The long-form vision behind Small Home Village — who it’s for, why Austin’s makers are priced out, and what the village is and isn’t. This is a plan in progress, not a finished place.
Small Home Village is a plan, not a place — yet. This is the long version of what we intend to build, who it is for, and why we think the moment for it is now.
There is a specific kind of person this village is for. The welder with a one-truck shop. The illustrator who does book covers. The open-source maintainer whose code runs on ten million phones and who still splits rent three ways. The line cook, the luthier, the field biologist, the schoolteacher, the person who fixes the machines that everyone else depends on. These are the people who made Austin the kind of place worth moving to — and they are the people the city’s housing math has quietly shown the door.
We are not going to fix that with a website. Nobody is going to solve a metro housing crisis with a dozen small homes on a Bastrop County parcel. But we can build one good place — a small, real, financially honest community where making a living with your hands or your keyboard doesn’t mean choosing between rent and a workshop. That is the whole ambition, stated plainly.
The vision is a cluster of ten to twenty permanent small homes — 200 to 800 square feet each, on real foundations, not wheels — arranged around a set of genuinely shared spaces: a working shop, a community building with a real kitchen and a long table, raised-bed gardens, and the plain infrastructure (power, water, septic, internet) that lets people live and work without each household duplicating every tool and every bill.
The organizing idea is borrowed openly from the cohousing movement, which has a forty-year track record in the United States: private homes clustered around shared space, managed by the residents themselves, with a written agreement instead of a distant landlord. The Cohousing Association of the United States describes it as “an intentional community of private homes clustered around shared space” — each home complete and private, the commons designed for daily use. That is the shape we’re after.
On the cohousing model and its six defining characteristics: The Cohousing Association of the United States.
Honesty is the point of this whole project, so let’s be exact about what we are not proposing. This is not a tiny-house Airbnb park dressed up in community language. It is not an RV lot. It is not a commune where nobody owns anything — homes are private, bookkeeping is real, and the shared parts are shared on purpose, not by default. It is not a homelessness intervention, and it is not a real-estate fund looking for outside investors. It is a two-partner joint venture with the partners’ own money and land in it.
And critically: nothing is built yet. There are no occupied units, no permits in hand, no homes for sale, no move-in dates. What exists today is a partnership, a design language, a target region, and a shortlist of candidate parcels being scored. Everything past that is clearly labeled as plan.
The village pairs two long track records. Anil Pattni founded Tiny Hacker House in Austin in 2010 and has spent sixteen years running hackathons, makerfaires, design challenges, and field-built housing experiments — a futurist and community-builder who has produced and directed hundreds of innovation events.
On Anil Pattni and Tiny Hacker House: VoyageAustin, “Meet Anil Pattni”; anilpattni.com; linkedin.com/in/anilpattni.
Paul Walhus brings the land in the Cedar Creek area, thirty years of Austin web infrastructure, and the publishing pipeline this very site runs on. One partner knows how to convene and build a community; the other has the ground and the back office. Neither is waiting for permission. As the homepage puts it: we’re not asking permission to start — we’re starting.
We use the word affordable carefully. A small home on a real foundation is cheaper than a conventional house, but it is not free, and building shared infrastructure costs money up front. Independent 2025 figures put tiny-home construction anywhere from roughly $30,000 for a very small unit to well over $150,000, with per-square-foot costs that run high precisely because a 300-square-foot home still needs a full kitchen, bath, and mechanicals.
Cost ranges: HomeAdvisor, “How Much Does a Tiny House Cost?”. Figures are general market data, not a Small Home Village quote — no pricing has been set.
What the village model changes is not the cost of a single home — it’s the cost of everything around it. You don’t each buy a band saw, a tiller, a guest room, a projector, a commercial-grade kitchen. You share them. That is where the real affordability lives, and it’s the same logic cohousing communities have used for decades.
The list gets the honest updates — when a parcel is chosen, when permits are filed, when the first foundation is poured. No spam, no middlemen.
Get on the list → How residency would work