After 2 years, couple sells tiny home without ever living in it | Hacker News Reader

After 2 years, couple sells tiny home without ever living in it

cbc.ca

29 pointscolinprince12 comments

These kinds of zoning restrictions cause so many more problems than they resolve. If somebody wants to live in a small home, the law shouldn't get in their way. They make sense for tenant rights, or home selling, but why impede someone's personal freedoms?

I don't even see them making sense for tenant rights or home selling. Placing a minimum on the size of apartment someone's allowed to rent to me, or the size of home I can buy ultimately comes into conflict with my right to decide how much money I'm willing to spend.

Other housing codes - say, requiring the wiring not to be a fire hazard - make a lot of sense as a way to protect me in situations where I can't reasonably be expected to have the expertise necessary to assess the situation for myself. But I am the ultimate authority when it comes to deciding how much space I need for myself and all my crap.

I tend to agree with this sentiment but it does sound a lot like the whole “if people want to sign up to be slaves to Uber because they have no other options then that is their right” argument which I have mixed feelings about. I could imagine a situation where new construction in SF is all 100sft units because it maximizes rent ROI which would if anything make larger spaces even more expensive then they are.

Wouldn't that still be better than the current situation? It seems like a lot of these laws, in an attempt to define the acceptable minimum as middle class, just end up pricing lower income people out of the market altogether. I think it should be alright to allow for lower minimums as long as the main priority of fluid class mobility remains high.

> According to current town bylaws, a house needs to be at least 80 square metres, or about 860 square feet. That's more than twice as big as the couple's tiny home.

I have lived in a house (not just an apartment) that was smaller than that – 800 square feet – and it was a perfectly normal cemesto built in the 1940s. Two bedroom, one bath. That's a bylaw that was written for developers, not for people.

Take a walk through Vancouver a little bit after sunset in spring / summer and you'll see less than half the apartments with their lights off.

I understand the couple's house was too small, but hopefully they generated some profit from whatever land they were on.

I wonder if laws like minimum house sizes are fit for purpose now that we have less space, millennials have less ability to buy houses, property prices are higher as percentages of wages, and safety in homes has come a very long way.

Are you not allowed to live in a camping trailer or RV on your own land in that town? Studio apartments are around 400-500 sqft so I'm not really sure why all homes must be larger than 800 sqft in that town. At least with a tiny house on a plot of land, you have much more potential usable space (wraparound porch, patio, garage, etc) than you would with a 400sqft apartment.

May not permit year round trailer _living_ because of things like sewer, waste, etc. devil is in the details.

Living in a trailer anywhere too uptight to approve a tiny house is almost certainly not something you can do above the table since that is likely what the bylaws that are preventing the tiny house were adopted specifically to prevent.

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