We at the Lab recently came upon a recent story in a Michigan newspaper with a disheartening title: “Tiny house turns into big headache for Michigan man.”
We were expecting it to be about how tiny house living was not what it’s usually cracked up to be. Haters gonna hate, we shrugged. But then, as we kept reading, it turned out that the big headache had little to do with the tiny house experience. Rather, it had to do with outdated regulations:
For Bellows it had to do finding a legal way to keep his tiny house on his own piece of land. He found a 3.8-acre piece of land in Lapeer County, but Bellows said in order to be there legally the home had to be at least 960-square feet.
So in January 2012 — after almost five months of living in his tiny house on his own piece of land — he was forced to move out.
Now, as the tiny house movement is on the brink of going mainstream, the project of legalizing tiny — updating housing regulations to allow for voluntary tiny house living — is more important than ever! Read the full story here.