An intentional community of a dozen small homes, a shared shop, a garden, and a community building — twenty-five minutes southeast of Austin, on land that's already in the family.
Austin priced out the people who built it. The artists, the engineers, the small-shop welders, the open-source maintainers, the cooks, the teachers. The folks who showed up early and made the city worth showing up to.
Small Home Village is a workable answer: a dozen or so small homes on a single parcel near Cedar Creek, with the costs and the freedoms of a tiny-house lifestyle plus the resilience of a real community — shared shop, shared garden, shared kitchen, shared everything you don't need to own privately to live well.
We are taking the design language and the sixteen years of community-building from Tiny Hacker House, the live/work playbook proven at Alpine Village in Del Valle, and pairing it with a parcel that's already in the family and a server that already runs a hundred and twenty websites. We're not asking permission to start. We're starting.
Eight to fifteen permanent small homes, 200–800 sq ft each, on slab or pier foundations. Built or sited from container-grade or steel-framed modules. Tiny Hacker House has been proving these out since 2010.
One shared building with a real kitchen, a long table, a movie wall, a guest room, and the wifi you can hear yourself think on. The thing that makes the village a village.
A real shared shop — woodworking, welding, electronics, a 10 ft 3D printer (Tiny Hacker House already has one), a soldering bench. Skills get shared. Tools get used. Nobody owns a band saw they touch twice a year.
Raised beds, fruit trees, a tool shed, a compost system, and the rare Texas summer beauty of shared shade. Run by whoever wants to run it. Feeds whoever needs feeding.
Bluebonnet Electric on the meter. Solar on every roof we can fit it on. Septic done right, water through the local supply corporation, and a backup well for the inevitable Texas grid weekend.
A short, plain-language written agreement that says what's shared, what's private, what you commit to as a resident, and how decisions get made. The thing every co-op and HOA wishes it had written down twenty years earlier.
You can't fix Austin's housing crisis. You can build one good place.
The target region is Cedar Creek, Bastrop County — about twenty-five minutes southeast of central Austin on Hwy 71, between the city and the airport. The specific build parcel is still being chosen.
Bastrop County unincorporated land has the friendliest posture in the metro for the kind of multi-dwelling small-home cluster the village requires. Septic permits go through the County's On-Site Sewage Facility program. Water comes from Aqua Water Supply Corporation or local wells. Electric is Bluebonnet. Internet is gigabit cable through Spectrum, plus three fixed-wireless providers as backup.
We're actively scoring nine candidate parcels in Bastrop and Travis counties — see the JV's private parcel-scoring tool at land.wholetech.com for the live shortlist. We're also exploring parcels adjacent to the JV's existing Cedar Creek footprint, where two nearby properties already demonstrate the model works in this specific spot.
The Cedar Creek area isn't a hunch. Two parcels within the JV's existing footprint already demonstrate that the small-home model produces income, attracts residents, and works under Bastrop County's permitting posture.
The owner-occupied model. One JV partner has lived on a Cedar Creek parcel for years — same county, same soil, same drive to Austin, same utility providers. That property runs as a working residential and short-term-rental hybrid: a primary residence plus rental units on the same parcel, under the same county permits we'll use for the village. It's the working live-in version of what we want to build at scale.
The scaled-up precedent. A second adjacent parcel — originally acquired in this area for roughly $44,000 a few years ago — has since been built out with a primary house, Airbnbs, RVs, and trailers operating as short-term rentals. Today that parcel is valued at over $1,000,000 and generates significant monthly revenue. Same county. Same permitting framework. Same drive time. Same exact thesis as Small Home Village, executed by a different owner, vindicated by the market.
The Small Home Village JV takes that proven small-home / multi-unit model and builds the intentional version of it — a designed community with shared infrastructure and a written agreement, instead of a one-off owner stitching it together unit by unit.
Tiny Hacker House founder. Sixteen years in Austin building hackathons, makerfaires, design challenges, geodesic domes, tiny-dome homes, and the 13-unit Alpine Village development in Del Valle. SXSW launch with 13 US mayors. First-place HackForLA. WonderDome at Burning Man.
WholeTech founder · Austin web shop since 1996. Spring.com BBS in 1996. Twitter's first celebrity at SXSW 2007 (BuzzFeed, Slate, NYT). 120+ websites running on a single Austin server with auto-renewing SSL, daily sitemap, fleet security baseline. Based in Cedar Creek, TX — same area as the village's target parcels.
An occasional dispatch — when the permits clear, when the first foundation pours, when applications open for the first three homes. No spam. No platform middlemen.