Giving Compass' Take:

•  Tiny homes can now be a way toward homeownership and economic stability. In Detroit at least, a newly constructed tiny house will be affordable even if you only make $10,000 a year. 

• What are the downsides to this type of home ownership? Can they be built in places that are not rural?

• Read about where tiny homes stand in the context of affordable housing. 

If you live in Detroit and make only $10,000 a year, you still might be able to buy a newly constructed house. On two vacant blocks in the city’s northwest side, a new neighborhood of tiny houses was designed to help people living in poverty become homeowners.

Through a rent-to-own program, residents will pay $1 per square foot in rent each month. For a 250-square-foot house, for example, rent is $250, when a similar home in Detroit might normally cost twice as much. After a maximum of seven years, the house can be fully paid off.

“Poor people lack an asset,” says Faith Fowler, a pastor and the executive director of Cass Community Social Services, the local nonprofit that created the program.

They don’t have anything that they could use as collateral, they don’t have anything they can sell to climb the economic ladder, if you will. They don’t have anything to leave their children. We saw this as the start for poor people–people making as little as $10,000 a year can end up owning a home in seven years.

As the project provides housing, it’s also transforming a blighted neighborhood. “The neighbors are ecstatic,” says Fowler. “You get the sense that with these tiny, bright, beautiful new homes there’s a renaissance occurring in a small way in a neighborhood that hasn’t had much to celebrate for a long time.”

Read the full article about tiny houses by Adele Peters at Fast Company