[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 :-)