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Fresno Company Cashes In Big On Tiny Houses

Jeffrey Hess/KVPR
Nick Mosley (right) and his father Pat

Small could be the new big, at least when it comes to houses. The so-called "Tiny House Movement" has taken off in the last year with numerous shows and even a popular Netflix documentary about living in homes of just a few hundred square feet. For one local company, tiny homes are huge business.

"It has been hard to work because of how many people are coming in," Nick Mosley California Tiny House

At a time when many potential homeowners are going big, a small but growing number of people are downsizing into homes that are smaller than your average garage.

That is where Nick Mosley and his father Pat come in.

“I mean everything we build is under 350-square-feet and that is an entire house. So yeah, very tiny.” Mosley said.

In a cramped warehouse in central Fresno, the Mosleys and two other workers build custom ordered tiny houses from the ground…or more appropriately wheels…up.

Tiny houses are commonly built on trailer beds making them mobile. Nick offers three different sizes but all of the houses are small, less than 24 feet in length, and contain everything you would expect in a normal home all condensed into essentially one room.

“It’s basically one bedroom with a full house inside of it,”

Nick first heard about tiny houses last year. After attending a seminar, he and his dad decided to convert their kitchen and bath remodeling company into a fully dedicated tiny house construction company. And business, according to Nick, is booming.

“We just expanded an extra 2,000-square-feet so we can build two at once. The traffic, just in the last week…it has been hard to work because of how many people are coming in,” Mosley said.

The recent announcement of Fresno being one of the first cities in the country to officially allow tiny houses has driven attention even higher.

Nick says he never thought Fresno would be interested in tiny houses, but because of how the houses are constructed and since they are on wheels they can be shipped anywhere in the country.

“For most of our houses, you don’t have to have a special license to pull it. You can hook it up to a three-quarter ton truck and pull it to New York if you wanted to,” Mosley explained.

Nick shows off how he keeps a full counter despite needing a sink

Nick’s houses are highly customized, extremely polished and can cost more than $70,000, but kits are available on the internet that cost only a few thousand dollars if you want to try and build one yourself.

For all the publicity the tiny houses are pulling in, they remain a minuscule portion of the housing market. It’s hard to get an exact count since most municipalities do not permit the houses, so people build them in secret. The homes are restricted because tiny houses are on wheels and most building codes require a permanent foundation.

There is, however, a website run by Tiny House fans that attempts to track every tiny home in the country.It shows just a few in the valley, but it’s hardly comprehensive.

Americans overall appear to be continuing to prefer ever larger and larger homes. The average size of a new home in the U.S. jumped from 2,600-square-feet in 2014 to over 2,700-square-feet last year, according to industry research. And there are plenty of news stories interviewing people who tried a tiny house, only to move out after a short time.

"Because I really have discovered that the amount of stuff most people have, most of it is not adding to their happiness," Russell Jensen

Russell Jensen has lived in a tiny house in Selma for over a year.

“For me, it is my own space. It is quite. It is comfortable. It makes my life really simple.” Jensen said.

Jensen bought his Tiny Home, which is a converted semi-trailer, from another family for $10,000. It is currently parked in his sister’s backyard.

He says it’s perfect for his current situation. He is single with no kids and it forced him to downsize his life. That is what many people talk about when they consider a Tiny House. It is less about the actual house and more about how it make them feel.

But can see how it would have drawbacks for a bigger family.

“It is definitely not a solution for everybody. But the concept is a great eye-opener for everybody. Because I really have discovered that the amount of stuff most people have, most of it is not adding to their happiness level,” Jensen said.

And that is where the real question of the longevity of the tiny house movement comes into focus. Is this a fad or a real long-term solution for people turned off by renting or the cost of living in a large house?

Pat Mosley, the tiny house builder, says he is confident that these homes aren’t going away anytime soon.

“With the water shortage and housing costs going up,  I think this is a trend going to be a trend you are going to see in the future. So I think this is going to be around for at least another 20 years,” Mosley said.

And while tiny houses might not be for everyone, Mosley thinks that enough people will be interested for them to keep growing. If fact, he says he is already in the process of hiring more staff to meet the recent increase in demand.

Jeffrey Hess is a reporter and Morning Edition news host for Valley Public Radio. Jeffrey was born and raised in a small town in rural southeast Ohio. After graduating from Otterbein University in Columbus, Ohio with a communications degree, Jeffrey embarked on a radio career. After brief stops at stations in Ohio and Texas, and not so brief stops in Florida and Mississippi, Jeffrey and his new wife Shivon are happy to be part Valley Public Radio.