If I were to build the first permitted earthbag house in Coconino County…
Posted on August 13, 2024
…what would my process be?
First step is acquiring earthbag knowledge. I would go to a workshop and learn the basics, and/or seek out real projects that are happening near-ish to me and volunteer.
Step two is getting land. First, I’d consider where I want the earthbag house to go. In town, out of town. This is a big cost-benefit equation. Personally I like living in town so I can walk to a coffee shop or stumble home drunk at night. However, in Coconino County, most of the places that you can do this are incredibly expensive. So then the benefits of country living are forced into mind.
North of Williams, there were a bunch of “would be illegal today” subdivisions that happened in the 50s or 60s “before anyone really cared what was happening out there”, according to a local real estate agent. A few these subdivisions are huge squares chopped into small 1 acre squares. The more modern ones are chopped into 2 to 20ish acre shapes (sometimes squares, sometimes not), but those are more expensive overall / have HOAs/CCRs that could restrict the end goal. And this is a good juncture to remind ourselves of the goal here: to build the first legally permitted earthbag house in Coconino County.
Coconino County has this dope program called the Innovative Materials and Systems Pilot Program (aka the pilot program), in which, if your property is more than 2.5 acres, and if you build your structure with 50% or more of alternative materials or methods, you don’t have to get a building permit. There are a few caveats (like, you don’t get a certificate of occupancy so you might not be able to get insurance, and any utilities available in the area might not want to connect you), but by and large, this gives a direct pathway for weird things to get built without a County building permit (you still have to follow state & other laws – no getting around your septic requirements this way!).
However, as stated, I want to build the first permitted earthbag house in the County. There very well could be pilot programmed earthbag homes in the County (although I wasn’t informed of any when I asked), and there could certainly be unpermitted ones, but that doesn’t fit my goal (which is some level of “jurisdictional transferability” – i.e. I want to build one here so that I can convince skeptical jurisdictions elsewhere that I can do it there too).
Side note, a source told me that the pilot program is controversial with certain higher-ups in the building department, for whatever reason. As there is an upcoming review of the Coconino County Code happening, this program could fall under political attack (which is dumb! let people do what they want!).
Anyway, to get back to the point, the point is building a permitted earthbag house – NOT sinking 10+ years of debt into building a huge “last place I’ll ever live” house on 20+ acres where I’ll never see my neighbors guaranteed. 1 acre plots, while more expensive per acre, are almost always less expensive overall than larger plots. So, that’s what I would shop for.
Now that we’ve thoroughly beaten around the bush, it’s on to the specifics of land shopping. I would either look for cheap small plots on zillow (or other agent-based aggregators) or on more FSBO-oriented platforms (like craigslist – although annoying number of agents post there too). In addition, I would find parcels I like in the Coconino County parcel viewer and send hand-written letters to the owners with an offer or discussion of offer. I have frequent delusions that this would work, but I’ve never tried it.
While land shopping, I would be thinking about one thing, and one thing only: septic. There is no legal way around septic requirements in Arizona – you can use a composting toilet to reduce the size of the system you need, but you still need a system. There’s this place called “Valle” way north of Williams, by Grand Canyon Junction. Rumor has it, the soil here is super shallow and difficult to work with – as such, most 1-acre plots here (of which there are very many) require an “alternative” septic system, such as a mound system (which is effectively building a septic-perfect dirt hill above bad dirt so that you can pump your gross water into it). Mound systems are notoriously expensive. Other alternative systems are also expensive (if you’re a natural-building-inclined person, the mention of the word “alternative” usually sparks positive interest – but when it comes to septic, it’s the last thing you want to hear). Many of these one-acre plots are cheap because of the expense of putting in a mound system. Your 1 acre is $10k (or less) because you’d need to put in a $30k+ septic system to build something there, which then puts you back in the market for more expensive land closer to amenities (coffee, alcohol, other vices).
However, in my research, I’ve found a couple of these “illegal” 1-acre subdivisions down south closer to Williams, where there’s that kind of “juniper” forest, which comes along with relatively deeper soil. Now, this isn’t a guarantee that a plot here wouldn’t need an alternative (i.e. expensive) system, but it does offer the opportunity that it could need maybe a less expensive version of an alternative system, or maybe, by some stroke of luck, an actual conventional system (again, made smaller by the composting toilet that would be integrated into the house design).
So, after all this zillow trawling and letter writing, let’s then assume I found a plot with a couple specific qualities:
- The owner is willing to sell it to me for a cheap price
- Tt has a chance that maybe it could support a conventional septic system
I then send an offer to purchase the land at the price we’re discussing, under 2 conditions:
- That we get a survey done (and no weird issues come up), and
- That it can support a conventional septic system. I then offer to pay for half of the septic soil testing costs (in which someone with a backhoe digs a big hole on the property and a guy from the county comes out and looks at the hole and says what type of system it can support). Upon learning what system the property can support (and how much that system is projected to cost), I would either go forward with my offer, or repeat this process with other plots of land. I’d play this by ear – septic testing isn’t cheap, so I don’t want to do it like 5+ times just trying to find that one perfect test hole that could support a conventional system (although, if you’re into rolling dice, this could result in significantly lower overall costs if you do strike gold vs. settling for an alternative system).
Then, i would own the land. Wow, that’s the second step!
Beyond this part of the process, I am less currently knowledgable. There are probably aspects after this that harbor unforeseen complexities, which I “gloss over” compared to the level of detail I’ve gone into so far. However, from my research, I am fairly certain that none of these complexities are as damning (i.e. expensive) as, say, needing to pay 10x what you thought you’d need to pay for a septic system because your dirt is too thin. Moving on…
The next phase contains questions related to utilities, including how to get water to the property and what I’d do for power and heat.
- For water, I would haul it – only a 15-20 minute drive from water in Williams, which is a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to drill a well (crazy expensive out here). Get a big storage tank, harvest rainwater off of whatever structures I build (plus snowmelt), never shower… Sounds like the good life to me.
- For power, solar would be the way to go – I personally have a few extra panels and a couple batteries that can power a camper, and this house isn’t gonna have a fridge or a blender or anything insane like that, so that covers power at a low cost.
- For heat, I’d probably do propane (and you’d probably agree with me if you’ve ever tried to heat with electricity while not connected to a grid). It gets cold here, don’t want to die in the winter. I would say rocket mass heater, but the Coconino County Alternative Methods people “determined that numerous problems could arise in the construction of a rocket mass heater that could lead to deadly outcomes.” I’m fine to burn some oil if you are.
There are probably specific permits related to each of these utilities that I would need to navigate, and this could add costs depending on what goes into them. At this point in the hypothetical process, I would get the permitting started by going for septic first, then following with other permits (including a building permit…).
Then, we’re finally on to house design. You know what’s so dope about Coconino County? They have this policy that, if you’re building an earthbag structure that’s 750 sqft or smaller, is one story, has no walls taller than 8′, and has no dome, you don’t need engineering approval, so long as you follow the methods described in Earthbag Building: The Tools, Tricks and Techniques, by Kaki Hunter and Donald Kiffmeyer. I mean, come on. that’s so crazy. Crazy awesome that is.
Coconino County has specific design criteria, including related to frost depth and snow load, which would need to be accounted for in the design. Normally, an earthbag house would have absolutely no problem handling snow load, because a dome is soooo strong. However, the Coconino earthbag policy says no domes (without engineering approval) – probably because domes look scary and weird and new, and building officials are scared of scary weird new things.
Worth mentioning that this represents a decision point. I’ve been assuming that engineering approval would be a pain in the ass and also expensive. But it would actually come down to a very specific cost-benefit analysis between:
- The cost of building a non-earthbag roof, and
- The cost of getting engineering approval.
Ultimate decision would depend on ultimate house design.
At this point, non-earthbagpilled readers might be like “you should get engineering approval anyway so you make sure you don’t kill yourself!”. Bro, just trust me i took the workshop.
After I go back and forth with the County a couple hundred times, they fully understand earthbag housing and they approve my building permit. Then, I can start actually building, get the inspections lined up, get the septic installed, and put everything together.
For how much work earthbag building is (it’s a lot of hard work!), it’s basically a footnote in this process. No wonder housing is so expensive, such a pain in the ass!
If you’re interested in building an earthbag house somewhere (especially in Coconino County), please reach out to me (probably on twitter is the surest way to reach me, unless you can sleuth my email or phone number somehow). I would be embarking on this project myself, but it’s already relatively late in the year (for Flagstaff) and I don’t have certainty on if I’m sticking around in this area after September. Perhaps I’ll be back in the future and be able to embark on this process myself – but perhaps by then, you will have built the first fully permitted earthbag building here before me!