Faced with a housing shortage, Seaside looks to an innovative solution: tiny homes.

To help alleviate the region’s worsening housing crisis, Seaside City Manager Craig Malin is not just thinking big, he’s thinking small. Tiny, in fact.

On Aug. 10, the city will host a daylong charette at the city’s economic development office to explore the possibility of one or more tiny home developments in Seaside, which would aim to both make home ownership more affordable, and to help the homeless.

Malin is modeling his idea after the “one for one” business concept employed by Toms, a Los Angeles-based shoe company that, for every pair of shoes sold, gives a pair of shoes away to a child in need. The vision in Seaside is that when someone purchases a tiny home for themselves, they also purchase a tiny home for a homeless person.

“The diversity of the Seaside community demands creativity in housing,” Malin says, “so let’s give it a shot.”

Roughly, the idea is this: identify a location in one or more places – either urban infill, non-forested or semi-forested – and build a small community. The key, Malin says, is affordability, and to that end, he thinks shipping containers are the ideal building block.

“You could put two or three or four together for a larger house, and stack them in architecturally interesting ways,” Malin says, adding that he thinks the additional cost of buying a single container home for a homeless person could be as low as $50,000. “I don’t see why that’s not workable.”

The idea is purely conceptual at this point, as no locations, or water supply, have yet been figured out. But the city does have a leg up on one aspect: money.

Seaside has about $5 million set aside in an affordable housing fund, and Deputy City Manager Daphne Hodgson says it will grow by an additional $1.5 million in the next two years when some loan repayments come due.

Additionally, the city’s short-term rental ordinance went into effect Aug. 1, and thanks to a push by Councilmember Kayla Jones – who raised concerns about the negative impact short-term rentals have on housing availability – 50 percent of the transient-occupancy tax generated by short-term rentals will also go into the fund.

Malin’s enthusiasm for the idea is rooted, in part, in his own experience. He says the first home he bought in Illinois was about 1,300 square feet, and his current abode in Carmel Valley (which he refers to as a “shack”) is about 12-by-14 feet.

Whether or not the “live one, give one” idea pans out, Malin at least wants to start the conversation. “You’ve got to let the idea breathe,” he says.