Austin’s Community First! Village Unveils Affordable New Micro Homes

With a wood-clad interior and a butterfly roof, this compact home by Mckinney York Architects balances affordability, sustainability, and privacy.

Feb 11, 2021 - 00:17

Austin’s Community First! Village Unveils Affordable New Micro Homes

With a wood-clad interior and a butterfly roof, this compact home by Mckinney York Architects balances affordability, sustainability, and privacy.

The homes' small efficient footprint leads to less heating and cooling, and residents get passive ventilation due to the orientation of the windows and the cut-outs above the barn door.

Austin’s Community First! Village is a planned community that provides affordable housing and shared resources to those transitioning out of homelessness. The village features an array of micro homes designed by some of the city’s most acclaimed architects to be sustainable, attainable, and sensitive to resident lifestyles—and it’s expanding with 310 additional dwellings.

he floors are all concrete, powered by community first themselves pretty simple and durable. The house that our neighbor was living in before she had a dog trot model where sleep9ng space was separate. They only had one ac unit which was in main nspace and that limited her availability because there was no heat or ac so by having the cut outs she can have close it down but still able to get airflow to that space so it doesn’t become an untempered space. It also helps when the windows open and pull air through the house through that upper opening. The countertops in kitchen are stone. We had a stone company in austin who offered stone for the project and so we went to lok in their stone yard and our seed neighbor was so excited we looked at dozens and dozens of big slabs of stones and this is the one she picked. It really became a special feature because it's a beautiful soft grey with some blues in it and really lovely veins but subtle enough that it would go with any color scheme. It was really fun to do that with her. — McKinney York partnered with BEC Austin, whom they worked with on phase one, to build the micro homes. With phase two, their goal was to make the design "easy enough so that people who weren’t skilled laborers and were volunteers could take the drawing and build one themselves," McKinney says. "With phase one, the houses were hard to pull off for anyone that wasn’t a carpenter."

Leonid Furmansky

McKinney York first got involved in in the community via Tiny Victories 1.0, a design contest held by AIA Austin DesignVoice to determine plans for the first set of homes—and they were thrilled to be included for phase two.

"More than 30 firms submitted to be a part of phase two—some of the best firms—so we were really pleased to be selected," says Heather Mckinney, principal of Mckinney York. "It wasn’t a slam dunk that we would get another opportunity, so we were very excited."

Community First! hopes to expand to other parts of Austin and have purchased several more acres on the east side. — Community First! hopes to expand to other parts of Austin—the organization has purchased several more acres on the east side.

Leonid Furmansky

While the first homes weren’t designed with a particular client in mind, the architects got the opportunity to learn what residents needed and wanted out of their homes for phase two thanks to an intensive post-occupancy study—and many of the findings were surprising.