(The Hill) -- As the precipitous rise in housing costs over the past decade has put buying a traditional home out of reach for many Americans, a growing number are turning to nontraditional alternatives.
Some are repurposing old commercial buildings or buying land and prefabricated homes, while others are choosing to share homes with strangers to cut down on costs.
Here are three nontraditional ways Americans are housing themselves:
Tiny houses
When Elisa Boots and her husband, Rick, moved from New York City to Seattle 10 years ago, they arrived just as the city was experiencing the biggest population boom in its 174-year history. Thanks to a surge in tech jobs coupled with a growing city economy, Seattle gained about 60,000 new residents between 2010 and 2014, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
That boom increased the demand for housing, which in turn caused the price of homes to skyrocket in the city. Six months after they arrived, the couple discovered that they couldn’t afford to buy a home in Seattle or its suburbs.
They eventually began to investigate other options and came across the tiny house movement.
Tiny houses are exactly what they sound like: small dwellings typically no bigger than 500 square feet, often designed to look like miniature versions of suburban-style homes. They come with all the usual amenities included in larger homes — bathrooms, kitchens, bedrooms and sometimes even garages. Tiny houses can be built on a foundation or have wheels so their owners can pick up and go whenever they like.
After the Great Recession hit in 2008, Americans' interest in downsizing spiked, and tiny homes became more popular. By 2014, a small Texas town became the first self-proclaimed tiny-house-friendly town. Now, many states, including Kentucky, Missouri, Vermont and Maine, have become prime places to live in tiny homes either because they offer ample space to park them or because state zoning laws are amenable to them.
Tiny-home owners say mobility and energy efficiency are among the many benefits of their minuscule abodes. But one of the most appealing aspects of tiny homes is their affordability.
Tiny homes are usually far less expensive to purchase than traditional homes. The cost of a basic tiny home can range between $20,000 and $60,000, though prices can vary depending on building materials, size and add-ons, according to Bankrate.
Boots and her husband currently own two tiny houses, one for each of them, which they hitch up together wherever they go. Boots’ tiny home cost a bit more than the average — about $75,000 — and her husband’s custom-built tiny home ended up costing more than $100,000.
Still, the couple believe they are making off better financially than if they had purchased a traditional home.
Neither one has a mortgage on either home, and they pay about $650 a month each to rent the space they take up in the Oregon RV park on the slopes of Mount Hood, where they are currently stationed. They then pay about $100 apiece on top of that for utilities such as electricity, water and trash pickup.
Combined, they are paying well below the $1,795 average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the state, according to data from Zillow. Their housing costs are also well below the $2,000 monthly mortgage payment they expected to pay on a traditional home outside or Portland or Seattle.
“That has freed us up incredibly, to do a lot of the things that people dream about,” Boots said.
Barndominiums
Barndominiums, or barndos for short, are homes that look like barns on the outside but include all the usual amenities of a traditional house — bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen and a dining room — on the inside.
They have become more popular among Americans over the past decade, especially in rural parts of the country, enough so that a national survey found last year that 7 percent of single-family home builders had constructed a barndo in the past 12 months.
Definitions of a barndominium can vary, but there are two main types. The first is an existing barn converted into a home, while the second is a metal post-framed building built from the ground up to resemble a barn.
It is typically far more expensive to convert a barn into a home for people than it is to just build one from scratch, according to Paul Murphy, home planning adviser for the Frisco, Texas-based company My Barndo Plans, which has been designing and constructing barndominiums since 2023.
And a metal post-framed barndo is typically going to be less expensive to purchase than a traditional home, he said, because the materials to make it are usually cheaper.
Murphy said his company builds its barndominium frames and accompanying wall panels with red iron, which is less expensive per square foot than wood.
His company also ships out barndominium kits, or precut frames that can be used to construct the buildings more quickly.
“Having that time savings of getting the home up quicker is another benefit of a barndo,” Murphy said.
A typical barndominium will cost $35 to $45 per under-roof square foot, Tony Golladay, owner of the site BuildMax, which sells barndo kits, told House Beautiful. Meanwhile, building a traditional home can cost between $100 and $155 per square foot, according to Bankrate.
Co-housing
Co-housing is essentially a community of private homes where people share common spaces and facilities. Many such communities consist of a series of small individual homes, with some of the amenities of traditional home kitchens and bedrooms, located near a common house, which contains a large dining area, a large kitchen, meeting rooms and numerous guest rooms.
Co-housing is not a new idea: Architect Katie McCamant told NPR that she brought it to the U.S. in the early 1980s after studying housing in Denmark. Others in the co-housing world credit American architect and author Charles Durrett for bringing the concept to the U.S.
It has become more popular in the decades since, however, as Americans look for ways to fight off loneliness, find caregiving support and offset their carbon footprint. Now there are at least 165 co-housing communities in the U.S., with another 140 in formation, according to the Cohousing Association of the United States.
The model provides financial benefits as well — even if it doesn’t appear to initially.
Many co-housing communities are formed when a group of interested people come together to finance the development and construction of the community they want, according to Don Reinhardt, a member of Louisville Co-Housing.
“The cost of the common houses are usually offset adequately by the smaller footprint of the individual houses,” Reinhardt said.
Because of the shared spaces in a common house, co-housing residents can live in smaller individual homes.
“You don’t need to have room for lots of people to come over or your own guest room,” said Raines Cohen, a community organizer at the National Co-Housing Association who lives in a co-housing community in Berkeley, Calif.
Those smaller individual homes are cheaper to build, and they are less expensive to maintain and to heat and to cool, Cohen said.
But some of the biggest cost-saving measures of this model come not in the process of building the homes but from living within the community over time — many co-housers share resources and domestic labor. For example, community members may designate lawn-mowing responsibilities to one person or band together to pay for gardening services.
“Co-housing is very much about the long haul and what you can do together,” Reinhardt said.
This story is the third in a four-part series. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 4 here.