Tierra Buena Home and Garden, LLC

Name: Tierra Buena Home and Garden, LLC
Address: Tucson, AZ, US
Telephone: (520) 975-3533

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Tierra Buena Home and Garden, LLC

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A Tucson-based, alternative building consultant. Specialties:
• Earthen and strawbale construction

ROC 347660
Tierra Buena Home and Garden, LLC is a Tucson-based general contractor specializing in straw and earthen construction. Our specialties also include:
• Smart-sized, small, and tiny homes
• Creative salvage and reuse
• Integrated site design and custom patio improvements

We offer the following services:
• Design + build of residential and small commercial projects
• General contractor services for designers and owners
• Consulting including design development, project approach advising, and construction
detailing
• Workshops and educational opportunities
• Owner-builder assistance
• Developing context-sensitive housing with a focus on natural materials and modest home sizes

Coming soon! We’re excited to announce the following upcoming developments
• Manufacture and installation of prefabricated straw wall panels – coming fall of 2024
• Predesigned and model home and casita kits ready to be shipped to and installed at your project site – likely coming spring 2025

09/25/2026

Just returned from a Santa Fe long weekend chock full of earthen construction inspiration and community goodness gracious. delivered on all those earthy feels I was needing to recharge for some projects back here in the old pueblo.

In addition to the New Mexican and other contingents there was a strong showing from the Californian earth-building contingent. Arizonans let’s rally for Earthusa 2028!

Also snuck in some fun extra curricular activities - a visit w my friend Yas in Burque and tour of her ADU project, a visit to the Santa Fe market, a Mexican Independence Day disco dance party, and a powerful dance session in Santa Fe.

09/17/2026

Last Thursday and Friday hosted the first annual , which brought together developers, financiers, doers and dreamers. There was representation from the nonprofit, affordable housing, market rate and commercial development sectors, and there was a pitch competition and boot camps for nonprofit and emerging developers. It was really great to connect with developers from tucson and other parts of Arizona, since much of my development exposure has been w more of a nationwide demographic and focused largely on middle housing.

07/25/2026

Interested in becoming a small developer, connecting with other small developers, and/or connecting w finance peeps in southern az? September 10th and 11th the is hosting the Southern AZ development finance summit. Early bird tix are available til the end of July, and there are also small/nonprofit developer boot camps for those just getting started. I hope to see you there!

05/12/2026

Last week I presented to Planning and Development Services and Housing and Community Development staff on the exciting projects that I toured in Portland, Oregon and Northwestern, Arkansas last year. These field trips were organized by the nonprofit alliance to show small developers the promise and potential of middle housing thru code reform.

Tucson PDSD staff have been working hard to roll out the new middle housing policies that were approved by mayor and council at the end of last year, so it was fun to share small developer projects and perspectives w them from other communities that have also been creating middle housing reform.

03/16/2026

Last Saturday I had the distinct pleasure of leading a workshop on and light frame construction at The School of Architecture at their campus at the Cattletrack arts compound in Scottsdale. The workshop was part of their high performance natural building materials class. We installed bales in a couple wall sections using the BOEBS (bales on end between studs) method, and demoed splitting bales and got to play with mud plasters at the end of the day.

11/10/2025

One of the developers who was highlighted during October’s field trip in was Eli Spevak of Orange Splot development company. We toured a variety of his projects that showcase his ability to realize ambitious visions that test the boundaries of local zoning codes and provide a variety of housing options for Portland residents.

He’s created two co-housing communities (Cully Greens and Cully Grove) that include community gardens, attractive architecture, comfortable common areas/buildings, a food forest, and a hempcrete sauna. His project Flora and Ulysses functions as a boarding house of sorts, and he’s created other attractive multi-housing developments using middle housing code reforms and land divisions.

He’s long been an outspoken advocate for zoning code reform, pushing for the changes that have made many of his projects possible.

Before he started developing his own projects he was a Project Manager w Habitat for Humanity in Oregon and Pennsylvania. His business’s name, and some of his projects (flora and ulysses) are named after children’s books.

11/04/2025

Sharing some belated finish shots of the we applied to my casita at the end of September. What I had envisioned as a 2 coat plaster ended up being a 2.5 coat plaster - while the second coat was still wet we came back w a finish coat with chopped straw screened to 1/4”. the coarser bits of the chopped straw that snuck thru the screen def made the finish coats more laborious. For a future application I will probably look into another fiber.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the plaster uses , chopped straw, and type s lime for stabilization. The plaster coat has held up great to the last few storms of the monsoon season.

The first and second coats were applied with wooden floats and compresssed w a larger wooden float. the final coat was applied w a metal trowel and hit w a sponge float before burnishing w a metal pool trowel.

Once again major thanks to Bert Scott for his assistance with the plaster application. We had a couple no shows with laborers and his extra hustle made our two-person workflow doable.

10/06/2025

Small developer tour of Portland
I’m heading home today after another excellent small developer field trip w Alliance, this time to Portland OR.

Takeaway 1: zoning/land use code reforms do work to incentivize housing development and begin to address housing shortages in/around cities. Multiple rounds of code reforms in Portland create flexibility for the development of adus, tiny homes and middle housing. In this market and regulatory environment, small developers are responding, and construction sites and new developments are popping up throughout the areas east of downtown that we toured.

These zoning reforms have come from concerted advocacy by developers and the greater community that have been able to overcome the voices of nimbys and reach a receptive city government. Noteworthy changes include the elimination of parking minimums in many cases, the allowance of increased housing density and variety (fourplexes, six plexes, cottage clusters, adus), the elimination of many restrictions relating to tiny houses, and the enabling of middle housing land division strategies (fee simple subdivisions, condo divisions) to help create homeownership/for sale opportunities.

Casitas, duplexes, and other structures are sprouting in formerly SFR neighborhoods. Some developers are knocking down existing homes, but a lot of developers are preserving existing homes and building around them due to the Increased flexibility around siting in the code reforms. Property values are increasing (reportedly a 30% increase in property values after passage of the zoning reforms due to increased site developability).

The increased density has enabled the creation and/or enrichment of neighborhood hubs, so you see strips of commercial w restaurants and coffee shops and other amenities popping up to serve growing demand. the availability of transit, bike paths, and proximity to amenities allow households to reduce the number of cars needed and even enable households to be car free. Some areas, like the district around Division St, have seen dramatic transformation including increase in density, traffic, commercial activity, and property values.

09/22/2025

My casita has been getting some much needed TLC recently. New Saltillo tile baseboards inside and out, and a 2-coat clay-lime exterior plaster to replace a weathered clay paint over the original clay-straw plaster that went on back in 2016. Major thanks to Bert Scott for his work on the trowel and tile setting. My plaster mix features site soil (screened to 1/8”), chopped straw (screened to 1/2” cuz I’m lazy), and type s lime. These Plaster coats are about a 1/4” thick, which is a big contrast to the high-fiber basecoat I put on originally, which went on in a single coat that was 2-4” thick.
Scratch coat is on and brown/finish coat should be on in the next week or so.

04/06/2025

Since December I’ve been diving into trainings on smallscale development trainings w the , which have been so great. Most of the trainings have been online, so I jumped at the opportunity to see some small development projects in person and do some networking irl.

This weekend I’m in northwest Arkansas in the and area touring the projects and hearing how their developers put them together. Local governments have made some major zoning code amendments to allow denser developments, and local small developers have responded. There’s a really healthy ecosystem of development professionals, lenders, and local government staff coming together to make exciting projects happen. Super inspired to come back to Tucson and continue evolving the vision for

Address

Tucson, AZ

Telephone

(520) 975-3533

Website

http://Tierrabuenahome.com/

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