In the past two years, Brown County building inspector Lonnie Farlee has fielded calls from people wanting to build homes or vacation rentals out of shipping containers or straw bales, in yurts and in trees.

But more often, the unusual type of dwelling people are asking about isn’t all that unusual. It’s just small.

Brown County’s first residents lived in “tiny homes.” They called them log cabins.

Today’s tiny homes are generally between 100 and 400 square feet. Sometimes, they’re built on tow-behind trailers to make them mobile.

Right now, they’re not legal in Brown County.

That’s what real estate agent Tom Vornholt tells potential clients who call him specifically wanting a tiny home. Then, he tells them to call Farlee to learn the rules that make that so.

Those rules are going to be discussed at a public forum in December.

Since June, the Brown County Area Plan Commission has been talking off and on about whether to change a range of development standards that affect the size of a home and even the size of the land it sits on.

“One of the things we’re trying to work on with our ordinances is to allow starter family homes to be constructed, make it so they don’t have to have a five-acre lot, don’t have to have a minimum size. That’s why we were looking into the tiny home thing, to make it possible for those to happen,” said APC member Deborah Bartes.

Across the country, tiny homes have been marketed as a possible solution to homelessness, high housing costs, “millennial” housing and even senior living.

Tiny homes also are referred to as guest houses, studios, granny flats or granny pods, or “park models” if arranged in a commercial campground-type setting, said Planning Director Chris Ritzmann.

APC members haven’t made up their minds about whether or not allowing tiny homes would be an all-around good thing for Brown County. Questions were asked at the board’s October meeting about their effect on surrounding homes’ property values, their resale value, and whether allowing or encouraging them is going to have a positive effect on the community’s economy and school enrollment.

That’s why they want public input.

“The only thing we have decided on is we don’t want to hurt somebody’s property value just because we want to put these in,” APC President Dave Harden said.

Building rules

When Farlee gets calls about tiny homes, he explains the state’s and the county’s minimum code standards. He shared those with the APC in October.

Under state and local codes, there are separate standards for commercial developments — like tiny or “micro-apartments” — and for single-family residential construction, he said.

Under state rules, neither commercial nor residential codes require that a dwelling be of a total minimum square footage, he said. But both commercial and residential codes require that certain rooms be at least a certain size, he said.

One “habitable room” — a room that is not a bathroom or a closet — has to be at least 120 square feet, and a second habitable room has to be at least 70 square feet, he said. There are also minimums on ceiling height, which need to be considered if a loft is going to be a habitable room, such as a bedroom.

In a commercial development, like an apartment complex, there are additional rules for square footage based on how many people will live there, he said. The unit has to have at least 220 square feet of floor area and an additional 100 square feet for each additional occupant over two people, he said.

Unlike the state, Brown County and Nashville do set a minimum size for a home.

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In the county, the minimum is 600 square feet if it’s along a county road and zoned R2 (residential), or on property zoned LR (lake residence), FR (forest reserve) or GB (general business). Along a state highway, it’s 900 square feet for a one-story home or 800 square feet of ground space if it’s a two-story home.

In Nashville town limits, the smallest a house can be in a residential district is 800 square feet if it’s one story, or 600 square feet of ground space if it’s a two-story. In business districts in Nashville, it can be as small as 600 square feet whether it’s one or two stories.

Screened porches, decks and lofts don’t count toward those minimums, Farlee said.

Some APC members — and a few members of the audience in past meetings — have said they don’t know if it’s their place to tell people how “small” they can live.

“I lived here in 1977 … in less than 600 square feet, and it was an opportunity for me and 30 or 40 other young guys … who wanted to live in Brown County,” said APC member Russ Herndon, calling smaller living “the future.”

There are older homes in Nashville that are smaller than the minimums, said Nashville Town Manager/Economic Development Director Scott Rudd at the June meeting. “There’s this circle of things happening here, and I think if you go back 100 years, you’ll see a lot of these tiny-looking homes being built. It was what they could afford,” he said.

“The original pioneer lived in a tiny home,” added county council member Keith Baker.

Location, location

Another idea the APC could consider is changing minimum standards to allow micro-apartments, which would be like regular apartments only smaller, said Planning Director Chris Ritzmann. Those might not require zoning changes, she said.

But possibly a bigger issue than the size of houses is the size and location of lots.

Brown County rules say that for any home along a county road or state highway, the lot has to be at least 2 acres. On land zoned forest reserve, abutting a private road or no road, the lot has to be at least 5 acres. On land zoned general business or lake residence only a half-acre is required.

Lots of less than 5 acres can be created and built on, but they first need to go before the APC to be subdivided. The APC hears one or two of those requests every month, Herndon said.

Harden and Herndon said the 5-acre minimum in particular make it expensive for a family to move to Brown County and build a house.

Another factor that governs where homes of any size are put is sewage disposal, Farlee said.

Whether a person wants to put a tiny house in their back yard for their mother-in-law to live in, or put it on a 10-acre lot in the middle of nowhere, that house has to be hooked up to either a septic system or a sewer.

There are very limited places in the county where sewers are available — Nashville, Gnaw Bone and Helmsburg, so far.

In other areas, the smallest septic system allowed is one that will serve a two-bedroom house.

Composting or incinerating toilets — which are popular in mobile tiny-house designs — are not permitted under current county rules. The county’s septic ordinance is in the process of being rewritten, but composting and incinerating toilets are not in the proposed changes.

Ritzmann said another option for discussion is placing tiny homes in “planned unit developments,” or PUDs. That would allow them to be hooked into a shared septic system.

Harden said he’s more comfortable with the idea of putting tiny homes in clusters rather than on individual properties.

“I feel, just me personally, that we’re going to have to come up with areas. … Just anywhere, I’m a little hesitant on that,” he said.

What the future is?

Harden was one of the people who had questions for Vornholt about tiny homes’ effect on property values.

Vornholt said that would depend somewhat on how the buyer of a traditional home would feel about a tiny home or cluster of tiny homes being nearby. With a high-dollar home, there would probably be some drop in value, he said.

But chances are, any “million-dollar” home would be built on a large piece of property and away from any other neighboring home, Ritzmann said.

“You can drive anywhere in southern Indiana and see things that are worse than a tiny home,” Herndon said.

APC member Carol Bowden said she knows of people who live in RVs, which she called “basically a tiny home on wheels.” One of the things she’s particularly concerned about is making sure any new development standards don’t allow people to live in a garden shed. The size of the home they live in should be up to them, she said.

“If that’s what this generation is looking for, we need to figure that out,” she said.

“It’s what the future is,” Bartes added.

Brown County Redevelopment Commission member Tim Clark wasn’t so sure. He’s been urging county and town boards to use economic data to guide their decisions, like whether a proposal is going to spur population growth, school enrollment growth or job creation.

He said it doesn’t hurt to have a range of housing options, but he doesn’t see tiny homes making a positive impact on those economic markers.

“Who’s going to buy them?” he asked.

“It’s the future for a market segment, but not an entire market. … That’s depressing; that’s not progress.”

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WHAT: Brown County Area Plan Commission public hearing about tiny home development standards

WHEN: 6 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 19

WHERE: County Office Building on East Gould Street, second-floor Salmon Room

CAN’T GO? Written comments and phone calls can be directed to the Brown County planning office, Planning Director Chris Ritzmann, at 812-988-5490 or [email protected]

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