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Tiny house festival shows off itsy bitsy stylish homes

The 3rd annual Florida Tiny House and Music Festival is underway this weekenD.

ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. -- The 3rd annual Florida Tiny House and Music Festival is underway this weekend in St. Johns County.

Event organizer John Kernohan drove around the St. Johns County Fairgrounds in a golf cart inspecting explaining what is available to see this year.

When he passed by a line of former school buses, he said, "What used to be considered fringe is now such a major part of the tiny house movement."

"There are converted school buses, gypsy wagons, traditional tiny homes," Zack Giffin of the TV show Tiny House Nation said.

Ninety tiny houses are on display that you can walk into this weekend.

People have different words for the idea of tiny: Small, compact, restrictive, teeny, wee, mini, beautiful.

Kernohan says the tiny house craze took off about ten years ago. "The 2008, 2009 finacial crises and real estate crash gave people an opportunity to re-evaluate their living situations, financial lives and decide they wanted to own their lives instead of life and their houses owning them."

Giffin said the lack of affordable housing is keeping tiny houses popular.

"The price of our housing is outpacing the wages people have been earning," Giffin said. "A tiny home is a quality constructed home that is lower cost because of its size."

But there are challenges.

"A lot of it has to do with the zoning for the land, minimum square footage requirements allowed by county zoning code," Kernohan explained. "You have building codes. What are you going to do to ensure it?"

But he added that cities and counties are creating more tiny home-friendly laws.

Dana Treadwell has a tiny house on display at the festival. "We built this as a spec home to get into the tiny house market."

A year later, it's still on the market.

"I thought I'd sell it the first day. A lot of people have trouble financing or finding a place to put it, but that's changing," Treadwell said.

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