"Hacking" is about thinking outside the box, getting your hands dirty in the process by taking things apart and putting them back together, regardless of someone telling "no, don't do that". Starting with that mindset can lead you to find new and creative solutions that can transform or change the world, or maybe just the part of it that matters to you.
Inside every hacker startup is someone who disregarded someone else saying "you can't do that" or "don't look behind the curtain", and came out the other side with a new method. The startup part of the process is taking that idea and getting it out into the world, learning how to adapt what you've learned to what the world needs.
Municipal, "little brother" regs are a major impediment to a lot of ideas. Companies like Uber fought against that. Sometimes they won, sometimes they caused mass protests by entrenched stakeholders and lost.
I applaud this couple for at least trying to work with the municipality to make some positive changes. As they noted, lots of other people just break the law, leveraging their social privilege to avoid being held to account. For those who don't have the ability to avoid prosecution, it takes someone else standing up and saying "I'm not just going to break the law, I'm going to help fix it for others" to make a difference.
Like most startups... most of these efforts fail. Good on them for at least trying for what they believe in.
My wife and I have been trying to work with the local city/county governments to try and build an Earth Bag style home. We both love the idea of a more natural building material and the fact that we (and some family members) can do the construction ourselves over a longer time frame.
However, the city isn't exactly willing to accept the construction method due to it not being standard techniques. I get that it's harder to know what to inspect, but it's a pain that it's so tedious to try and get it approved.
I wonder if laws like minimum house sizes are fit for purpose now that we have less space, millennials have less ability to buy houses, property prices are higher as percentages of wages, and safety in homes has come a very long way.
Are you not allowed to live in a camping trailer or RV on your own land in that town? Studio apartments are around 400-500 sqft so I'm not really sure why all homes must be larger than 800 sqft in that town. At least with a tiny house on a plot of land, you have much more potential usable space (wraparound porch, patio, garage, etc) than you would with a 400sqft apartment.
Living in a trailer anywhere too uptight to approve a tiny house is almost certainly not something you can do above the table since that is likely what the bylaws that are preventing the tiny house were adopted specifically to prevent.
These kinds of zoning restrictions cause so many more problems than they resolve. If somebody wants to live in a small home, the law shouldn't get in their way. They make sense for tenant rights, or home selling, but why impede someone's personal freedoms?
I don't even see them making sense for tenant rights or home selling. Placing a minimum on the size of apartment someone's allowed to rent to me, or the size of home I can buy ultimately comes into conflict with my right to decide how much money I'm willing to spend.
Other housing codes - say, requiring the wiring not to be a fire hazard - make a lot of sense as a way to protect me in situations where I can't reasonably be expected to have the expertise necessary to assess the situation for myself. But I am the ultimate authority when it comes to deciding how much space I need for myself and all my crap.
I tend to agree with this sentiment but it does sound a lot like the whole “if people want to sign up to be slaves to Uber because they have no other options then that is their right” argument which I have mixed feelings about. I could imagine a situation where new construction in SF is all 100sft units because it maximizes rent ROI which would if anything make larger spaces even more expensive then they are.
Wouldn't that still be better than the current situation? It seems like a lot of these laws, in an attempt to define the acceptable minimum as middle class, just end up pricing lower income people out of the market altogether. I think it should be alright to allow for lower minimums as long as the main priority of fluid class mobility remains high.
> According to current town bylaws, a house needs to be at least 80 square metres, or about 860 square feet. That's more than twice as big as the couple's tiny home.
I have lived in a house (not just an apartment) that was smaller than that – 800 square feet – and it was a perfectly normal cemesto built in the 1940s. Two bedroom, one bath. That's a bylaw that was written for developers, not for people.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 49.3 ms ] threadAlso failing to see how this is "hacker" "news".
"Hacking" is about thinking outside the box, getting your hands dirty in the process by taking things apart and putting them back together, regardless of someone telling "no, don't do that". Starting with that mindset can lead you to find new and creative solutions that can transform or change the world, or maybe just the part of it that matters to you.
Inside every hacker startup is someone who disregarded someone else saying "you can't do that" or "don't look behind the curtain", and came out the other side with a new method. The startup part of the process is taking that idea and getting it out into the world, learning how to adapt what you've learned to what the world needs.
Municipal, "little brother" regs are a major impediment to a lot of ideas. Companies like Uber fought against that. Sometimes they won, sometimes they caused mass protests by entrenched stakeholders and lost.
I applaud this couple for at least trying to work with the municipality to make some positive changes. As they noted, lots of other people just break the law, leveraging their social privilege to avoid being held to account. For those who don't have the ability to avoid prosecution, it takes someone else standing up and saying "I'm not just going to break the law, I'm going to help fix it for others" to make a difference.
Like most startups... most of these efforts fail. Good on them for at least trying for what they believe in.
However, the city isn't exactly willing to accept the construction method due to it not being standard techniques. I get that it's harder to know what to inspect, but it's a pain that it's so tedious to try and get it approved.
I understand the couple's house was too small, but hopefully they generated some profit from whatever land they were on.
Other housing codes - say, requiring the wiring not to be a fire hazard - make a lot of sense as a way to protect me in situations where I can't reasonably be expected to have the expertise necessary to assess the situation for myself. But I am the ultimate authority when it comes to deciding how much space I need for myself and all my crap.
I have lived in a house (not just an apartment) that was smaller than that – 800 square feet – and it was a perfectly normal cemesto built in the 1940s. Two bedroom, one bath. That's a bylaw that was written for developers, not for people.