Long Island Tiny Homes: The Unattainable Alternative
By Paige Clarke
In March 2016, Center Moriches resident Rena Dalen logged into Facebook with an idea - to create a Facebook group that would kickstart the first tiny house community on Long Island. The low costs and creative designs of tiny homes had always been appealing to her, especially after she and her three children had to move in with her parents to stay financially stable.
Today, nearly 900 Long Islanders have joined Dalen’s Facebook group, called “Long Island Tiny Homes.” Most of them are in similar situations like Dalen’s - struggling to afford to live on Long Island and looking for a way to live in a tiny home.
However, tiny homes are illegal to live in on Long Island. Each town and village has its own building and zoning codes, and the average tiny home is smaller than their regulations. Tiny homes range from 400 to 600 square feet in size, according to Ken Pond, owner of Connecticut tiny house building company Craft & Sprout.
“I wanted to find like-minded people who could possibly work together to make tiny homes on Long Island legal in the future,” Dalen said.
The tiny house movement has grown exponentially across the country over the last several years. Shows like A&E’s “Tiny House Nation” and HGTV’s “Tiny House, Big Living” brought the trend to TV screens in 2014, and sales of tiny homes skyrocketed 67% three years later.
In 2019, over 10,000 tiny homes had popped up across the country, according to iProperty Management, a real estate data analysis site.
A couple gets a first look at their new tiny home on Tiny House Nation.
The movement also serves as a possible answer for those who want to live on Long Island but are unable to afford the hike in the cost of living. The Multiple Listing Service, a real estate data collector for Long Island, reports that housing prices on Long Island are growing twice as fast as incomes. Long Island has some of the most expensive property taxes in the country, ranging from $9,000 to $11,000, according to ATTOM Data Solutions, a national property database. The national average property tax is $3,561, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The U.S. Census Bureau also reports that more people are leaving New York than any other state. Long Island real estate expert Glen Hagen is concerned with the mounting financial difficulties for residents. “[There is] a multitude of factors, but first and foremost is the lack of wage growth and higher taxes,” he said.
Click on the graph to learn more about Long Island's growing property taxes over time.
Michael Piterniak, a member of the Facebook group who is from Shirley in Suffolk County, lives in a shared house with only one room to himself.
“At this rate, New York is way too expensive to stay!” he said. “From the looks of it our only options are to hide [a tiny home] and hope we don't get caught. My next idea, if I don't find someone to move in with, is probably to move somewhere with a bit less taxes and more freedom to build on property. New Hampshire looks promising.”
Another member, Andrea McConnell, also from Shirley, is a single mother who has hopped from one unaffordable apartment to the next and is ready to leave Long Island when her daughters go to college. The cheapest apartment she could find cost her $1,200 a month.
“Right now I am stuck paying high rent, just getting by and not being able to travel and do things I want because it's so expensive to live here,” she said. “[Tiny houses] would mean affordable housing for so many on an overtaxed and expensive Long Island. Maybe people wouldn’t leave New York if this was possible.”
As single-income residents, both McConnell and Piterniak find the only way to afford apartments here is to pool incomes together with a roommate or partner.
“Single with one paycheck is not cutting it these days,” Piterniak said. “I have a few sets of friends who are couples who all moved into apartments together, and were only able to do so since they share the financial load.”
The family of Guadalupe Rodrigues, another member of the Facebook group, has lived on the island for generations. Rodrigues nearly had to leave because of high housing costs, but instead moved in with her niece in Middle Island, Suffolk County. At 60 years old, Rodrigues knows she is unable to retire on the island. Her only options are to stay and struggle, or leave.
“It feels like I’m being kicked out of my home,” she said.
Regulations in towns and villages across Long Island put limitations on the size of houses and plots.
In some towns, tiny houses are only allowed on properties temporarily if they are on wheels and registered as an RV, camper or mobile home.
“Long Island Tiny Homes” group member and Suffolk County resident Sharon Strub-McIntyre is aware of the amount of obstacles involved. She calls Long Island the “land of no.”
In Huntington, mobile homes are prohibited and single-story houses must be no smaller than 800 feet with at least three rooms. Two-story homes can be 600 feet in size but must have another 400 square feet on the second floor with a full seven feet of headroom. Tiny homes are usually built with only one floor and a loft area as a bedroom, which does not contain the required headroom for a two-story home in Huntington.
“If one was proposing to make a tiny home a permanent structure and they already have a dwelling on the lot, it would be a zoning violation because you’re not permitted to have more than one dwelling on a particular lot,” Huntington Public Information Officer Lauren Lembo said.
The minimum size of a plot of land in the village of Patchogue is 10,000 square feet, and single family houses must be at least 800 square feet. On top of that, “the Planning and Architectural Review Board would weigh in with whether a home would fit in with the ‘character’ of the neighborhood,” according to Patchogue Planning & Zoning Coordinator Carol Giglio.
In Riverhead, single-family dwellings must have a minimum of 1,500 square feet of livable space. The town allows mobile homes, but at a maximum of 8 feet in width and 35 feet in length, smaller than the square footage of an average tiny home. Mobile homes are allowed in Oyster Bay only as temporary residences. Plots of land in Oyster Bay must be no smaller than 6,000 square feet.
Click on the map to find out more about Long Island towns' various housing regulations.
Timothy Zike has been the deputy commissioner of the Oyster Bay building department for 15 years. Throughout his time in the department, he said that the standard buyer will usually look to build as much as they can on a plot of land. The zoning regulations tend to cater to those standard buyers, buyers with enough money to build as much as a plot allows rather than look for the most affordable housing.
“People are going to build the biggest house they can and get the most out of it,” he said.
But the idea behind tiny homes is to be comfortable with a small amount of space for a low cost, and buying a large plot of land might be financially impossible.
The town of Brookhaven requires single-family houses to be no smaller than 1,000 square feet. Brookhaven also has nine separate residential districts that have their own specific codes within the town. Shirley, Middle Island and Center Moriches are located in Brookhaven, where Dalen, McConnell, Piterniak and Rodrigues have struggled under the high costs and various building codes that prevent tiny homes.
Setauket resident Tim Tedesco had built and lived in a tiny house registered as an RV on his friend’s property in Stony Brook, a village in Brookhaven. But after being faced with summonses and fines for violating zoning laws, he found that building a tiny home on Long Island for financial reasons is unrealistic.
“It would make sense to build a tiny home if you had a place to put it for free or cheap,” he said.
Cassone Trailer and Container Company, in Ronkonkoma, added tiny homes to their product line in 2016 by officially registering them as RVs. The company mainly sells and rents trailers but detected a growing demand for tiny homes as potential buyers began requesting them from as far away as California. The company has two models available, and sells them for nearly $50,000.
Cassone marketing assistant Lisa Giosi said many residents fail to understand that tiny homes are unwelcome in many towns on Long Island, and as a result they rarely go through with the purchase.
“People don’t do the extensive research and know that it’s down to every single town to determine the legality of a tiny home,” she said.
In other parts of the country, tiny homes have been legalized and implemented in cities as low-cost housing alternatives. This concept was first introduced to residents in Portland, Oregon over twenty years ago, in 1997.
The city established tiny homes as Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), or a second dwelling unit created on a residential lot, and amended regulations to allow homeowners to build them without special permits, Alyssa Davis wrote in a journal for the Kennedy School Review in 2018.
The Portland City government defines ADUs as “a second dwelling unit created on a lot with a house, attached house or manufactured home. The second unit is created auxiliary to, and is smaller than, the main dwelling.”
These new regulations proved to be successful. “In 2000, the city issued just 24 new permits for ADU construction,” Davis reported. “By 2016, that number had jumped to 615, a 2,463 percent increase. This created a big financial incentive for homeowners to construct ADUs.” Santa Cruz followed in 2003. The city waived development fees for ADUs on lower-income households and provided loans for residents with low interest rates.
Click here to view time-lapse footage of a tiny home being build from the ground up.
Interest in tiny homes increased significantly after the Great Recession of 2008 when foreclosure filings increased more than 81 percent, according to RealtyTrac, a real estate information company.
Fewer homeowners could pay mortgages on their houses and more were looking to downsize and even shift to tiny homes to avoid foreclosures and high payments.
By 2018, 53 percent of Americans were willing to consider living in a tiny home, according to a poll by the National Association of Home Builders.
Long Island’s housing crisis dates back even further than 2008, all the way to the 1980s when the amount of affordable homes on Long Island started to decline. The median price of a home rose 80 percent in Nassau County and 100 percent in Suffolk from 1980 to 1984, according to the National Association of Realtors.
By 1987, the average price of a home shot up to $150,000. “We have reached a stage on Long Island where the average Long Islander can no longer afford to buy the average-price house in Nassau or Suffolk,” chairman of the housing committee of the Long Island Association Robert McMillan told The New York Times in 1987. In the article he stressed how legitimizing two-family homes and revamping zoning regulations could allow for more affordable housing.
McMillan’s idea was similar to Levittown’s historical zoning amendments in 1948. The town allowed smaller plots of land and revamped its zoning regulations for cheaper living as families were regrouping after World War I. Smaller houses were being built in droves and basements were removed from the building code requirements. Over time, the Nassau County town became known as a quintessential middle-income family suburb.
Jack Schnirman is the comptroller, or fiscal watchdog, for Nassau County. “If the trend in zoning amendments continues similar to Levittown,” he said, “it’s possible that tiny homes may be allowed in the future.”
Today, Nassau County residents earning the county’s average annual wage of $60,775 would need to spend more than half of their incomes to buy a home at the median price of $500,000, according to the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island. The median home price in Suffolk is $411,900. A studio apartment is $1,200 a month on average.
Click here to view how Detroit included tiny homes in their area for low income residents.
Christina DeFalco, manager of public relations and communication programs at the Long Island Board of Realtors, says the median home price for Long Island increased 6 percent within the last year.
For Rena Dalen and many others, right now the only way to afford a place of their own is to leave Long Island, where they and their families call home.
“I could leave the island and own a home, but I want to stay,” Dalen said. “My entire family is here. I feel like a tiny home would allow me home ownership and the ability to stay on Long Island where my family has been for generations.”