Jason Dietz at work on an eco-friendly ‘tiny house’ for Felton’s Molecule Tiny Homes.
The West, being the domain of cowboys, does not always take kindly to tiny houses, the little elf-sized cottages that in recent years have become the calling card of ludicrously sustainable living. While the Tiny House movement, as it is called, rejects the standard American home (which NPR reported has more than doubled in size since the 1950s), the wee homes’ cuteness factor has always overwhelmed any badassery they may represent.
Until now.
Meet Jason Dietz, owner of Felton-based Molecule Tiny Homes. A tiny home builder for three years, Dietz possesses no kind of building license, just a certificate for classic car restoration and “a lot of experience creating things and engineering things.” Indeed, he was once featured in the Bay Area Maker Faire for his 5-foot-tall neon UFO lamps, each filled with 10 gallons of bubbling water and a cow figurine, being “abducted” into a UFO perched at the top.
With six tiny homes under his belt, including one for the CEO of software giant Intuit, Dietz follows no housing code or government determined safety standards.
“I just kind of do things off the cuff, as it were,” he says.
So how does he pull it off? Well, to start with, tiny homes are a completely unregulated industry.
“I mean, of course you want to build things to a certain standard just for safety purposes,” says Dietz, furrowing his brow, “but as far as permitting and regulating and things like that go, there’s really just nothing.”
In Santa Cruz, our notoriously strict building code (which requires, among other things, that a single family home with two bedrooms have three parking spaces) turns some people off to the idea of owning their own home, says Dietz. Tiny homes provide a way around that.
A tiny house can be placed on any lot, even one too small to be zoned for housing, because its size puts them into a gray area when it comes to pinpointing what exactly the structure is. “It’s not really an RV,” says Dietz. “It’s not really a mobile home. It’s not a park model.”
It is basically a Wild West out there for tiny houses. And the benefits go beyond using fewer resources and taking up less space. Tiny home owners pay no property tax—just a laughable $38 a year to register their home with the DMV as a load on a trailer. And like the tiny baby Phoenix rising from the ashes of the subprime mortgage crisis, tiny homes have stellar resale value.
Builders, meanwhile, are reveling in the opportunity to create whatever kinds of structures pop into their imaginations.
“You can get away with a lot,” says Dietz, whose edgiest creation to date is a staircase that doubles as a dresser, each step pulling out into a full drawer. While he takes great pains to make sure his homes are safe, describing things like “insulated wire” and “hurricane straps,” Dietz knows not all builders are as responsible.
“Some people are doing things that are pretty shoddy, dangerous looking,” he says.
Because of this, Dietz knows the wild rumpus cannot last forever.
“I mean, eventually something down the road somebody will have an accident or something, and the authority’s gonna come and say, nope you can’t do that at all. Or it has to be built to these guidelines. Then it becomes regulated.”
