This is the ridiculous result if you try to build a tiny house in most places

TinyHouseTalk — a blog dedicated to the micro-house movement — posted this graphic as an example of the kind of home you could design if you want "to build tiny or build small while still meeting minimum local building and zoning codes."

(TinyHouseTalk)

The real issue here is not the difficulty of drawing up a code-compliant building; it's that it makes no sense to have this parking requirement in the first place. If a person prefers, all things considered, to live in a tiny house with no off-street parking, a person should be allowed to live in a tiny house with no off-street parking. With the money you save, you could take crazy vacations or enjoy lavish meals or retire freakishly early or whatever you want.

Of course, most people are going to want to own a car and a place to store the car. But precisely because this is such a no-brainer feature of a house in 21st-century America, there's no special need to mandate it.

Almost every house has a freezer, which seems sensible to me. But the actual size varies widely, and if for some reason you didn't want a freezer you would be free to eschew one.

It would be different if car storage were some kind of useful social externality — like a vaccine or a school — but in the real world, more car storage is associated with more traffic congestion and more air pollution — things we should not be encouraging more of.

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