Chelsea Rustrum can picture her future tiny house village like she's looking at a postcard.
Located within commuting distance of San Francisco, it has 10 to 20 homes on wheels nestled in the grass. They circle a community center where residents can grill over a fire pit, stage a film screening, and tend the garden. Pathways connect homes to the hub like spokes on a wheel, and each 150-square-foot abode has as much character as its owner.
"I saw creatives, entrepreneurs, mindful people, and those of all ages living the dream by doing more with less," Rustrum, who works as a consultant on the sharing economy, tells Tech Insider. "I thought about how much money people would save, and how they'd value each item they owned with more fervor."
What she didn't see coming was a legal battle.
The problem is that most city and county governments don't authorize residences under a certain square footage. Development codes have requirements on plumbing, utilities, and building foundations that such unconventional dwellings can't possibly meet.
Cute as they may be, tiny houses are often illegal.
In 2014, San Francisco was named the most expensive place to rent a one-bedroom apartment for the first time. An influx of tech workers displaced low-income earners from their Bay Area homes, even in formerly affordable places like Oakland. Residents regularly protested rising evictions and rents by blocking private buses that shuttled people to Silicon Valley. The problem continues to get worse.
At least partially as a result of all this, the tiny house movement started gathering steam. The homes are affordable, costing between $200 and $400 per square foot (a one-bedroom unit in San Francisco averages $1,028 per square foot). As a bonus, they're often environmentally friendly, helping homeowners reduce their carbon footprint and limit their possessions. (Did we mention they're adorable?)
They aren't a particularly wise use of San Francisco's limited space, but there's room outside the city.
Rustrum organized quickly. She registered a domain name for the Bay Area's Tiny House Village and gathered a team of like-minded individuals to "tackle the nuts and bolts of making a village possible." They took to Craigslist with a wanted ad for land within 30 miles.
"I naïvely thought that we could just illegally park a number of tiny homes on a leased plot of land," Rustrum says.
They were wrong.
Like most urban areas in the US, the San Francisco Bay Area isn't friendly to "micro dwellings." The issue boils down to one unsexy obstacle: zoning.
As San Francisco-based blogger Emily Pinkerton explains in The Bold Italic, many building codes are based on a set of recommendations by the International Code Council, a domestic trade group. They state that a house needs to have a main room of 120 square feet and no habitable room less than 70 square feet, which essentially outlaws the tiny house.
There are also restrictions on land density in most cities' planning department codes. Developers have to squeeze a certain number of residents into a space to make the most of it. Most tiny houses fit one to two people, and you can't stack them like apartment units.
A popular workaround is classifying the tiny house, since it's often built on a trailer bed, as a recreational vehicle. Owners register them with the DMV. However, there are limits on how long and where they can be parked, which makes it near impossible to stage a permanent ground for a village of tiny houses.
"Money isn't an issue. We have a number of investors ready to be part of the project," Rustrum says. "Interest isn't the issue. I have thousands of people who want to live there and multiple people emailing me daily to ask about the progress of the village."
She estimates that between land, development, design, and engineering, the tiny house village will cost at least $1 million to build.
Rustrum and her team of 10 cohorts now regularly meet with city and county government officials, and are developing templates for legalizing tiny homes in towns surrounding the Bay Area.
They're also planning a hackathon, where designers, developers, civic engineers, lawyers, teck workers, and other tiny house evangelists would come together to brainstorm ways to remove legal hurdles.
"It's going to take more than talking to city officials," Rustrum says. "It will take the public to say, 'we want this.'"
There is hope. Earlier this month, Fresno, California, passed groundbreaking legislation that would allow a homeowner to park a tiny home as a permanent second dwelling on the property. It's the first city in the country to write authorization for tiny homes into its development codes, and some are saying the ordinance may set a precedent.
Rustrum already has her eye on a plot of land in Santa Rosa, California. It's spacious enough that two dozen people making a lot of noise wouldn't bother the neighbors outside the village.
She dreams that residents will come into the space with their own tiny houses and pay a membership fee of roughly $600 a month for utilities, maintenance, and access to the community center.
And as Rustrum gets to know her organizers better — from a middle-aged woman looking to retire comfortably, to an elderly architect who lives in an Airstream trailer drawing up his own blueprints for the village — her faith in the project grows.
"These people are amazing," she says, "of course I want to live with them."
