ASTM: Letter of Support for Tiny-Sized Standards

ASTM’s involvement is a giant step forward for tiny home dwellers, builders, and developers.

Over the past decade, the work product of tiny home owner builders, construction industry professionals, and manufacturers around the world have proven that quality, durability, affordability, and innovation can happily coexist in an inherently vehicular housing structure.

Since its inception, builders of Tiny Houses on Wheels have evolved innovative ideas into burgeoning best practices that may now be more fully formalized as standards that identify the unique aspects for the design, construction, transport, placement, certification, and use of Tiny Houses on Wheels as a truly mobile housing solution.

Having clearly defined and openly shared specifications for the unique aspects of THOWs allows an expansion within existing industrialized manufacturing channels around the world while more broadly benefiting the whole of humanity by unlocking the potential of this new form of flexible, affordable, resilient, and rapidly deployable relocatable residential dwelling unit.

Thanks to all for your continued efforts to cooperate and collaborate on behalf of those we serve with tiny homes as mobile housing solutions. I look forward to working alongside our tiny world peers, AEC professionals, and other parties interested in building upon the Tiny House on Wheels platform.

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ASTM Proposal Committee:

I wish to offer my support of ASTM International guiding the collaborative development of standards suitable for smaller sized permanent homes, relocatable residences, and tiny home related housing products. Here’s a quick summary of my thoughts and reasoning. Why standards for small and tiny homes?

We are in the midst of a housing crisis and yet special allowances must be made for the manufacture and use of smaller sized homes. There’s nothing innovative about small homes, and nothing different in their construction.

So, in this context, I think the difficulty in finding a ways-and-means for the allowance of a smaller home illustrates the need to shift our perspectives, to better understand changes in housing needs, and to support a broader range of low-cost home ownership options.

Further, and maybe more importantly, I believe the means to create a simple yet compliant shelter, to lower costs by reducing housing size, and to ingrain a solid sense of personal security and privacy are basic rights and privileges granted to all in an advanced society.

That smaller homes break the price-per-square profit model or have fallen out of fashion doesn’t make them inherently wrong, maybe just less popular. And so we fight for the right to “go tiny!”

Multi-use Plug-n-Play Specs

Compliant home design is akin to a big puzzle as it leverages multiple sources for requirements that ultimately define site-specific design criteria.

As one who already references multiple sources for guidance, I believe a strategically segmented and multifaceted series of standards will best address small housing needs well beyond what fits within a tiny-sized footprint, or merely suits one form of manufacture, or exclusively supports a more singular field of special interest.

Such standards, when issued by an objective multidisciplinary body like ASTM, could be most suitably applied across various use case scenarios; for refining housing classifications; via multiple membership organizations; as output through many manufacturing methodologies; in untold administrative and regulatory scenarios. Housing is changing; we must adapt.

Many of the manufacturers with whom I’ve worked produce Recreational Vehicles, Recreational Park Trailers, and Off-Site Modular Constructs. For most it seems that meeting specifications is as simple as having a trusted source for cited standards. ASTM seems an appropriate solution.

A Means of Proof and Approval

Of course for all planning and approval scenarios, it is necessary to illustrate adherence to specific criteria and provide proofs of compliance. While conventional housing has clear pathways for average size homebuilding, tiny-sized homes on foundations often face great opposition. And it’s harder still to garner authorized use of a fully compliant relocatable residence as they were built (to date) as an unclassified “tiny houses on wheels.”

In discussions with building officials, fire marshals, and state/municipal housing authorities, push-back usually seems rightfully focused on bridging concerns for safety and liability with a means of compliance. I’ve witnessed that where proper precedent exists, open minded authorities and other interested parties are apt to adopt changes that obviously enhance or appropriately append existing standards.

Of course, new practices are harder to implement, and I feel it’s important to remember that all specifications were at one time an amalgam of best practices that fought to prove themselves worthy of standardization. Change is tough, but often good, especially when what were once advanced new products and practices settle in and become more “usual and customary.”

For example, with tiny houses on wheels, what were once the most typical “alternative methods” are now quite conventional best practice. Once published as specifications, these standards become the basis of purpose-driven media like industry specific summaries of minimum requirements, role-based standard sets (e.g. design, chassis, frame fastening, ground anchoring, inspection, and etc.), professional certification criteria, in-depth seminars, video tutorials, how-to guides, workbooks, and much more.

Tiny Standards: Bigger than Any One of Us

It looks like a global cadre of designers, builders, manufacturers, and component suppliers are ready to bring standards-ready best practices into the formal development process.

To me, the pledges of support and participation from invested organizations and other interested parties illustrate a broadly held desire to finally solve the small-and-tiny housing conundrum through the development of specifications for standardized components, assemblies, methods, and other criteria that may be used to meet multiple compliance requirements.

I hope ASTM accepts its proposed role as an objective party to guide the process and help ensure equilibrium during the development of standards suitable for small and tiny homes.

Thank you for your consideration and leadership.

IMAGE: Courtesy of ASTM website