Tiny House Community in RePurposed Parking Structure

by Phillip DeNise
(GA)

A modern approach to alternative senior housing can involve reducing the size of your living space. Google my title text to find more info on the tiny house; an image search can be more fun.

Seniors who own a home that has become an albatross around their neck should give serious consideration to this approach, or perhaps investigate home sharing (lots of this stuff can be found on the WWW, but BEWARE). The problem with almost every website you may encounter (in your quest for your own tiny house) is that they are primarily commercial ones that are marketing cheaply produced units at much inflated prices to seniors who have the assets to be qualified customers/victims. Seniors struggling financially will find it very difficult to find doable solutions online. However, time is your friend; keep looking.

What really makes the concept work better is clustering the tiny units about such shared facilities as community kitchens, community gardens & common areas for recreational activities.

Locate this imaginary village in an area where the cost-of-living is low, the climate is mild & there are lots of nearby amusements to rightfully award the senior's village with the coveted appelation of RESORT DESTINATION. Were it not for this last selling-point, Albany, Georgia would be ideal for this kind of development.

Many of America's cities & towns, where real estate is distressed, abandoned housing, especially where there is clustering, could make developing low-cost housing for seniors attractive to developers or the municipalities themselves. Atlanta's Cabbage Town development did very well; very small mill-village shotgun-type houses were renovated and the mill itself reclaimed for shopping and eating establishments.

The latest idea to emerge as a viable means of green development in many urban settings involves the repurposing of no longer needed parking structures. Tiny units (just 135 sq ft) sit in just one parking space, but it is the common areas devoted to gardening and communal recreation that make living alone in such a confined space tolerable. They are already designing double-wide units for more luxurious privacy.

LEARN MORE: SCADpads are tiny—135 square feet, or the size of the average parking spot. That’s not an arbitrary number; the project is an elaborate thought exercise that addresses three demographic trends: Urban areas are dotted with under-used parking structures; a lot of people—especially those in their twenties and thirties—want to live in cities but can’t afford to; and the number of single households is surging. Why not repurpose parking decks to contain millennial-friendly micro apartments?