I would love to live in a tiny house village...but, the zoning laws in my home city (Austin) make it literally impossible.
It is also illegal to be homeless here, with fines for illegal camping costing several hundred dollars. It's sickening to see all the new construction, often with enthusiastic support of much of city council and the mayor, that is targeted at people who can afford $3000/month rents, when there are so many families being pushed out of their neighborhoods.
I've kind of idley been shopping for houses or land in New Orleans and its fascinating how tiny some of the old houses are. There was a time when it was not considered crazy or illegal to construct a two room, 250 square foot, house for one or two people to live in. It don't understand how we've gone so far in the McMansion direction. It's entirely possible to live happily in a tiny space (I did it for four years, living and traveling full-time in a motorhome).
"It don't understand how we've gone so far in the McMansion direction."
My theory is two parts. In the old days, your kids could play outside and weren't expected to be in the house until dinner and then before bed. Now, your kids are probably in the house more, and let's face it, space creates harmony sometimes.
The second part is simply that people want to keep up with their peers and McMansions were sold "cheaply" enough for people to jump on. That big family home is still a measure of success.
Most cities in Australia and New Zealand are like this, and I'd guess Canada and the U.S. as well. This is one-person one-vote "democracy" at work: the land-owners vote in the government that restricts supply via zoning laws, and boosts demand via immigration and international students. When even just a bare majority of people have jobs they hate and there's 95% bank loans available on houses and apartments, they'll gang up via the government on the renters and lower-waged to get those residential land prices going up. They want to sell their city houses and leave their jobs as soon as they can, and there's plenty of immigrants from Asia who'll happily rent and buy up with funds they earnt via questionable means in their home countries.
> This is one-person one-vote "democracy" at work: the land-owners vote in the government that restricts supply via zoning laws, and boosts demand via immigration and international students
as well as:
> 95% bank loans available on houses and apartments
and:
> a bare majority of people have jobs they hate and [...] leave their jobs as soon as they can
yet you read all that as "blame the immigrants who are all rich and earned their riches via questionable means"?
I'm curious, what is a specific zoning ordinance which prohibits small houses? In my county, the building code does not mandate a minimum size, but many HOA covenants do. Or is it just the grouped houses that are outlawed, like minimum parcel size of 0.25 acre or something?
The IRC and IBC do specify minimum sizes, so if your county adopted either of those then there is a built in minimum.
> Every dwelling unit shall have at least one habitable room that shall have not less than 120 square feet (11 m2) of gross floor area. Other habitable rooms shall have a floor area of not less than 70 square feet (6.5 m2). Habitable rooms shall not be less than 7 feet (2134 mm) in any horizontal dimension.
It's not an internationally enforced document or anything, more of a "base code" that jurisdictions can choose to adopt (often with local modifications) to avoid writing their own from scratch.
Similar codes exist for electrical (NEC, which I guess is national because of voltage differences internationally?) and fire safety (IFC).
It is the multi-family rules that conflict with tiny villages in Austin, and many others. If you're seeking to build a multi-family "thing" on a plot of land, it has to be zoned for multi-family use, and the permitting process for that is much more complicated and subject to a lot more rules. So, yes, it is the parcel sizes and number of houses per parcel that triggers the problems.
You can put one tiny house on one regular plot of land in Austin, most likely, without too much trouble.
Density is the alleged goal for a lot of the rules that prevent tiny house communities from popping up. But, there's nothing stopping anyone from putting one huge house on a moderate sized lot anywhere in pretty much the whole city, including places that are extremely sought after.
The moment you want to build housing for several families (or individuals) on one plot of land, that's when they insist it be condos or apartments with high density. There is no middle ground where people can have their own house and garden...either you're in a McMansion or you're in an apartment/condo.
There is recently an ordinance to allow a secondary housing unit on a lot, but the language of it makes it very clear there has to be a full-size house on the property and the secondary unit is to be a "granny flat" or garage apartment or similar. I don't know if this rule has passed yet, but it's been discussed quite a bit. I'm too busy lately to get involved in the minutiae of that, especially since it still doesn't actually fix the problem I have with the rules here. So, it may be that you could build a tiny house village of two tiny houses. Maybe you can get two lots side-by-side and build a four house village. Still extremely limiting, and doesn't help to resolve the sprawl problems that Austin has.
A friend who researched it found that building an "RV park" would be the only way to do it given current code and political climate...which has a limit on the number of permanent structures that can be on the grounds. So the tiny houses would have to be on wheels. And, homeowners associations and such will fight hard against permitting any new RV park or mobile home park, so the likelihood of any such thing happening near downtown approaches zero. Also, being an RV park makes it commercial construction, comparable to a hotel, rather than residential (though there are rules allowing permanent residency at RV parks with different taxation that doesn't include various "tourist taxes").
Frankly, a lot of this stuff comes down to wealthy people just not wanting poor people living anywhere near them.
If the people that can afford $3,000/month for rent don't have a place to spend it, they'll just bid up the price of the other housing. Nobody is going to build hovels out of the gate, affordable housing is luxury housing that was built 50 years ago.
So the person who lives on a several acre lot with a 4000 sq ft house, running their own business is asleep and the person in a 600 sq ft loft crammed in a city block with thousands of others is wide awake?
As I see it, the size of the dwelling is irrelevant: plenty of americans with high salaries still manage to live paycheck-to-paycheck.
If somebody has a huge house, a high salary and 3 cars but spends all of their money every month, has no savings/emergency fund and aren't saving for retirement then they are anything but wide awake. Rather, they are sleepwalking through consumerism (just like most of their neighbors, friends and family).
It is also illegal to be homeless here, with fines for illegal camping costing several hundred dollars. It's sickening to see all the new construction, often with enthusiastic support of much of city council and the mayor, that is targeted at people who can afford $3000/month rents, when there are so many families being pushed out of their neighborhoods.
I've kind of idley been shopping for houses or land in New Orleans and its fascinating how tiny some of the old houses are. There was a time when it was not considered crazy or illegal to construct a two room, 250 square foot, house for one or two people to live in. It don't understand how we've gone so far in the McMansion direction. It's entirely possible to live happily in a tiny space (I did it for four years, living and traveling full-time in a motorhome).