Tiny homes designed by students could be coming to Waco neighborhoods

It's a growing partnership for our growing city! Heather Healy finds out the big deal behind tiny houses designed by students that could be coming to Waco neighborhoods.

BROADCAST SCRIPT:

These five students are working hard on a project that could increase your property value.

“Our city council thought it’d be very good to start for allowing homeowners, like for single family residential, to allow them to build a second accessory dwelling unit. They have not been able to do that for a long time,” said Bobby Horner, Project Planner for the City of Waco.

The city is partnering with TSTC architectural drafting students to design these tiny homes.

“Both sides have benefited very well,” Horner said.

“They asked us to design around 500 square foot homes for examples of what could be built on these lots,” Corby Myers said, am Architecture and Civil Design Instructor at TSTC.

These future architects, like Joshua Stock, got busy honing in on their professional craft, collaborating with the city on how much is expected out of such tiny space.

“In our first meeting, I only had one floor plan and it was the wheelchair accessible one, and they really like that idea, so, I was excited about that, and they told me, they gave me some changes that they wanted to see, I was able to make those happen in the second meeting,” first year Architecture and Civil Design student Joshua Stock said.

“I changed a lot. It was constantly changing: my design, my concept, everything was constantly changing,” fellow student Cierra Zimmermann said.

Once changes were made, these future architects presented to the city taking to design to possibly reality.

“What we want to do is pre-approve these plans, that’s why we need the plans in so we can look at them and it meets code. These accessory dwelling units are not to be sold off,” Horner said.