Tiny houses could be making their way to Greater Sudbury

Sudbury City Councillors Deb McIntosh and Geoff McCausland want to know more about small and tiny houses.

The councillors are bringing a motion to Tuesday's city council meeting that will ask staff to evaluate options for encouraging the development of small and tiny houses, saying they'd like to see best practices and a working group created to look into these houses. 

Tiny houses have been growing in popularity in the last few years, there's more than a few TV shows and books about finding the perfect tiny house. And many young people are choosing to go the minimalist lifestyle with these smaller dwellings.

"As you see prices go up in the city and houses are becoming unattainable to certain groups of people as well, it's not just about affordable, it's about attainable as well — affordable to some people has a different definition," McIntosh said.

"Being able to have a home at the age of 20, or perhaps there are a lot of people who just don't want all the square footage, they do want to live a more simpler life and they do want a smaller home... so I think there is a market here in Greater Sudbury for this sort of thing," she said.

McIntosh also says tiny houses could be a good solution to help with the city's Housing and Homelessness Plan.

"The people who are living on the streets who need a place to sleep, there's the shelter and then we want to move from the shelter to another accommodation so you can move to a rental accommodation," she said. "Perhaps at some point you can move onto a smaller home toward home ownership yourself, so it's part of a continuum of providing homes."

Houses are considered tiny when they are smaller than 400 square feet and while many of these houses come on wheels, they can also be built on a foundation, often for a fraction of the cost of a regular house.

However, many municipalities in Ontario and across the country don't allow for tiny houses to be considered permanent homes. Municipalities have bylaws about housing and what is considered a house, such as they cannot be on wheels and that houses need to be a certain square footage. 

"The policies of the past few decades were focused on a bigger and more spread out footprint and we're starting to see a reversal in the trends and we need to create the tools necessary for developers to be able to build smaller homes in the shifting market that's happening," McCausland said. 

If the motion is passed, city staff will bring a report back to council in 2020. McCausland is hoping that it will lead to more housing opportunities.

"It's one step in a process, so it'll allow staff to go and look at what's necessary to make smaller and tiny homes a reality in Greater Sudbury," he said. "What I hope it leads to is developments that are more walkable, more focused on community and less focused on cars."