ROUND ROCK, Texas —
A Round Rock developer built a first-of-its-kind community to bring a tiny solution to a large problem.
He's tackling affordability with a new tiny home community called Mustard Seed Village.
"Very grateful. I mean, it's almost like a miracle in a sense," Mohammed Mbaya said.
Mbaya searched all over Cental Texas for an affordable place to live.
"Houses are expensive all around Round Rock, just like Austin. So to find a place like this in Round Rock, it's like, perfect," Mbaya said.
He said when he first found these homes, he wasn't immediately convinced.
"Honestly, at first I was like, 'Tiny home, I don't know. I'm not sure how tiny it is,'" he said.
But after seeing the layout, he said it just made sense.
"It's just spacious enough to move around and it doesn't feel so, you know, so small," he said.
Developer Joseph Claypool said his goal with Mustard Seed Village was to give people the best bang for their buck, with rent for the homes capped at just under $1,400 a month.
"They're small, but I say they're mighty, in the sense that they they're spacious inside and, most importantly, they're affordable," Claypool said. "I wanted to do something that where people didn't have to spend all their money just on rent to survive."
He worked with Amplify Credit Union to be strategic in the building process to keep the prices down.
"It worked towards the mission of Amplify as a credit union [in] general, kind of trying to give back to the community that we serve," said Renee Flores, Amplify Credit Union's vice president of commercial lending.
It's a partnership that allowed Mbaya to find not just a home but a wedding venue. He and his wife, Vanessa, got married right in their living room.
"It wasn't an easy decision for us, but it was also the perfect decision," Mbaya said.
Starting their lives in a space that's not tiny, but the perfect fit.
All 29 units in Mustard Seed Village are taken, but Claypool said he learned a lot of lessons from his first time doing this and hopes to bring more homes online within the next few years.
Boomtown is KVUE's series covering the explosive growth in Central Texas. For more Boomtown stories, head to KVUE.com/Boomtown.