Before you donate all your possessions, sell your traditional house and build or buy your modest home, be sure to have a basic grasp on the zoning and legalities.
If you're going to live in a micro apartment or a tiny house community, you don't have to worry as much about zoning laws, because these homes are already established. This may be a simpler option for first-time micro livers. Those who want to experiment with the lifestyle might even consider renting an existing lot in a tiny home community for a month or so to give the lifestyle a spin before fully committing to it.
But if you dream of living out in nature as many tiny home owners do, with the woods, lake and mountains as your backyard, “You have to have a plan around where this house is going to live,” says Schapdick.
For this reason, many in the tiny house community put their homes on wheels, which means they're subject to regulation by provincial transportation ministries. But that doesn't mean you can just plop your home anywhere.
“If you want to live in 1 permanent place, you have to know where that's going to be,” Spisard says, noting that, “We're not reinventing the wheel. People who live in RVs have been doing it a long time. Tiny houses fall into the same category.”
In 2015, Spisard toured Canada from the U.S., venturing from Maine to Nova Scotia, through New Brunswick and Quebec, then on from the U.S. West Coast to British Columbia and the Yukon. “It was definitely a novelty,” she says of her travelling home. She recalls that people were very nice, letting her park on their property. Now that the tiny house phenomenon is more well-known, regulations may be on the horizon.
“There are several citizen groups across Canada looking to start/develop eco-villages or tiny house communities,” the Tiny Home Alliance of Canada states, noting that by-laws can be created at the onset for specific housing. Here's a list of current tiny house by-laws in Canada.
The Tiny House Advocates of Vancouver Island (THAVI), which was founded in 2017 to work with local governments to make tiny houses a legal and acceptable housing option, advises, “Make sure that council members in your municipality know that you want tiny houses to be recognized as a legal housing option.”