4 ms·

> Nearly all of the sub-cities around Austin and Dallas, and Austin and Dallas themselves, for instance, have minimum interior area requirements spanning from 1

> Nearly all of the sub-cities around Austin and Dallas, and Austin and Dallas themselves, for instance, have minimum interior area requirements spanning from 1200 to 2000 square feet. Red Oak, just south of Dallas, is particularly egregious. Whoa. That's pretty crazy. Why can't you just build a cottage on your land and live quietly?

SwellJoe 9y ago
On further research, it's a new phenomenon in many of these places. Just in the past ~10 years or so. Red Oak (among the most ridiculous examples I've found) changed their zoning in 2009. Which may explain why there are so many mobile homes in these places...maybe they've been there since 2009 (though several look much newer than that). One of the scarier bits, to me, is that people who are already living in a mobile or manufactured home in Red Oak could stay. But, if they ever needed to do major work on their home, they'd have to get a new permit, and there are several seemingly arbitrary conditions under which the city could force them to remove their home from their property. Worse, if they wanted to replace their mobile or manufactured home with a newer/bigger/whatever one, they would by denied a permit. This kind of clause is pretty common across the country (though most of the actual examples I've found were in the south, including Texas); there have been lawsuits alleging discrimination (unsurprisingly, the rules are seemingly occasionally used against black and brown families to force them out), but I don't think anything good has really come of those suits. The laws are still on the books, so I guess they're still pretty confident they'll win lawsuits. I've never really been all that interested in zoning and the like; it's just such a dry topic. And, while I've owned a house in the past, I just bought it the traditional way...got a realtor, looked at a bunch of houses, and bought the wrong one for too much money. Now that I'm really digging in and wanting to have more direct involvement in my home, I'm just amazed at how crassly classist (and only slightly more subtly racist) housing is in most major municipalities. On a more positive note, Austin has added "granny cottage" rules to some areas of the city, so a secondary tiny home can be added to properties that are large enough and in some parts of the city. And, there are several efforts to enable natural building. Unfortunately, there's so little land available in Austin, and so much demand for housing, that it's not reasonable for me to buy there ($120k is about the cheapest suitable lot I've come across). And, even more positive, I've been studying the Dallas zoning and code tonight, and I can't find anything prohibiting small houses or even manufactured houses. So...I think Dallas might actually be kinda OK. Their building code appears to be the ICC code with minor amendments, which recently has evolved to make tiny houses plausible (there used to be some minimum room size requirements that made houses smaller than ~240 sq ft impossible). I plan to drive over and talk to the city and look at some properties next week, so I'll hopefully have more firm answers on the question of whether I can buy property there and be able to build a house without needing to fight the city for years. I may be a little ranty since it's been a bit frustrating (though the maps are still fun to play with, even when I'm pissed off at certainly classist and probably racist Texas cities).
- pnathan 9y ago
  So why would they change it so recently? Since it's so recent, maybe some of the discussion around it is available/recallable? I mean, I could remark snarkily about the polarization of America and urban vs exurban divides etc, but that probably doesn't relate here. Probably.
  - SwellJoe 9y ago
    I was just talking to my mom about this; she lives in the suburbs of Atlanta, in a neighborhood with those kinds of rules. She suspects, and I agree, that it is to do with the growth of the area itself, due to the growth of the major city nearby. Dallas/Fort Worth is growing pretty fast, Red Oak is nearby, and has seen a lot of new development. All those folks who've bought houses there don't want their housing prices reduced because of very small or manufactured houses nearby. Since house prices are kinda set based on "comparables" anything that makes a neighborhood look cheaper reduces the price of everything in the area. It's sort of rent-seeking by the folks who already own homes in the city, from anyone who might move in in the future. I don't think it is specifically racist or classist, that's just a side effect (that is probably also considered good by many of the homeowners). Basically, home pricing is the recurring theme when it comes to all of these kinds of regulations. Current owners who show up to city council meetings want their house prices to go up; poor folks don't show up to city council meetings (they're busy working their second job), so wealthier folks get their way. It makes me far less interested in living there. I grew up in the homogeneous suburbs, and never want to live there again. I want a corner store in walking distance, I want weird neighbors with a massively overgrown jungle of a yard, I want old houses and new houses...suburban zoning makes all of that illegal.
kwhitefoot 9y ago
Such regulations are used to ensure that poor people don't move in. And in the US this has often be used in a directly racist way to exclude black people. See, for instance, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4083588/#S2title https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4083588/#S2titl....

SwellJoe 9y ago

On further research, it's a new phenomenon in many of these places. Just in the past ~10 years or so. Red Oak (among the most ridiculous examples I've found) changed their zoning in 2009. Which may explain why there are so many mobile homes in these places...maybe they've been there since 2009 (though several look much newer than that). One of the scarier bits, to me, is that people who are already living in a mobile or manufactured home in Red Oak could stay. But, if they ever needed to do major work on their home, they'd have to get a new permit, and there are several seemingly arbitrary conditions under which the city could force them to remove their home from their property. Worse, if they wanted to replace their mobile or manufactured home with a newer/bigger/whatever one, they would by denied a permit. This kind of clause is pretty common across the country (though most of the actual examples I've found were in the south, including Texas); there have been lawsuits alleging discrimination (unsurprisingly, the rules are seemingly occasionally used against black and brown families to force them out), but I don't think anything good has really come of those suits. The laws are still on the books, so I guess they're still pretty confident they'll win lawsuits. I've never really been all that interested in zoning and the like; it's just such a dry topic. And, while I've owned a house in the past, I just bought it the traditional way...got a realtor, looked at a bunch of houses, and bought the wrong one for too much money. Now that I'm really digging in and wanting to have more direct involvement in my home, I'm just amazed at how crassly classist (and only slightly more subtly racist) housing is in most major municipalities. On a more positive note, Austin has added "granny cottage" rules to some areas of the city, so a secondary tiny home can be added to properties that are large enough and in some parts of the city. And, there are several efforts to enable natural building. Unfortunately, there's so little land available in Austin, and so much demand for housing, that it's not reasonable for me to buy there ($120k is about the cheapest suitable lot I've come across). And, even more positive, I've been studying the Dallas zoning and code tonight, and I can't find anything prohibiting small houses or even manufactured houses. So...I think Dallas might actually be kinda OK. Their building code appears to be the ICC code with minor amendments, which recently has evolved to make tiny houses plausible (there used to be some minimum room size requirements that made houses smaller than ~240 sq ft impossible). I plan to drive over and talk to the city and look at some properties next week, so I'll hopefully have more firm answers on the question of whether I can buy property there and be able to build a house without needing to fight the city for years. I may be a little ranty since it's been a bit frustrating (though the maps are still fun to play with, even when I'm pissed off at certainly classist and probably racist Texas cities).

pnathan 9y ago
So why would they change it so recently? Since it's so recent, maybe some of the discussion around it is available/recallable? I mean, I could remark snarkily about the polarization of America and urban vs exurban divides etc, but that probably doesn't relate here. Probably.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  I was just talking to my mom about this; she lives in the suburbs of Atlanta, in a neighborhood with those kinds of rules. She suspects, and I agree, that it is to do with the growth of the area itself, due to the growth of the major city nearby. Dallas/Fort Worth is growing pretty fast, Red Oak is nearby, and has seen a lot of new development. All those folks who've bought houses there don't want their housing prices reduced because of very small or manufactured houses nearby. Since house prices are kinda set based on "comparables" anything that makes a neighborhood look cheaper reduces the price of everything in the area. It's sort of rent-seeking by the folks who already own homes in the city, from anyone who might move in in the future. I don't think it is specifically racist or classist, that's just a side effect (that is probably also considered good by many of the homeowners). Basically, home pricing is the recurring theme when it comes to all of these kinds of regulations. Current owners who show up to city council meetings want their house prices to go up; poor folks don't show up to city council meetings (they're busy working their second job), so wealthier folks get their way. It makes me far less interested in living there. I grew up in the homogeneous suburbs, and never want to live there again. I want a corner store in walking distance, I want weird neighbors with a massively overgrown jungle of a yard, I want old houses and new houses...suburban zoning makes all of that illegal.

kwhitefoot 9y ago

Such regulations are used to ensure that poor people don't move in. And in the US this has often be used in a directly racist way to exclude black people. See, for instance, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4083588/#S2title https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4083588/#S2titl....