Sugar Shacks

Christian’s post (in his blog land+form+design, there is a link on the sidebar) about the Katrina cottages reminded me of Starkville’s own Sugar Shacks. The Sugar Shacks were one of the first things I noticed about what is sometimes called "vernacular" architecture when I moved to Starkville. The first thing you notice about the Sugar Shacks is that they are small...really really small. Possibly smaller than the Katrina cottages. They are tool-shed sized. The other thing is that the little decks and corrugated tin roof awnings on the front doors actually give them some flair. This feature is important because it is what makes the Sugar Shacks actually tolerable to look at. Each shack has its own two-car concrete parking slab (a slab about equal in area to the footprint of the building it serves) and a dedicated entrance off of North Montgomery Street. Ten units occupy about an acre with about 400 feet of street frontage.



From a sustainable urbanism perspective, the Sugar Shacks could be said to fulfill a few basic principles such as energy efficiency and density, but barely. They would be more efficient if four or five of them had been combined into one building with shared walls. How much privacy would the tenants loose? How much privacy do they have now?

I always get a kind of weird feeling when I look at the Sugar Shacks. The Sugar Shacks were mentioned often in the recent debate about the zoning change for the five acre “pasture” on Yellow Jacket lane. The neighbors who opposed the zoning change invoked them as an example of what would result. The zoning change passed and we will be watching closely to see how right (or wrong) these opponents were.