For some, flouting zoning restrictions is an accepted, even celebrated, aspect of a culture that rejects the American appetite for big houses, rampant consumption and excess stuff. “It’s one of the last things we have where you can kind of stick it to the man,” Marcus Stoltzfus, a co-owner of Liberation Tiny Homes, near Lancaster, Pa., said with a smile.But the comments are not accepting the Creative Rebels template:
In the right setting, illicit tiny-house dwellers can usually get away with it. “If it’s off the road and you’re on good terms with your neighbors, you probably won’t have an issue,” said Dave Cramer, an owner of Hudson River Tiny Homes, in the Albany area....
For the time being... finding a place to live long-term in a tiny house requires creativity, flexibility and considerable networking....
1. "What is completely missed by the author, and ignored by the tiny home advocates, is that the building codes exist for a reason. There are very important reasons we have, for example, 2 doors, indoor plumbing, fire resistant walls between kitchens and dwellings, ventilation in bathrooms and a whole bunch of other lessons that have been written in blood."
2. "To live in a tiny home and tread lightly on the planet, rent or buy a tiny home stacked with many others and located in a walkable neighborhood near public transit so you can sell your car. In other words, move to an apartment. It's a healthier and greener way to live than plopping a tiny home down on your own lot in the country."
3. "Nice desire to live 'off the grid' with no municipal regulation or overhead. But that's no reason to be exempt from tax and regulation while tapping into private or municipal services illegally, and there needs to be regulation of fire and safety codes as well as sewage disposal for the sake of others, and documentation about sale and resale for safety reasons. And all should have to meet insurance standards and be insured, just like everybody else in everyday America. Expensive but true."
The word "tax" doesn't appear in the article, which does, however, mention the wheels on the house: "Most tiny homes are built on wheeled trailers that can be towed. Unlike R.V.s, however, tiny houses are generally not wheeled for touring, so much as for flexibility of location." Flexibility of location or tax avoidance?
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73 comments:
My daughter was being interviewed for a job with Apple last spring. One serious consideration was where she would live if she got the job, She had finally decided on a small RV if the job materialized but she still didn't know where she would park it. She was relieved when the job did not materialize. It was interesting but the problem of where to live was just as important.
This Tiny House fad makes a Virtue of Necessity, and we all know how important Virtue can be.
Tornado bait.
The requirement for ventilation in bathrooms is written in mold, not blood.
Thread jacking removed. Including everyone who responded to it.
This is a thread about where to park tiny houses.
If you have other subjects, wait for a cafe or find a post on the subject. Or get your own damned blog.
I'm going to sell them on the internet (including free shipping). Make millions and move to Miami.................
The commercials are going to be great!
I told him, but he just wouldn't listen.
>It was interesting but the problem of where to live was just as important.
Housing's a big problem, especially for entrance level jobs in tech. And depending on where you are, there's not much of a gap in rents between studios and two bedrooms.
Some sort of cheap housing needs to be made available, but where and how I don't know.
Nothing says "stick it to the Man" like leaving a steaming pile of raw sewage as you pull away towing your Tiny House.
Actually, in many places out west (MT, for example) there are no building codes for your own dwelling. Interestingly, there *are* regulations for septic, but mostly outhouses are specifically exempted, so the building shows I watch on YouTube show some interesting work-arounds for the "off the grid" people.
And nowhere in the country, AFAIK, is there a requirement to insure your property. If you owe money your bank will require insurance.
I am not sure the legal requirements to insure an RV like structure.
Final point - if you tow a trailer, you have to register it (above a certain size) - there is your tax right there.
But the above make it hard to be a hipster.
-XC
NB - a Marine head with a holding tank would solve a lot of problems. Expensive though, but any marina or RV service center can take that crap off your hands.
_XC
Why don't they levy property taxes in a cemetary? You would think the cocksuckers would have thought of that already.
Imagine if the article -- and the comments -- were about the homeless, rather than the nonformist. Replace "tiny home" with "homeless" and it's an interesting read.
It also recalls David Sedaris' distinction between a hobo and a homeless person:
It was only at Halloween that we were allowed to choose our own outfits. One year I went as a pirate, but from then on I was always a hobo. It's a word you don't often hear anymore. Along with "tramp." It's been replaced by "homeless person," which isn't the same thing. Unlike someone who was evicted or lost his house in a fire, the hobo roughed it by choice. Being a liberty, unencumbered by bills and mortgages, better suited his drinking schedule and so he found shelter wherever he could, never a bum, but something less threatening somehow, a figure of merriment, almost.
*nonconformist*
They have tiny homes in parts of KC, they are called trailer parks. That's where you can park your tiny home and have sewer and electricity.
BTW, what famous Democratic strategist said, " Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find."
My problem with the Tiny Homes is that they are just as expensive as a small house, with the latter having far more room.
I’ve got a small, young family. We are renting. I want to get my own home, so I thought “Tiny homes are cheap, right, because they are so small. Start with one of those, live in it while I build a bigger home.”
The cost for the tiny home is just the same as building a small house of your own, but smaller, cramped, less insulation, etc. Plus, it appears they are illegal in my county, and I’m in a rural area.
So what’s the point of them? Spend your 80 grand on something else.
—Vance
How about a shipping container solution. There will be levels and the containers will be stacked. Each container will be a biosphere unto itself. The ultimate high density population solution that appeals to businesses and politicians alike.
Or the Matrix solution, where we go full virtual.
The calls to conformity of those comments critical of tiny homes is the problem progressive run societies. The crabs reaching up to pull the others down trying to escape urban housing problems with innovative ideas.
Leaving the wheels on + tax avoidance. My Dad bought a cheap trailer to put his storage unit on just for that reason. Permanently bolt the unit to the trailer, viola, it's a vehicle and not a structure.
Housing's a big problem, especially for entrance level jobs in tech. And depending on where you are, there's not much of a gap in rents between studios and two bedrooms.
It was not an entry level job. It was as a member of the design team but housing is still an issue.
I sent her an article from the Guardian about housing for engineers. A small house a two hour commute from Cupertino is about $1.5 million.
The Cupertino house are about $1200 per square foot.
1,000 square fett, $1.2 million.
>It was not an entry level job. It was as a member of the design team but housing is still an issue.
I stand corrected. I still agree, it's a big quality of life problem.
Two hour commute? My only two hour commute was from Manhattan to a studio apartment in Peekskill. The thought of a million dollar mortgage and a two hour commute is horrible.
"“It’s one of the last things we have where you can kind of stick it to the man,” Marcus Stoltzfus, a co-owner of Liberation Tiny Homes, near Lancaster, Pa., said with a smile"
The mass of Leftists lead lives of quiet self-parody.
Those statist nannies almost made me sympathetic for the tiny house hippy weirdos.
The capitalize part of me started thinking about setting up an upscale RV park for folks with those tiny houses. So long as I can find a location with a Whole Foods and a good wine bar nearby, it should be a winner. Of course, it already sounds like an episode of South Park.
Every time I see a show or news item on tiny homes, the subtext seems to be that we should, as a people, lower our expectations.
Hubby and I went on our last "camping" trip of the year a few weekends ago. Camping is in quotes because we are really in a 23 ft trailer with A/C, forced air heat, hot water, shower, fully equipped kitchen. etc. The livable space is less than 200 sq ft. It is pretty nice, but TINY!
We discussed the tiny house living fad and decided that the only way we could 'live' in a space the size of our camping trailer would be by dire necessity. You would really get on each other's nerves in such a small space after even a month or so. Yikes for living that way on a permanent basis..
Trying to find a legal place to park or having to move all the time. What a pain.
A tiny house or permanent camp trailer on our property would be cool for a guest accommodation. We could build a nice deck, have a part of it covered for shade, put in a bbq and outdoor eating space, hook it up to the septic, electric and water. It would be in range of our wi-fi and guests would probably find it an adventure to stay for a while.
However, to choose to permanently or long term live in a 'camp trailer' is just crazy. It just seems to be yet another method of virtue signalling by clueless urbanites.
There are places to park your tiny house it's called an RV park. A tiny house is just an RV with Danish design that's it
I like tiny houses that are actually houses. I like to see them built on a foundation. A trailer is something else.
Talk in S.F Bay area is allowing tiny houses in back yards. Building codes already relaxed years ago to allow converting garages into living spaces.
Also, plenty of talk about affordable housing in San Francisco, which is pretty fucking ironic because they imploded the "affordable" projects awhile back, and replaced the projects in another area with expensive homes.
BTW, you can buy older homes 30-45 min from Cupertino for 6-800 thousand. Nothing special, just an ordinary tract home.
Situation is, as older homeowners move, new guy has to make a lot of money to afford payments.
Fifty year mortgage might make a difference.
It is always hilarious to watch self-styled non-conformists bitch about each other's differences of opinion.
I like tiny houses that are actually houses.
Movie stars like Bette Davis built some tiny (in all 3 dimensions) houses on the north end of Nantucket. It made amusing PR photos and must have been a nice contrast to their opulent Hollywood lives. For a few days a year.
Wasn't there a post here about fire stations not saving houses that hadn't paid for it in advance? Would that force these houses to park in organized trailer parks if the houses are worth saving (or could be)?
For the progressives it is all about control. Tiny houses on wheels deprive them of control, so they hate it.
Hippy Dippy Left meets Big Government Left.
Have fun you two!
Full disclosure: I seriously researched and thought deeply about buying a tiny house a little while back. If there was a good jurisdiction that allowed them in my state I probably would have bought one. There aren't, so I didn't.
There were a couple of OK trailer parks that will allow long term parking for a tiny house, but the lot rental fee made the economics not work.
A guy in an area I liked in NC said if I bought the large-ish lot I was looking at I could almost certainly park one there far enough back that no one would object/the authorities wouldn't see it, but I didn't want to risk it and the setup I liked best had a electric grid tie option--I'm not sure I could get the power company out there without someone catching on.
you can buy older homes 30-45 min from Cupertino for 6-800 thousand. Nothing special, just an ordinary tract home.
This is the Guardian article.
Another tech worker feeling excluded from the real estate market was 41-year-old Michael, who works at a networking firm in Silicon Valley and last year earned $700,000. Sick of his 22-mile commute to work, which can sometimes take up to two and half hours, he explored buying a property nearer work.
“We went to an open house in Los Gatos that would shorten my commute by eight miles. It was 1,700 sq ft and listed at $1.4m. It sold in 24 hours for $1.7m,” he said.
Maybe you know better.
Tiny houses are for the little people, Bette Davis notwithstanding.
I like tiny houses that are actually houses.
Maybe it's a Dolls House thing.
As much as I dislike hippie posturing, I should point out that much zoning and code stuff is not about safety in any case.
(Indoor plumbing? That's pure, glorious convenience.
Square footage requirements and the like? Purely there to keep out poor people and low-rent types and "flophouses"*.
* People love to point out Roosevelt's Minimum Wage Law and "everyone should have a living wage!" from 1935 as justification for their $15/hr "everyone should be able to afford their own studio apartment" line.
Problem is, adjusted, that's like $5/hr, and the standard for "living wage" has moved goalposts from "shelter in a group home and food" to "a nice apartment to yourself, a car, and basically an entire middle-class lifestyle".
Someday they might figure out that work exists to create value, not to pay employees, but that's a rough one for people who insist that all labor should provide such a lifestyle as a right.)
Expat(ish) said...Actually, in many places out west (MT, for example) there are no building codes for your own dwelling. Interestingly, there *are* regulations for septic, but mostly outhouses are specifically exempted, so the building shows I watch on YouTube show some interesting work-arounds for the "off the grid" people.
The sewage regs make perfect sense from a public health and externality perspective.
The common solutions are dry toilets (using a liner that stores everything so you can later throw it away, composting toilets, or incinerating toilets. You could use an RV toilet/canister toilet but you'd end up having to empty the canisters a lot or have someone come and pump your large black water tanks periodically. I've read about offgird people who set up regular (monthly, I guess) water deliveries and tank pumping, so I guess that could work depending on where you site the house.
Ann Althouse said...I like tiny houses that are actually houses. I like to see them built on a foundation. A trailer is something else.
A trailer is what lets you not nave to comply with the housing codes, though (just with RV/mobile home codes--the big deal is usually the minimum square footage an actual house needs). Lots of people have the house-style houses nominally on a trailer but actually resting on foundation footers (inside the corners of the trailer). They cover the wheels and trailer body with wood or other trim so you can't really tell it's not permanent.
The bigger tiny houses require a mobile home hauler to move, so we're not talking about something that's peripatetic in a real sense--once sited they tend to stay in one place for a while.
A guy in an area I liked in NC said if I bought the large-ish lot I was looking at I could almost certainly park one there far enough back that no one would object/the authorities wouldn't see it, but I didn't want to risk it and the setup I liked best had a electric grid tie option--I'm not sure I could get the power company out there without someone catching on.
Knew a guy in NC who was rehabilitating an old house himself. Very handy guy, I have no doubt his repairs were sound. When it came time to put the power to it, he had to get it certified by a local county official, a personal enemy of his (who had, I believe, dissed is wife & kids). It was killing him to make nice to this guy knowing that he could cost him thousands of dollars if he decided to (continue to be) an ass.
So, yes, you will get noticed, and not just by the power company.
My daughter, the one who interviewed with Apple a dozen times, has now bought a 5 acre property in Idaho. She is trying to figure out what sort of dwelling to put on it. I suggested an RV until she can afford to build a small house. First she needs to dig a well.
"Ann Althouse said...
If you have other subjects, wait for a cafe or find a post on the subject. Or get your own damned blog."
I fear "Make Your Own Damn Blog" has been taken. You will have to use a different phrasing.
http://makeyourowndamnblog.blogspot.com/
Everyone talking about sewage: You ought to meet my Oakland landlord. He was a curious combination: he'd fix anything we asked about with extreme alacrity, but as cheaply as humanly possible. Therefore, when our plumbing backed up three times in the space of a month, and the roots of a couple large nearby trees were the likely culprits, he did the obvious thing: He sent a man with a jackhammer to open up the whole sewer line, out to the main. And then left it like that for upwards of a year. So we were living next to a literal open sewer, strewn with rubble, in a nice north Oakland suburb. Funny that the cops never noticed it. Perhaps, being in Oakland, they had bigger things on their minds.
Michael K said... [hush][hide comment]
you can buy older homes 30-45 min from Cupertino for 6-800 thousand. Nothing special, just an ordinary tract home.
This is the Guardian article.
Another tech worker feeling excluded from the real estate market was 41-year-old Michael, who works at a networking firm in Silicon Valley and last year earned $700,000. Sick of his 22-mile commute to work, which can sometimes take up to two and half hours, he explored buying a property nearer work.
“We went to an open house in Los Gatos that would shorten my commute by eight miles. It was 1,700 sq ft and listed at $1.4m. It sold in 24 hours for $1.7m,” he said.
Maybe you know better.
Fuck the Gaurdian article. I do know better. I have property in the area, dumbass.
I am no genius, like some here, but I can google 95035 and 95127 and 95122 homes for sale. Anecdotal facts impress the impressionable.I know, I used to be one.
and what may I ask is wrong with tax avoidance? only a liberal/prog find tax avoidance wrong..
"Fuck the Gaurdian article. I do know better. I have property in the area, dumbass."
Do you have a hard on for everyone ?
Maybe this is why you have the history you have,
Those commenters sound like the type of people that would make me want to live in a tiny house out in the woods.
Another tiny homes story popped up, this time from my old stomping grounds, Charlotte NC.
http://www.thestate.com/news/nation-world/national/article177812071.html
This time, it's the "tiny houses will destroy our property values" excuse.
Blogger Michael K said...
"Fuck the Gaurdian article. I do know better. I have property in the area, dumbass."
Do you have a hard on for everyone ?
Maybe this is why you have the history you have,
10/9/17, 2:46 PM
Nope. When you insinuate I am full of shit because you read an article by some asshole in the Guardian, while I actually know what I am talking about, I will mention it in a nice way. Same as I did months ago when I pointed out your Apple daughter could rent a two bedroom apartment in the area for around two thousand a month.
She had finally decided on a small RV if the job materialized but she still didn't know where she would park it.
Anybody else remember Trapper John, MD?
skip ahead to 22:55
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACAe2ASGngI
Michael K said...
My daughter, the one who interviewed with Apple a dozen times, has now bought a 5 acre property in Idaho. She is trying to figure out what sort of dwelling to put on it. I suggested an RV until she can afford to build a small house. First she needs to dig a well.
Sounds like a lot of work. Maybe hire a guy to drill a well instead, and dig a hole for the septic tank.
"while I actually know what I am talking about, I will mention it in a nice way. Same as I did months ago when I pointed out your Apple daughter could rent a two bedroom apartment in the area for around two thousand a month."
OK. So the guy The Guardian interviewed was lying ?
She talked to people and she was pretty relieved the job didn't happen.
"digging a well" does not mean you do it yourself, but I guess you know that and are just being a jerk.
I don't know about the real estate prices near where her job was. We had talked about it in general. She now lives in Santa Monica which is almost as bad.
Michael K said...
"while I actually know what I am talking about, I will mention it in a nice way. Same as I did months ago when I pointed out your Apple daughter could rent a two bedroom apartment in the area for around two thousand a month."
OK. So the guy The Guardian interviewed was lying ?
Maybe not. Doesn't matter, The point is a person can but a home thirty minutes from Cupertino for much less than 1.5 million, LIKE YOU CLAIMED based on a couple of anecdotes. When I pointed that out, you insinuated I was wrong. Of course, I am right, and you are wrong,again. Nice try at diversion I am arguing with you, not the Guardian guy.
And, being the reasonable person I am, I will not ask why your daughter interviewed a dozen times and did not rent a place for a couple of grand so she might work at one of the highest paying, most prestigious, perkified companies in the world.
" When I pointed that out, you insinuated I was wrong."
Actually, I simply commented that maybe you knew better.
Your paranoia did the rest which is why I wonder if your hair trigger temper has gotten you into trouble before?
I will not ask why your daughter interviewed a dozen times and did not rent a place for a couple of grand so she might work at one of the highest paying, most prestigious, perkified companies in the world.
In the end they decided to promote from inside as the women who would have trained her were pregnant.
She was conflicted the whole time about the living costs and what the salary would be. She did get interviewed by the guy who is chief of the design team, which has 20 members.
Michael K said...
" When I pointed that out, you insinuated I was wrong."
Actually, I simply commented that maybe you knew better.
Your paranoia did the rest which is why I wonder if your hair trigger temper has gotten you into trouble before?
10/9/17, 3:52 PM
Yeah, well, fact is, I do know better, correct? Better than the author, and better than you. Regarding property prices/commute times in the area.
OK. So the guy The Guardian interviewed was lying ?
Dear Doc,
Allow me a personal observation: you are not Jewish. Perhaps accordingly, when someone tells you the price, you think that's the price. :-)
President Trump would never do this. He is not Jewish, of course, but he has what we call a Yiddishe kop.
Also, al-Guardian had no reason to search real estate exhaustively, nor to strive for the lowest prices. The more outrageous the numbers, the hotter the story. Plus they are foreigners. So what do they know about a local RE market?
Moral of the story:
Never pay retail!
And never trust content from the Guardian!
Assrat said...
>It was interesting but the problem of where to live was just as important.
Housing's a big problem, especially for entrance level jobs in tech. And depending on where you are, there's not much of a gap in rents between studios and two bedrooms.
Some sort of cheap housing needs to be made available, but where and how I don't know.
Step 1- Get rid of rent control, permanently. It's an unconstitutional taking in any event, despite what courts have ruled.
Step 2- Reasonable zoning that allows high density housing- like apartments- to be built.
Step 3- make eviction easier and quicker for non-payment of rent.
"And never trust content from the Guardian!"
Fair enough but they did quote a guy and it fit with what I do know. I also have a son in the Bay Area.
My daughter lives in a tent controlled apartment in Santa Monica and apartments next door rent for $4500 per month.
rent controlled, not "tent controlled." Even Santa Monica is not that bad.
"Two hour commute? My only two hour commute was from Manhattan to a studio apartment in Peekskill."
Two hours? How were you traveling? Whether by car or train, the commute shouldn't take more than an hour (if not less) from Manhattan to Peekskill. Two hours will get you to Poughkeepsie.
Why do we need tiny houses. Why not small, modest houses. They used to build them, 60 yrs ago. My first was small, 500sf on a fenced lot. Built for a railroad worker.
Except, new buyers want more for their debt.
Robert Cook,
Two hours from Peekskill to Manhattan jumped out at me, too. The only two-hour commute I've ever actually known was a guy who commuted daily from Modesto to our music store in the SF Mission District, though there are obviously a ton of people who make the daily run from Santa Rosa and even further north down to SF, bumper-to-bumper nearly all the way, and now that I'm in OR we see the same thing into and out of Portland, though thankfully not (yet) here. [ETA: No, I've seen worse, in fact been worse, but then I was a little kid. For a couple of years my father drove me to Juilliard from Schenectady, 3 1/4 hours on a decent day. Then we moved downstate, and it was more like an hour.]
The key to avoiding such routine traffic jams is, unsurprisingly, to stay away from large cities, either as homes or as work destinations. Something that a lot of Democrats, in my experience, just refuse to do. This of course feeds into the gerrymandering case now before the SCOTUS, and many other things.
Mansion, penthouse, gated community privilege.
wild chicken,
The one I was talking about above (the one with the open sewer) was a little bigger than that, but not very much. We think it was the original homestead on that patch of land, a clapboard cottage maybe a century old. Later on a much bigger and grander house was built in front of it, closer to what is now Alcatraz Ave.
My house started as two rooms with a 3 foot hallway between them, 650 sq ft total. It's been added to 3 times and moved 20 feet.
We still have a fair number of occupied tiny houses built for cotton mill workers a hundred years ago or more.
"The only two-hour commute I've ever actually known was a guy who commuted daily from Modesto to our music store in the SF Mission District"
The commute from Orange County, north Orange County, to El Segundo took two hours at 5 AM. The return trip, after 2 PM on Friday, could take over 3 hours. Once, I got home at 7 PM.
I now commute from Tucson to Phoenix and at 4 AM it takes 1 1/2 hours. The return at 1 PM takes 2 hours.
I only do that twice, sometimes three times, a week.
The difference is that, in Arizona, it is 110 miles each way. In LA 50 miles each way.
Twice the distance in the same time, or less.
>Two hours? How were you traveling? Whether by car or train, the commute shouldn't take more than an hour (if not less) from Manhattan to Peekskill. Two hours will get you to Poughkeepsie.
Yes, if you have the power to teleport instantly from work to Grand Central, and then from the Peekskill station back to home.
Unfortunately, I did not have those powers at that time.
If the point of having a tiny house on wheels is so that you can pull up to a storm drain in order to dump your sewage, that's sort of illegal and very bad for the environment.
Very typical of NY Times readership.
They are ANSI-code park models, if that.. Otherwise they're effectively tents. Best case you need to move them at least once a year. Middling case they are constructed to the codes of a shed; we don't need no water let the cascading burn... Burn cascading burn.
I don't know that a tiny house has a septic holding tank.
My fantasy small dwelling is a Yurt but the climate needs to be just right. High Country.
Do they float?
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