[bmelton]

So, you can build portable tiny homes, though that constrains the tininess even more so.

Another pre-condition is being in a city with tiny house-friendly zoning regs.

As someone who frequently entertains the notion and novelty of tiny living, I keep up with it, and know more than a few folks who have been evicted from their tiny homes.

D.C. has actually been making it harder to live in tiny homes, as they are non-conformant structures in which you can "camp", temporarily, but cannot live, so there's this shell game going on of tiny home dwellers rotating out their dwellings just frequently enough to be on the right side of the law.

[analog31]

Another issue in my locale would simply be the availability of land. Pretty much every empty lot was snapped up during the real estate bubble. My house is small by contemporary standards, but not tiny in any credible sense.

But it's worth noting that by "tiny homes," we mean specifically tiny detached homes. Within a few blocks of my house are some four-banger apartment buildings with ~ 1000 square foot units, and I could probably afford to buy one and rent out three of the apartments. That could actually be a realistic option if I ever become an empty-nester.

[bmelton]

I've seen a few implementations of that. There are obviously the micro-condos in NYC, but tiny house villages have been cropping up (like trailer parks, with less of the stigma). More land-efficient are the shipping containers as condos are becoming more popular too.

[bfuller]

They are exactly that, yuppy trailer parks

[ianlevesque]

What laws or regulations have caused the people you know the most trouble? I remember some stories in the past about sewer or water regulations causing problems, but not for tiny houses.

[wlesieutre]

A lot of towns have minimum square footage requirements that are too high for tiny homes to be legal

[toomuchtodo]

That's slowly changing; stop by https://www.reddit.com/r/tinyhouses for details.

[bmelton]

On top of the arbitrary square footage requirements that wlesieutre already mentioned, in a lot of cases it boils down to windows per room requirements, as well as the typical <x> requirements per room, where rooms like kitchen and bathroom are the most problematic.

While I'm generally not a big fan of regulations, I get that there are definitely well-intentioned regulations for legitimate problems, such that landlords weren't allowed to cram too many people into too small a space, or demand that too many people share too few kitchens and bathrooms, but for those who choose the path for themselves, those self-same regulations are burdensome.