Hendersonville Tiny House Neighborhood is Growing

The Simple Life is a gated tiny house subdivision in East Flat Rock, near Hendersonville NC.  You own your home, but not the land it is on. This isn’t a new concept. Mobile home parks and park model communities work the same way.

At Simple Life your monthly fee includes your home site, cable, water and sewer, trash pickup and recycling, and lawn maintenance. It also includes amenities, like a community pool, dog park and a bocce ball court. This is the price on their website right now.

Village at Flat Rock, North Carolina Lifestyle Fee Monthly Cost

• Amenities, Common Area, Landscaping Upkeep $90
• Community Activities & Supplies $30
• Utilities: Water, Sewer, Trash/Recycle Removal, Road Maintenance, Real Estate Taxes $40
• Basic Cable $30
• Management & Administration $120
• Reserves Contribution $30
  SUBTOTAL MONTHLY LIFESTYLE FEE $340

• Land Lease $225*
  TOTAL LIFESTYLE FEE + LAND LEASE $565
  *$25 additional monthly “homesite premium” is applied to select homesites if chosen.

In most areas zoning doesn’t allow Tiny Homes or Tiny House communities. North Carolina (and most other states) State Building Code considers Park Model Tiny Homes to be campers, RVs. In most areas, Zoning doesn’t allow them to be set up all by themselves.

What is now Simple Life got around this because it used to be a campground, already set up for RVs. We toured it when it first opened.  It was called the Village at Flat Rock then.

Tiny House Neighborhood Open House Tour >

So what are they doing across the street? The houses they are building (and selling) across the street are bigger.

Coles Whalen, marketing director for Simple Life, said the neighborhood’s two sections, The Village and the Meadows “utilize a zoning that most closely resembles modern RV zoning, but has some significant modifications.”

“We like to say Simple Life has found a way to combine the benefits of modern RV living  — shared costs for utilities and amenities, owner-operator property maintenance, and small footprint housing to name a few — with the benefits of typical residential home living,” Whalen said.

Tiny home boomlet in Henderson County, but in Buncombe? Not so much.
John Boyle, The Citizen-Times, July 8, 2019

The houses they are building on the other side of Upward Road are not big, 550-square feet or so, but they are bigger than an RV. Some of them have two bedrooms.

Park Model Neighborhoods

Park Model neighborhoods aren’t new. We have a few of them near us. Since you are not supposed to live in a park model year round, many of them close for the winter. Residents have to leave by the beginning of November and  they can’t come back until they again in April (or so, it might vary). Even if an RV or Park Model is set up permanently and you are allowed to leave it there (and pay annual space rent), you are not supposed to live there more than 183 days per year in some parks.

But some Park Model parks are open year round. How do they get away with it?

The article cited above quotes Toby Linville, code enforcement services director with Henderson County.

“They are still considered temporary by our definition,” Linville said… “It is not something that we actively enforce, but they are not defined as permanent living,” Linville said.

Code Enforcement or Not

Code enforcement doesn’t check to see how many months at a time you are “camping” or living in what is considered an RV.

NC enacted residential building codes in 1903. Some communities already had local regulations. By 1957/58 state code made the rules more uniform.

“The Code is presented with the hope that its use will protect the public from dangerous and unsanitary buildings and will provide architects and engineers a set of minimum standards to follow in in designing buildings.”

1967 North Carolina State Building Code

Building codes existed, but building inspections started much later. Houses built even 20 years ago may have been built without many, or even any inspections. There are a lot of people living in houses that would never pass construction inspections now.

Code enforcement doesn’t go around inspecting houses people are living in.

There are rules and they may or may not be enforced. And rules change.

2024 Update

I have a friend who has lived in a park model off and on since the ’70s. Her family used to spend three months or so here in the mountains in the summers, the rest of the year in Florida. When they retired in the ’90s, they wanted to live here year round, but  the park they were at closed for the winter. They bought a different park model home with a large screened in porch in a different park. I just looked it up and it is zoned as a mobile home park. I went on GoMaps. The Simple Life developments are also zoned as mobile home parks now: The Simple Life-Hamlet Recombination Property Summary

The featured image at the top of this page is for a 540 square foot 2 bedroom, 2 bath not-so-tiny house for sale for $215,000 now, 2024. It is on 93 Mount Meadow Lane in The Hamlet by Simple Life in Flat Rock, NC.