Now, before I start this week’s column, let me make one thing perfectly clear. I was neither for nor against the idea of the city of Blue Earth building some tiny houses.

But I will admit I found the idea interesting.

I mean, I sort of live in a tiny house. It is certainly smaller than the one my wife and I lived in before we came to Blue Earth.

And once upon a time, my house on Main Street in Blue Earth was much smaller than it is now. Sometime far in the past an addition was put on my house that literally doubled its size.

Also, in the summer time, we often do go live in our tiny house out in the woods. It is only about 8 feet wide by 24 feet long, but it does have a kitchen, living room with bay windows, couch, chair, kitchenette table, one bedroom and one bathroom with a shower/tub.

It is pretty comfy. We call it our camper, but its real name is a travel trailer, I guess. Ours never travels, however.

And at our campsite my brother-in-law Jim built a small cabin, where he was going to have a bed, kitchen of sorts and bathroom in basically a shed. We call it a Shabin now because it does have a bed in it but we also use it as a shed. He went on to build his own little camper trailer, twice now. Both are really teeney tiny houses.

My sister-in-law, Denise, who many folks here know, actually does live in a tiny house, because her full-time residence is a 5th wheel travel trailer. And to be honest, it is a pretty darn nice tiny house.

I can hear some of you saying that this is all fine, but the tiny houses proposed to be built in Blue Earth were different. They were pretty basic. Not even a closet in the bedroom was a constant comment.

That is true, but only to a point. Perhaps the plan was going to be changed some before they would actually be built, with some input of ideas from the public.

But now we will never know.

I shared the tiny house cluster idea with some friends from other places in Minnesota and some from out of state. All of them seemed to be intrigued by the idea and wanted me to keep them informed of how the project was going. I believe they were wondering how this idea would work in the towns where they live. They wondered if it would help with the housing issues they also faced.

I see some plusses and minuses for the idea. One of the minuses is that they are tiny. Hence the name. But as mayor Rick Scholtes points out, they would have been larger than the apartments at Crescent Apartments, which sometimes have more than one person living in them.

Another issue is storage. The original plan was to have some extra tiny homes built that would have storage areas in them for the people living in the tiny houses to use. But the plan could be changed some. Look up tiny homes and you can see some that have more storage areas built in.

The cost is another issue, and that is a big one. The tiny house proposed for Seventh Street would have cost around $125,000 to $135,000. In Blue Earth, it is possible to buy a house for that amount of money that would have three bedrooms, couple of baths, living room and family room and a full basement.

True, that house might need some work, but the point is that there are some homes for sale that are much larger than a tiny house for the same price.

That cost is why the city did not plan on selling the tiny homes, but rent them out instead.

The HRA already owns properties in Blue Earth that they do rent out. That is what they do. The new tiny house on Seventh Street would have been an experiment of sorts, to see if there was interest in renting a tiny house instead of an apartment. And, the other plus points were that the HRA already owned the lot, and already had the funds to cover the cost of building one tiny house without increasing their budget or the city levy.

The plus that the HRA pointed out was that they own several lots in town, which are really too small to build a full-size modern family home on. So, what should they do with the lots?

A tiny house may or may not have been the solution. But now, we will never know.

No, I did not plan on living in one if they were built. I already live in one in the woods occasionally, as I pointed out earlier in this column.

But I might have rented one when I first came to Blue Earth in 2007 and there was not a house or apartment to rent in town and I had not sold my house in Tyler. A tiny house rental might have been just what I needed.

Tiny houses. Good idea or bad idea? I am still not totally sure.

But definitely it is (or was) an intriguing idea.