When Affordable Solutions to the Housing Shortage Are Illegal

Originally posted on Quora November 5, 2022

As housing prices and rents continue to outpace lower income and even median income wage growth (i.e. rack rents), more people are turning to flexible and compact solutions for their housing needs. One such solution proliferating in cities across the country are the tiny houses that are 400 square feet or less and often on wheels. This is the solution Chasidy Decker chose after she was priced out of the Boise Idaho realty market, where tiny houses are illegal outside of RV parks. She found a homeowner in the Boise suburb of Meridian willing to rent his lot out for $600 a month but it seems that Meridian also makes such living arrangements illegal outside of RV parks, which have run out of vacancies in the Boise metro area. As I noted several years ago, many cities across the country prohibit their residents from living in houses under an arbitrary minimum square footage making it clear they’d rather some of their residents stay homeless (Like in Las Vegas) than allow a variance to their zoning and building codes.

Decker’s case is not the first constitutional challenge to minimum floor space ordinances the Institute for Justice has taken on. Last year the public interest law firm sued the city of Calhoun, GA for blocking a non-profit developer from building a cottage house neighborhood on a donated lot. Even though these cottage houses would be between 540 to 600 square feet, much larger than the average tiny house, they are still illegal in the town of Calhoun and most of Georgia where minimum floor space requirements range between 1200 and as high as 1600 square feet. Even in my own backyard, building codes, zoning ordinances and the American tradition of NIMBYism make tiny houses all but illegal. Plans to build a 20 tiny house community for the homeless in New Orleans East was stifled after a contingent of homeowners and a city councilman opposed the project fearing for their “property values.” In most of the city, mobile homes, the second most affordable option, are illegal due to flood insurance policies, leaving low-income residents stuck between rack rents and unobtainable house prices. Of course, tiny houses aren’t illegal everywhere. Some cities across the country have not only allowed variances for tiny house villages but pursued them as a matter of policy for alleviating homelessness.