How to live large in a tiny house
I love the idea of tiny houses (and not-so-tiny houses like this one) clumped around a much larger shared space. I love it so much that I'm part of a (currently) seven party consortium trying to find rural acreage in unincorporated parts of the outer SF Bay Area to build such a thing. What we've discovered is that zoning ordinances in every county of California are openly hostile to the idea. The general rule is basically one ginormous single-family home (with a single kitchen) per parcel. Sometimes a second, but that's pretty much it.<p>It might be possible to get variances or special permits from friendly planning departments, but it's hard to convince a group of people to make large $ investments in dreams which could be destroyed arbitrarily by changing political winds. We may take the risk anyways, but our problem has gone from practical matters of structure and finance to a fundamentally political one.<p>This is really a shame. I suspect that a lot of people, like us, would be perfectly happy in low-footprint small (<500 sq ft) homes as long as they had easy access to a fancy kitchen, home theater, storage, etc in a space shared with a dozen of their friends. I always wondered why this isn't common - and the answer is, at least in California, it's effectively illegal.