Meet the Man Who Wants to Bring Micro-Apartments to the Masses

Lindsay Salazar/The Wall Street Journal

David Hall lives in a 3,500-square-foot, redbrick home in a quiet suburb of Provo, Utah. In five years, he and his wife, Karen, plan to move into a space of 200 square feet.

“Big houses are lonely,” says Mr. Hall, 69.

The Halls are going to a unit in a 24-room Provo hotel that Mr. Hall is developing. It will be the test case for his far more ambitious and controversial plan. Helped by the proceeds from the sale of a drilling-technology company last year, Mr. Hall says he has spent about $100 million—and eventually plans to spend $250 million, or roughly his entire net worth—on planned communities based on a 19th-century vision of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church.

These planned communities, which he describes as “massively scalable and sustainable econosystems,” will be nonreligious, says Mr. Hall, who is Mormon. Each community will house around 20,000 people in 200-square-foot rental apartments. The apartments will be highly adjustable, with storage units under the floors holding furniture that can be raised to create living rooms or bedrooms as needed.

Residents won’t have cars: They will get around through enclosed pedestrian walkways and a transportation system. Greenhouses will provide food; retail stores, offices, labs and workshops on the ground floors will provide employment and services. Multipurpose community buildings will provide space for sports, meetings and education.

For this project, called NewVistas, Mr. Hall has been buying up entire neighborhoods—about 200 acres of land in Utah, including about 40 houses, and another 1,200 acres in Vermont, including 10 houses. Construction is decades away, but he already has launched 25 startups, working on products like kitchens with cabinets behind walls that rotate at the push of a button; soundproof plastic walls that can easily be rolled up and shifted to create different room configurations, and window blinds that use solar power to close and open based on temperature.

Mr. Hall says his goal is to stop not only suburban sprawl but also the isolation that often accompanies it. His own house started as a four-bedroom, 1970s ranch house on a half-acre lot, which he bought in 1978 for $90,000. In 1995, he embarked on a series of renovations that included turning the garage into a living room and installing a grand entryway. Five years later, he bought the house next door and replaced it with a 2,000-square-foot, three-car garage, which he attached to his existing house. He also built an additional garage for storage.

In total, he spent about $150,000 fixing up and adding onto the home and landscaping. The house is currently appraised at $450,000. A 10,000-square-foot, six-bedroom house in his neighborhood is currently on the market for $1.3 million.

With its cream-colored travertine floors, walls adorned with white molding, large green marble-topped kitchen island and built-in cabinets, his house is a far cry from the pared-down, minimalist units that will make up his planned communities. “I’m definitely a hypocrite,” he says of his current home. “I made the mistake of adding on too much.”

Mr. Hall grew up in Provo. After high school, where he says he was never a great student (“I was more of a daydreamer”), he studied mechanical engineering at Brigham Young University.

In 1976, Mr. Hall came across an 1833 housing plan created from a vision by Mormon founder Mr. Smith in an old Mormon history book. Consisting of a community plot and a building plan, it argued that a scalable pattern exists that could enable all people world-wide to live a modern, prosperous lifestyle sustainably, without overtaxing natural resources or the environment, according to Mr. Hall.

For the next couple of decades, Mr. Hall spent much of his free time figuring out how it might work. After several years at industrial-equipment manufacturer Ingersoll-Rand and earning an M.B.A. from Rider University, he moved from Princeton, N.J., back to Utah. In 1990 he went to work for his father, who had started a drilling-technology company. Mr. Hall expanded the company, which became Novatek, and sold it last year for an undisclosed amount to Schlumberger, the large oil-field services outfit.

The money he earned from the sale allowed him to step up his property purchases, which caught the attention of Nicole Antal, who was then working as a librarian in Sharon, Vt. When she published a story online about Mr. Hall’s purchases in March, it spurred meetings, protests and a move to create a conservation organization. The concern, says Ms. Antal, is that Mr. Hall is driving up housing prices and destroying communities; then there is the prospect of 20,000 people moving in.

“He is a really nice guy and he’s been very open,” she says. But “people don’t like that an outsider is coming in and telling them they’re not doing a good enough job being sustainable.”

Opponents in Utah are also holding protests. In an open letter online, residents of one neighborhood where Mr. Hall has been buying homes wrote: “Your actions have engendered anger, worry, fear and instability in our neighborhood, and threatened the security of our homes and long-range plans for our lives and families.”

The entryway of David and Karen Hall’s home in Provo, Utah.

Lindsay Salazar

Mr. Hall, who aims to buy 5,000 acres in Vermont, dismisses the opposition as “Not In My Back Yard” syndrome. He says real-estate agents are flocking to him and he’s offering premiums for the homes, often as much as twice their values. A full-blown community is still decades away, he says.

Mrs. Hall, a 66-year-old CPA, is on board but cautious: Since her husband has tended to throw all his money into his entrepreneurial aspirations, she made him put their house in her name years ago; she also has separate investments and files her taxes separately. “That’s how I cope,” she says. Mr. Hall says he understands that many people—including all of his friends—think his idea is crazy. His five grown children aren’t interested in moving to the hotel.

The first NewVistas prototype will be the 24-room hotel in Provo, where the Halls will move in. Like the communities it will have rooms that can be reconfigured, allowing users to raise and lower storage boxes of furniture stored beneath the floors. His hope is to win over millennials, whom he believes see the need for community, sustainability and pared-down living. They will understand that “this is better than a mansion.”

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