved down here, so we don't have to shovel driveways anymore, but I still remember what that was like. You could go either way. You could put a nice accessible home in the backyard. We can design a tiny house that is completely accessible, with zero-clearance showers and all that kind of stuff.
People could move into their backyard into a new, modern, maintenance-free, right-sized house, just like the grandma in the backyard. Then the main house can stay and be rented out to a family, maybe someone who is happy to mow that lawn that you're unable or don't want to mow anymore.
I think there's relationships and interdependence. Getting more people together in our neighborhoods increases the chance that not only do we meet each other, but that we need each other. We realize that someone might have something we need, or someone might be able to help us with something.
So many of us, I think, are desperate to be of use. That's one of the reasons why I like doing this so much. It's such an honor and a privilege to create something that someone's going to call their home, and it makes me swell with pride and fulfillment because I'm of use to the person who's going to call this home. I think a lot of people are desperate for that feeling.
If we thicken up our neighborhoods a little bit, it's easy in an apartment building to never talk to neighbors, but it's kind of hard in an actual neighborhood. If you put a tiny house in, people are going to talk about it. People are going to talk to you. You take your dog for a walk, and they're going to talk to you about it. It increases the chance that we might find that we need each other and make those connections.
Using it as a way to house an aging parent, or bring someone who needs a little help but doesn't necessarily need to be in a full supportive home, can provide relationships and fulfillment that I think are priceless.
I think about this a lot. It's about whether we're willing to make room for others. I happen to be at a stage in life where I have a daughter who's about to graduate from college with a theater performance and production degree, and she desperately wants to go take her shot in New York City. We'll help her as much as we can, but it's not up to me whether or not there's room for her there.
I hope there's room. I hope someone has created a literal room for my daughter somewhere in that city. It makes me think about why I advocate so passionately here in Spartanburg for us to make room for someone else's daughter, someone else's son, or someone else's parent who is looking at Spartanburg and hoping to make a life here.
Spartanburg County is one of the top five fastest-growing counties in the country. There are a lot of jobs. It's a really special place, and people are looking for a place to call home here. I want to be part of making sure we create room for other people's families, just as much as I desperately hope someone's working so there is room for my daughters wherever they decide. I'd love for them to stay close to home, but I also realize there aren't the same opportunities here in Spartanburg for her passions as there are in other places.
Yeah. This connects so much because part of our work with Strong Towns is trying to make this possible everywhere, and actually seeing that yes, it is happening in Spartanburg. It's happening in more places. Anywhere that your homes can be shipped to, that's where it can also happen, so I definitely want to highlight that.
If people are interested in learning more, where, Andy, would you send them?
Our website is fireflytiny.com, and I'd love for you to check us out, if only to be inspired by what two people can do. We only build a handful of homes a year. We're not a big shop. That's not why I'm talking about this.
I also made a big commitment to stop talking back to the podcasts I listen to and actually get some thoughts out there. There's a YouTube channel that I just started called Start Smaller. I'll send you the link so you can put it in the show notes or whatever.
I just dropped a 20-plus-minute housing manifesto. It's all the thoughts a builder has to say after years of consuming interesting and inspiring thoughts from engineers, architects, planners, and the people who tend to put the podcasts out about housing. I'm inspired by it all, but I guess some of us builders need to put up or shut up. That's what I'm saying to myself.
Well, you've certainly managed to do that, and I think my instinct was right. I normally host our Bottom-Up Shorts, which are 15-minute quick profiles, and I knew there was no way I was going to be able to cap that discussion at 15 minutes. So I'm glad we've had more time. Andy, thank you for being generous with your time.
That passion to make room for others just stands out to me, and I'm sure it will with everyone. As we listen together, we've got so much work to do to normalize smaller increments that are normal to us if we go back and learn from our ancestors, but also grapple with how our present-day needs require the ability for us to make many smaller bets. When we do that, it certainly opens up a ton of great opportunities.
Thank you, Andy, for coming on Bottom Up Revolution today.
Thanks, Norm. This is fantastic. Loved it.
Good as always. Let's do it again. If you are listening, take note in your community. You might even ask, "Hey, is a tiny home something that can be legally built in my community?" It might be one of those things to check.
Share this podcast episode with leaders in your community to say, "This is what I'm actually asking for. I'm not asking for something strange, something obscure. I'm asking for that energy that Andy is describing, that readiness to say, let's make room for the people that are needed in our community."
When we do that, we will certainly all be stronger together. So thanks, everyone. Take care, and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.