[stickfigure]

I love the idea of tiny houses (and not-so-tiny houses like this one) clumped around a much larger shared space. I love it so much that I'm part of a (currently) seven party consortium trying to find rural acreage in unincorporated parts of the outer SF Bay Area to build such a thing. What we've discovered is that zoning ordinances in every county of California are openly hostile to the idea. The general rule is basically one ginormous single-family home (with a single kitchen) per parcel. Sometimes a second, but that's pretty much it.

It might be possible to get variances or special permits from friendly planning departments, but it's hard to convince a group of people to make large $ investments in dreams which could be destroyed arbitrarily by changing political winds. We may take the risk anyways, but our problem has gone from practical matters of structure and finance to a fundamentally political one.

This is really a shame. I suspect that a lot of people, like us, would be perfectly happy in low-footprint small (<500 sq ft) homes as long as they had easy access to a fancy kitchen, home theater, storage, etc in a space shared with a dozen of their friends. I always wondered why this isn't common - and the answer is, at least in California, it's effectively illegal.

[noonespecial]

This is a really cynical take on it but I've found the key to interpreting these regulatory thickets is to simply ask "Would this benefit the poorer people in my community directly if allowed?". If the answer is yes, expect to find surprising resistance to the idea at all levels of government "planning".

[samatman]

The difficulty with this thinking (and I say this as someone passionate about building my own tiny home) is that we already have tiny home communities in the US for poorer people. They're called trailer parks, and they're exploitative, unpleasant places to live.

[bch]

In what ways are they exploitive?

[tsotha]

>...and the answer is, at least in California, it's effectively illegal.

Because your (prospective) neighbors are worried you're building a Section 8 slum that's going to crash the value of their own properties. The house is usually a family's biggest investment, so it's not really surprising people get testy when they see a potential threat.

[declan]

<stickfigure>: I like that idea! What areas have you tried?

You can get pretty rural pretty quickly west of I-280 in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, and of course Santa Cruz County further south. Head 10 minutes west of I-280 via Sand Hill Road, and you're at Skyline at Alice's restaurant, which marks the limit of the town of Woodside's boundary. Anything north, west, or southwest of that point is unincorporated.

As a practical matter if you're in a rural unincorporated area you're going to have to deal with septic tanks, and finding a place in the bay area where you can dig seven (and counting) different leach fields with possible space for expansion, not on >35% slopes, not near streams, etc. is going to be tricky. Further out you may have problems getting water; are you going to dig a well? How many GPM? Check out the problems that mutual water companies in the hills have had during previous droughts. On the other side of the ridge things are even worse; there's La Honda's rationing and talk of trucking in water: http://www.hmbreview.com/news/cuesta-la-honda-guild-keeps-ra...

On a more positive note, if you can get the structure and finance down, why not build a ~3000 ft^2 conventional house with external power/water/septic hookups? Those hookups are where you'd place your friends' tiny-homes-on-trailers. They wouldn't be permanent structures, so perhaps that would pass legal muster. Or buy 7 acres and subdivide? Again, I like your idea and wish you the best.

[stickfigure]

We have primarily been looking for large agricultural plots (20-40 ac) in Sacramento, Solano, Napa, and Sonoma counties. Well and septic are tractable problems - which is to say, suitable properties are available. However, agricultural zoning rules in all of these counties forbid these kinds of dwelling groups. It's probably possible to fly under the radar but I don't think we're willing to take that risk. It might also be possible to get variances but again that's high risk, and you only find out for certain after you've bought the property.

It does seem to be that one of the least-friction approaches is to permit property as an RV park and have everyone move into tinyhomes-on-wheels instead of small permanent structures. We may end up taking that approach, although it would probably change the composition of our consortium somewhat.

There are some "special planning areas" in the delta (Sac county) that look very permissive, but they bring other issues (flood risk and flood construction requirements, mainly). On the other hand, hey, water :-)

[zo1]

Is it an absolute necessity for you to do this in the SF Bay Area? I'm sure you'd have a much easier time with city-councils, permits and ordinances if you were more open to the idea of doing this idea of yours in other parts of the country.

[stickfigure]

There's a sort of catch-22 going on. We all have some variation of this story: When I was younger I wanted to live in SF and I couldn't afford to buy anything anyways; now that I'm older (42), rural life is more appealing and the finances work... but after 13 years of living in the city, I have a broad and firmly established friend group that I am loathe to give up, even taking a dozen of them with me. So we picked an arbitrary cutoff of 2 hours from SF.

Two hours covers a lot of counties, but none with ordinances that permit rural compound housing. I don't know how far you'd have to go. I don't think there are any in CA.

[noamyoungerm]

Your idea is basically a smaller version of a Kibbutz (excluding the shared finances). Interesting to see that kind of approach pop up in the US.

[tsotha]

Utopian communes in the US predate the Kibbutz by almost 100 years. They mostly died out by the early 1900s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_Utopian_commun...

[Rhapso]

I'm explicitly interesting in seeing how to convert a kibbutz to american legal and value system. Its a bit of a mess. The US tax code is not really built with that sort of thing in mind. Right now it looks like building a LLC to represent group interests is the best options.

[secabeen]

It also falls under the category of co-housing.

[jacquesm]

Consider adding a couple of wheels to your design. That way you don't qualify as a permanent structure. In some places it is enough if you just don't have a foundation.

[archagon]

That's a great idea! I've been trying to figure out my ideal living environment over the past year, and I've come to the conclusion that a personal space within a larger shared space - anywhere in size from a large house to a small village - would be ideal. How did you find the collaborators for your current planned arrangement? (And - might as well ask - do you have any openings?)

[stickfigure]

It really is just luck and timing. We're a bunch of close friends all in our late 30s and 40s who have known each other for most of a decade. Some of us already live within a few blocks of each other and some of us have already been (or currently are) roommates. After a decade or more in SF & Oakland, we all are feeling the desire to work less and live somewhere more rural, but not so far away that we lose our established friend group.

While no openings, I do plan to write up what I have learned when it is safe to do so. It would be great to have neighbor communities. Talk to your friends now and plant the seed; it may take years to germinate, but you can use that time to save money.

[archagon]

Ah, well good luck! I look forward to reading your write up.

Back in university I lived in a large co-op house with 38 other people and it was the best living arrangement I could possibly hope for. I'd love to do it again as an adult (though perhaps with less people and more privacy), but unfortunately I just don't know that many people who would be up for it!

[IkmoIkmo]

It's a tricky by-product of the market. People are hostile to the idea because their property values drop when you get lots of micro homes in the area. And the property values rise when you have low density housing, privacy, little traffic, families with kids and dogs etc.

In other words, anywhere you want to do this, you're opposed by people who already live there, who usually have quite a bit to say about the area.

And anyone who wants to take away that influence from incumbent homeowners or tenants will be marked as someone who is destroying a long standing community for the sake of outsiders who want to take it over.

It is indeed a shame as I'm personally a big fan of small homes and at one point tried to get a new housing project off the ground.

But I'm seeing in some places slow consideration for new ways of living. From turning office buildings who've struggled to reach 25% occupancy in places where living rents are skyrocketing into homes, to microhomes.

In any case, it's not an easy issue. In some ways, small housing shares similarities with minimum wage: just because the economy is such that without a legal minimum wage, adults would still be willing to work for $4, doesn't mean we ought to allow it and let the market figure it out. People will get exploited. Similarly, the government needs to set building standards, including the minimum space a home ought to have, in my opinion (I just happen to think it can be quite small, if properly built, for certain people). If you don't have these standards, I would be the least surprised if we suddenly found large groups of students, young adults and struggling working poor living like they do as the 'Rat Tribe' in Beijing. [0] And again, like minimum wage, we don't want that.

But yeah then we're talking, really really small. <500 sq ft should really not be an issue. I live with my girlfriend on a little over 400 at the moment and it's great.

[0] http://projects.aljazeera.com/2015/01/underground-beijing/

[spiritplumber]

Yeah, I tried to do that in some warehouse space in the north bay - no go, and the planning folks made it clear that if I bought the warehouse anyway and did it under the table, I'd get busted.

[stephenboyd]

It might be naive of me to think that maybe you haven't already seen this, but if there are any examples of what you're trying to accomplish in California, they're probably somewhere on this list: http://www.ic.org/directory/listings/?cmty-country=United%20...

California certainly has some ecovillages, but most have buildings sized like typical houses.

[socrates2016]

That reminds me of the SROs that used to dot the SOMA area before being slowly replaced with high rises. Many of the warehouses in the area are being converted into offices. One room with shared bathrooms and kitchens. Chinatown still has some of this housing as does the Tenderloin. I believe the Tenderloin is losing it fast with all the tech companies moving to the mid Market area. I don't think it's a good long term housing situation because of the tragedy of the commons.

[saalweachter]

Have you talked to any existing communes about their planning and permits? While communal living isn't exactly common, it's also not exactly virgin territory.

[nickfox]

There is a solution. Tiny houses on wheels. That makes a lot of the permitting go away... Google it.

[stickfigure]

Unfortunately it is not that simple. It just changes the permitting process to something more along the lines of an RV park, which may or may not be easier depending on location, zoning, and neighbors. All the counties we have looked at have written ordinances that can be used to prevent tinyhouse-on-wheels villages on rural (low-density) property.

That said, some counties are apparently friendlier to this idea than others. And it is our fallback plan.