Just a little over a mile from downtown Boise and a whole lot less than a mile from the city’s flagship public university campus, a micro-subdivision sits wedged between two busy arterial roads. It’s barely noticeable, and I would have driven right past it if it weren’t for the unusual aesthetic: something between tiny homes and mobile homes. For lack of a better term, I’m going to call them tiny manufactureds, because that’s what they look like to me. Even from West Boise Avenue, the arterial that accesses this little ring-road of a subdivision, it’s hard to spot.
But if a passer-by continues on the drive to the right of the three gray storage doors, the scale and aesthetic of this subdivision begins to emerge.
Having visited over one hundred homes with a realtor while in the market, I’m not too bad at calculating square footage with my eyes. I’d wager that these homes near downtown Boise are no more than 550 square feet. They are probably larger than the median tiny home, which at this point in the mid 2020s scales at around 400 square feet, but well within that range, since these are clearly smaller than the 950 square feet that formed the benchmark for the initial suburban tract homes of the three Levittowns (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York). These would be small even for GI Bill soldiers returning home from World War II.
So what are they? It is indeed a community of identically sized structures, each one differing only in the primary paint color. Among the two looped streets that comprise the subdivision, I counted slightly under fifty units spread across probably less than ten acres, along with a few communal facilities: laundry, property management, the storage sheds at the entrance.
The walls here do not look like the standard material for tiny manufactured homes: vinyl siding, VOG (vinyl over gypsum), or metal (aluminum or steel). The windows in these units are larger and feature frames with a different painted trim. If these homes have hitches that helped transport them to Boise from the factory that assembled them, it sure isn’t obvious. Though it is possible that an owner could relocate one of these (certainly more easily than a home with a foundation built on-site), it doesn’t look that these have any intention of getting moved. They’re here to stay.
On the other hand, they do rest a few feet off the ground, with a sheath covering the piers or whatever it might be that they rest upon, suggesting there are in fact pads underneath.
Perhaps they do benefit from a degree of mobility more typical of mobile homes. And then, of course, there’s the name out front of the subdivision, over along West Boise Avenue:
The sign suggests these pads are capable of (and that the ownership overtly permits) hosting “Mobile Home / RV Park / Apartments”. I saw none of the second item represented, suggesting these are more of a hybrid of the first and the third, which again prompts me to call these tiny manufactureds, for lack of a better term…