What Ever Happened to the Tiny House Movement? | Hacker News Reader

What Ever Happened to the Tiny House Movement?

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5 pointsBrajeshwar7 comments

The article developed so slowly that I quit reading it. I just read an aphorism that went something like this: The Raspberry Jam Principle-The more you spread it the thinner it gets.

What’s the surface area of our planet divided by the population? I think it’s about 1 square km per person. Naturally much of that space is not inhabitable[0], and naturally people want to live near to other people.

But that’s a problem with tiny houses: sometimes they’re appropriate but in many intelligent scenarios they are foolish

Edit- I meant that tiny houses may be foolish because there’s better ways to live

[0] probably I’m wrong, correct information is welcome

> What’s the surface area of our planet divided by the population? I think it’s about 1 square km per person.

some don't want to live in the middle of the ocean

True! Thank you

Though seasteaders may argue.

But what is the habitable land area available for our current population? Any ideas?

[I don’t know]

yes if some want to live on mars or on the moon then some probably also would like to live literally anywhere on the surface of the earth. but probably more would like to live in a tiny house than in rough places like middle of ocean or sahara desert

I don’t doubt it. But the question was: how much space do we have? And how much of that is space that we want?

I’m not disagreeing. I simply don’t know

Zoning laws.

I spent a fair amount of time working with the Alameda (city) council a few years ago trying to get some of the Alameda Naval Base to be rezoned for some tiny homes.

The zoning laws required a minimum of a 2,000 square foot lot for a single family, and you cannot share infrastructure between lots - so you had to have a separate sewer, water, electrical system - and so you couldnt build a commmon, trench-based infra network and plant tiny homes on top of it.

The shared infra works for an apartment building, but a group of tiny homes cant be considered an apartment building/complex because the zoning laws required a single entrance to the "building" and tiny homes have separate entries, and thus cant be zoned with apartment-building-code requirements.

It wasa a catch-22 cluster of stupid rules.

I was working with Wind River Tiny Homes who has experience in zoning laws, and they said the laws were deliberately draconian in California.

There was one person on the city council, and the mayor, who sold out to Comcast when they sold the rights to all cable/tv/internet to Comcast in exchange for donations...

We need a better mechanism for building zoning controls, and for modifying/taking them out as well.

typical low-level municipal corruption a step above a PTA.

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