“McMansion of Micro-Houses” Debuts

A micro-home debuted in town, a possible solution to New Haven’s pressing absence of affordable housing.

The three-floor, 900-square-foot ski chalet-looking home on a fine elegantly landscaped setback on Scranton Street in West River received generally rave reviews at the debut Thursday afternoon. It also drew a critique: That it’s still too large, too expensive, not a cool enough interior or replicable enough, yet a fine experiment and first step.

That critique came from the guy whose idea the house was. He called it the ​“McMansion of micro-houses.”

Thach Pham, one of the financial backers (pictured with NeighborWorks New Horizons Executive Director Seila Mosquera), made the humorous but earnest pronouncement about 179 Scranton St. at a festive opening Thursday afternoon.

A tour of the house drew 150 fans and neighbors to see what might be the beginning of a solution, or at least one solution in town, for affordable housing for young first-time buyers, empty-nesters, environmentally minded less-is-more folks, or all three categories of shelter seekers.

The house was designed and built by first-year Yale School of Architecture students such as Katie Stege (pictured with her teacher Avi Forman) as part of their required coursework. The work is done under the Jim Vlock First-Year Building Project.

(Click here for a previous story how the Yale architecture students and faculty team up with community officials and organizations to build socially responsible housing, often on vacant or sliver lots, in hard hit neighborhoods. And click here for how last year’s project overcame a crisis after an elderly architecture professor was mugged on the building site on Lilac Street in Newhallville.)

Thursday’s culminating event on Scranton Street was all joy, fun, and good feeling. It included the participation of neighbors, who had allowed video cameras to be placed in the windows overlooking what had been a vacant lot to record the building activity over this past summer.

One of those neighbors, Barbara Payne (pictured at the top of the story), pronounced the finished product ​“amazing.” She said she and her daughter were contemplating exploring whether they might offer to buy the house, which has just gone on the market through a realtor retained by Mosquera.

The project came about when Pham, a recently retired entrepreneur, determined to use some of the resources from companies he has sold to help address the problem of New Haven’s school drop-outs.

He asked Erik Johnson, who runs city government’s neighborhood anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), for how he could help employ more of the city’s many high school drop-outs in the construction trade.

Johnson instead told him, ​“What you really want is to build smaller, more affordable homes,” Pham recalled. Johnson urged him to get in on the growing national trend of micro or tiny houses. 

Johnson led Pham to NeighborWorks New Horizons and to the Yale School of Architecture. Pham said Mosquera was intrigued and asked whether such a tiny house might be too risky ultimately to sell. ​“My solution: I’ll supply the money for the construction,” said Pham.

When the architecture faculty saw a challenge for its students in the idea, the project was launched.

The asking price is $155,000, said Mosquera, whose NeighborWorks New Horizons affordable housing not-for-profit teamed up with Pham to fund the construction.

The value of the labor of 50 or so Yale students and large amounts of contributed landscaping, appliances, bathroom fixtures, wood, and concrete all adds $100,000 or so more to the true cost of building the house, Pham estimated.

That gap was made up for in a subsidy provided through LCI. LCI also sold the lot to the developers for $1,000.

All those arrangements made it possible for the house, which materialized from hole in the ground to framed structure in just one month this summer, to serve as an experiment in learning for the students, for the city and socially responsible not-for-profits like Mosquera’s, and for entrepreneurs like Pham.

The house is divided into two units for an owner and a tenant. The idea is for the first and second floors, comprising about 550 square feet each, to be owner occupied, and the the third floor to be for a tenant.

The 350-square foot rental unit is accessed from an exterior stairway built by the students with concrete and wire mesh railing barrier reminiscent of the work of pioneering architect Louis Kahn.

Attendees at Thursday’s unveiling praised the hard, bright, and shiny bamboo flooring and interior steps, the floor-to-ceiling cubbyholes and storage units, the high open windows, and the shallow frost-protected, energy efficient foundation.

That choice allowed the house to be built on a slab at the back of the lot. and permitted the original six-foot deep foundation to be replaced (saving expensive excavation costs) with landscaping and a maple tree that invite neighbors and a sense of community, said Adam Hopfner, the overall director of the project for architecture school.

There is also a rather cool angled wall on the third-floor tenant unit (pictured) — although you can hit your head if you’re not careful. The angled wall rising to the roof line, instead of a straight wall, permitted the design to comply with zoning codes and to rise to three livable stories, said Forman.

In that aesthetically pleasing angle Pham saw a practical problem in the house if it were to be a prototype. He originally conceived of a house that was cube-like, all 90-degree angles, which would make it easy to replicate, and perhaps even manufacture in New Haven.

“It’s beautiful, but not what I’m looking for. I call it the McMansion of micros. It’s too big. It needs to be smaller, say, two thirds to one half [of what has been built], and replicate-able. It also lacks interior innovation, flexible space, beds that turn into desks [for example]. Once we have the perfect micro house — cool, cheap, attractive, energy efficient, easy to build, that’s when we build a factory in New Haven, ship these units all over. This is a first step. We learned a lot doing this.”

Forman tended to agree. He said you don’t save all that much money on reducing the floor space. The real costs in a house are items such as the kitchens and bathrooms, and you need those regardless of square footage.

Mosquera said she is in for the long haul. If she were single, she’d consider living in such a house, she added. She also pointed out that the house has been smartly designed so that with the removal of one wall or so, it can easily be converted into a single-family house. She said last week was the first showing of the house; she wasn’t sure if any potential buyers emerged from that initial effort.

Barbara Payne said she considered living in the house with her daughter, but found a different problem: ​“We thought about it, but we can’t. We could have tried if it was handicapped” accessible.