Homeowners think small

Tiny houses fall into two categories. Some, like Cantori's, are technically travel trailers - tagged and road-ready. Others have foundations and aren't going anywhere.

The houses usually manage a lot of function in a little bit of space - kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, laundry room - and they're often cute to boot. Gables. Wood siding. Even porches.

"These are beautiful works of art," said Joe Coover with Tumbleweed Tiny House Co., a California firm that sells tiny homes - as small as 65 square feet - and tiny-home designs.

U.S. houses got bigger for decades, ballooning from a little less than 1,700 square feet in the early 1970s to 2,500 square feet last year, even as household sizes shrunk, according to Census Bureau figures. But the housing crash, foreclosure crisis and rough recession have pressed some to think differently about how much space they need. And a house you can move with you has a certain appeal to anyone stuck in a place worth less than its mortgage.

But whether you can actually live in a tiny home depends on more than your ability to pare down your possessions. Location matters. Zoning, building codes, health codes and even private covenants in subdivisions can effectively render a tiny house illegal.

In the eyes of the law, there's such a thing as too small. Some jurisdictions bar people from living in travel trailers, too, no matter what they look like.

"That's the No. 1 issue - zoning," said Steven Harrell, owner of Tiny House Listings , where 20,000 to 50,000 people visit per day to check out tiny houses for sale. "There are a lot of people advocating, 'Hey, what's the big deal? Why don't you ease square-foot (regulations)?' Times have changed, the economy has changed, people are having to make choices. And tiny houses are one of them."

Tiny houses aren't the only example of small living. "Micro-apartments" of a few hundred square feet are popping up in some expensive cities, such as San Francisco, for young professionals who'd rather spend their free time downtown than in a sprawling living room.

Matt Hoffman, vice president of innovation at Enterprise Community Partners, the Columbia, Md., affordable-housing giant, said small dwellings aren't a solution for everyone. But they're a useful choice to have. More than 10 million people in America are "housing burdened," paying over half their income on rent, he said.

Cantori has spent his life in modestly sized places. At 19, he bought a dilapidated sailboat, fixed it up and lived there for nearly five years - all 180 square feet of it. His next move was to a studio apartment in Baltimore. Living cheaply has allowed him to pursue the nonprofit career he wanted, save money and go sailing on the side.

His tiny home was built by a lawyer from Kansas who intended to live there with his family of three. Then the family grew by one. So he sold to Cantori, who flew west with his brother two years ago, rented a U-Haul and drove back to Maryland with his new home hitched to the back.

For Cantori, the affordability of a tiny house is part of the draw, but also the ability to use less energy, take up less land and generally be "lighter on the environment." A 6,000-square-foot house not far from his neighborhood baffles him.

His future retirement home is robin-egg blue, with a porch out front. Inside, there's a tiny stainless-steel fireplace, a closet and a combination washer-dryer. A table in the living room/dining area seats two, or up to five if folded out. The kitchen has an RV stove, microwave and small refrigerator. In the bathroom is a full-sized shower and a composting toilet. And up top, two lofts - each a bedroom.