We have a travel trailer that we use for camping, but there are many people that live in small custom built homes made on trailers. I really think these are interesting how they build them and use every bit of space and makes some cool floorplans. We have no plans on buying one or living in one but they are pretty cool to see what can be done with them. Now that I have looked at videos and articles about them my google feed is full of articles talking about tiny houses. One I just saw that really caught my eye was this one click here. This article is about the problems and things you don’t think about when living in a tiny house. I figured it would just be more about how you don’t have space to entertain people or not enough space for a family or not being able to have all the stuff you may want as there is not enough storage. This was definitely not the case for about half of the article. It was more about how government regulations and zoning laws can make it hard to actually live in these tiny homes.
Benefits of a Tiny Home
Some of the benefits I see are much the same as a travel trailer, motorhome or fifth wheel except that they seem more like a house then one of the other three. They can relatively easily be moved, you can fit more homes in a smaller area, they are usually more reasonably price than a standard stick built home, your utilities for heating and cooling may be cheaper and there are probably various other benefits depending on your lifestyle. With this being said there are even benefits for the government. In our area there is always what they call a housing shortage, which really means that people like the area, there isn’t much more area to build homes and thus the high demand increases the price. So really it is more of just expensive housing. There are then a couple things that could be a benefit these may be cheaper homes, more density of homes by allowing them in the back of properties and a smaller footprint and less use of energy which the government always talks about that global warming they like to scare us with.
How Does the Government Screw it up?
Like everything, the government is good at screwing it up. Most of the time the government may have supposed goals that conflict with each other. They want the small homes so they can say there is affordable housing, they want small homes to “fix” global warming and they also want strict building codes to make everybody “safe”. In reality they just think they know better than us plebs.
In the article linked above it is interesting that some of the problems come from laws that don’t even exist but the bureaucrats take the power themselves and decide just to make their own rules. In the article they say there are not zoning laws regarding small homes and thus the person giving the permit is confused, incompetent and make it almost impossible to have. One man had to get a $10,000 inspection and that means tearing up his home to make sure it is built correctly. This is totally nuts that with no law they would think they could make things harder rather than the opposite. Most have to go around the laws by treating it as a travel trailer but that means they can’t have things like mail to their address.
This is where you see the conflict. It seems that tiny houses would be a win win for the government to say they helped people get into houses cheap, yet instead they make it more and more expensive and more and more difficult to own due to some of their own incompetence but also they have their power to make things really hard for you. In this case the man decided to just sell the tiny house to build a similar sized cabin to be considered a regular home. Where is the sense in any of this. Most of the time the government will attempt to fix a problem, but create another problem. They are chasing their tales to get to the next solution.
As soon as I was done I saw another interesting article, not necessarily about tiny homes, but about the government making it almost impossible for a couple to build a home on their own land due to what the EPA considered navigable water that were a few small water ponds on the land. Check it out here
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