Hopkinsville Developer Plans 75-Unit Tiny Home Community for Local Workers

Dozens of tiny homes, each 700 square feet and under, are going up on a property off West Seventh Street in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and the man behind the project has a straightforward argument for why they need to exist.

With five homes currently under construction, developer Steve Fincham is hoping to eventually construct upward of 75 homes on the property. He is wearing multiple hats on the project, acting as not only the developer but as the financier and head of construction.

"There's an entire demographic of people that will never see the American dream of owning a home unless we get the cost down," Fincham said. Inflated housing prices and high interest rates in Christian County are what motivated him to move forward.

The project has personal roots. As a Hopkinsville local and owner of his own construction company, Fincham's experience building a home for his daughter helped inspire the effort. Even sourcing all the materials himself, that project still resulted in a home valued at over $200,000, which got him thinking about how to create more affordable housing solutions without sacrificing quality.

When deciding how to approach the West Seventh Street development, he wanted to ensure the cost would be affordable for the average worker earning the Area Median Income. That focus on the workforce segment of the market sets this apart from most tiny home communities, which tend to skew toward lifestyle minimalists or retirees rather than local wage earners.

"By June I am going to try and have two or three of these ready to sell," Fincham said. After those initial five homes are completed, he plans to ramp up efforts to initiate development of the rest of the property.

For the tiny home community, a 75-unit clustered development built explicitly for workforce buyers is a model worth watching. Fincham is betting that keeping square footage tight and overhead low is the only realistic path to homeownership for a chunk of Hopkinsville that the conventional market has simply left behind.