Tiny houses small solution to big problem?

o What: Dee Williams and “The Big Tiny” in Vancouver.

o When: House tours 2-3 p.m., reading 3 p.m., Saturday.

o Where: Vintage Books, 6613 E. Mill Plain Blvd.

o Cost: Free.

Dee Williams was living for her property. Maintenance and the mortgage were the engines of each day.

“I used to race off to work to make the mortgage. Then I’d come home and work on my house,” Williams said. “I was doing the normal thing.”

The house was a three-bedroom fixer-upper in Portland that swallowed all her time, she said. Her job kept her ahead of the mortgage; evenings and weekend were all about upkeep and repairs.

Then a health crisis hammered home what most of us ignore, most of the time: Life is short.

“I collapsed in the grocery store and woke up in the ICU,” Williams said. The diagnosis was congestive heart failure. She was only 40 years old.

Portland Alternative Dwellings.

“You spend all your time running to work to make money and running home to spend it,” she realized. But in the end, the only thing she really had was time. “I wanted my time back,” she decided.

She’d once visited Guatemala and had an “aha” moment upon discovering “how the real world lives,” she said. Now, she found herself sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, studying a magazine feature about a “super-cute little cabin on wheels” — when everything clicked.

“It was the vacation cabin I always wanted to stay in. It was the tree house I’d built when I was a kid,” she said. Why had she let her life grow so unwieldy and stressful? How had she misunderstood the source of happiness? Living in a cozy little house like that, she felt: “Everything would be simple again. I would understand my life and my place in the world.”

She sold the house that had been running her life. She visited the creator of that little cabin on wheels in Iowa City, Iowa, and copied his blueprints.

In response to a huge wake-up call, Williams went tiny.

Community, not autonomy

Now 51, Williams’ home for the past decade has been an 84-square-foot house that’s almost always parked on some friends’ land in Olympia. It features a single propane burner for cooking, but no running water or shower. Solar power provides the lights. Her mattress is up in the sleeping loft. There’s no closet. Williams likes to talk about her kitchen, her library and her great room, but these are just-for-fun names of areas — mental compartments, not real ones — that underline the squeezed-together singularity of Williams’ tiny space.

“It’s nothing more than a rectangle. The floor plan is roughly the size of an elevator. But it’s got everything I need,” Williams said — given, of course, that she borrows her friends’ facilities and pays her way by doing their lawn mowing, dish washing and similar sorts of tasks, she said.

“It absolutely leans into this relationship I have with my friends,” she said. “That’s the thing that’s been most surprising to me — the way other relationships have shifted. I respect and appreciate other things in my neighborhood and in my life a lot more. I really do understand my place in the world a little better.”

For example, Williams said she’s far more dependent nowadays on frequent visits to community and commercial facilities — the library, the laundromat, the grocery store — than she would have been if her home still contained spacious bookshelves, a washer-dryer and a refrigerator.

“I have lost a sense of the functionality you have in a big house,” she said. What she’s gained is an even greater sense of the importance of community. “I am humbled by my living arrangements. Your humility and your gratitude live right next to each other,” she said.

Housecleaning takes a few minutes. Monthly bills cost a few bucks. Williams still works part time, she said, and now she’s got the time to enjoy life, rather than just pay for it.

“I know most people couldn’t live in a shoebox like I do,” she said. “But it’s not really about the little house, when you peel the onion back. We all want to be happy. There are different things we do in life that hold us back from that. This is really about trying to retool your life so your eyes are on the prize.”

Vancouver visit

In recent months Williams has become something of a celebrity, with a book called “The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir” getting good reviews; a 2012 “Ted Talk” that she delivered at Portland’s Concordia University — and other talks — online on YouTube; and a firm called Portland Alternative Dwellings (www.padtinyhouses.com) offering workshops, blueprints, individual consultation and even construction of your own tiny house.

A tiny house can cost anywhere from $15,000 to as much as $80,000 — depending on the size, the materials and the craftsmanship — and PAD also has developed expertise about niggling issues such as insurance, building codes, parking spaces and the best trailers to use for a base.

Williams has also grabbed the attention and enthusiasm of Sally Fisher, Clark County’s sustainability specialist, who has arranged for Williams to haul her little house to Vancouver Saturday afternoon.

“I just finished reading Dee’s book and she is highly inspirational,” Fisher wrote in an email. “Even if folks could never see themselves living in 84 sq. ft. … it really makes you think about cutting back on the clutter in your closet, or think twice before buying and bringing home stuff that you don’t really need.”

Williams will give public “tours” of her house for one hour, from 2 to 3 p.m. Saturday in the parking lot of Vintage Books, 6613 E. Mill Plain Blvd. At 3 p.m. she’ll move inside the bookstore to read from “The Big Tiny” and answer questions.

Microcommunities?

Here’s a frequently asked one: Could tiny houses end homelessness? Portland already has Dignity Village, a development of diminutive, homemade homes that has a long-term lease near Portland International Airport, and the city council there is pursuing both surplus public land and legal remedies to problems that might stand in the way of still more “microcommunities.”

A couple years ago, a retired Clark County contractor named Bill Barkley built an 8-by-12-foot shed as the prototype of a tiny, insulated house for the homeless. Barkley was proposing something like Dignity Village; he liked the idea that people would develop life skills, from carpentry to self-government, by building and maintaining their own shared microcommunities.

“We need to build housing that’s sustainable and affordable and small. And the underemployed and unemployed can build it,” he told The Columbian in March 2012.

The shed is still standing right where Barkley put it, in an empty lot just north of Yard ‘n’ Garden Land on Northeast Highway 99 in Hazel Dell, but nothing more has happened with tiny houses and microcommunities in Clark County. The possibilities remain interesting, a couple of local officials said, but there’s a lot of thinking and planning separating Dee Williams’ cute cabin on wheels from a functional, affordable standalone home for someone with little income and big problems.

“I think the devil is in the details when it comes to the tiny houses movement,” said Andy Silver, Council for the Homeless executive director. “While I am all for simplified living and looking for creative and cost-effective ways to increase affordable housing options, tiny homes … do not sound like a good fit for most people who are homeless. I would hope there could be some middle ground where the units provided the space and amenities necessary for someone to have a solid foundation.”

“The cost of land and then the cost of a tiny house still makes it difficult for our clients to afford,” said Diane McWithey, executive director of Share. “There is such a shortage that I think we need to begin thinking differently, and I would imagine that the tiny houses are not too much smaller than a studio apartment.”

While Williams also feels cautiously optimistic, don’t forget what a decade of living in such a house has taught her, she said: the smaller your individual world, the more you need social connections and services. The volunteer work she’s done at her local winter-weather spillover has convinced her that “just throwing homes at people” is no solution. The real key, she believes, is building a strong community, not just tiny buildings.

“I would love to see little houses become a part of how we look at homelessness,” she said.