Would you live in a ‘tiny home’? In the Florida Keys, leaders hope it’s a solution
Hurricane Irma destroyed more than 4,000 homes in the Florida Keys in September 2017, subtracting from the already slim affordable housing supply up and down the island chain.
Many of the homes that were wiped out or severely damaged by the Category 4 storm were mobile homes, and Monroe County officials don’t want to see them replaced with the same types of trailers that proved susceptible to Irma’s high winds and powerful storm surge.
That’s why in December 2018, the five-member Monroe County Commission approved a pilot program that looked for builders to supply very small homes that were code-compliant with newer wind and flood standards.
The county this week issued a permit for the first one of these “tiny homes,” which is expected to be delivered to Jenny Lane in Key Largo in about three weeks, said Kristen Livengood, Monroe’s public information officer.
The 400-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bathroom home will be on display for about a year so the county can gauge interest from potential buyers and renters. But the county expects it and similar homes to sell for around $85,000, Livengood said. The displayed homes are for display for the pilot program only. They are not for sale.
“They’ll be open for people to look at to see if they want them for their property,” she said.
The county owns the Jenny Lane lot, as well as three others throughout the county on which it hopes to build similar small houses. More than $656,490 was approved for the projects in 2018.
The county last year solicited companies to design and build different prototype small homes for the project. The Key Largo house was built by Cornerstone Tiny Homes, based in Longwood, Florida.
Another Florida company, RAS Engineering in Hallandale Beach, designed plans, and is in the permitting stage, for an elevated “container-type tiny home” that is expected to go up in Big Pine Key later this year, Livengood said.
Two other companies submitted plans to design and build similar homes for the county, but have since backed out, she said.
“The county may reissue a solicitation to build another tiny home project later this year,” Livengood said.
This story was originally published February 13, 2020 at 1:19 PM.
