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Comment by billmalarky | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression zoning regulation, not construction costs, was the main challenge for development in urban areas.

Can you seriously just drop these off in people's backyards and legally rent them out?

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There's more than local zoning at play. There are health regulations regarding potable water and sanitary waste disposal for dwellings that occur at the state level. There's ADA and FHA at the Federal Level.

Also at the local level are things like occupational taxes and building permits. Unlike room and whole house rental, a container provides direct visible evidence of the activity from the air, over a neighbor's fence, or sometimes from the street.

Short summation: No way. Living in shipping containers is not a great idea. By the time you overcome all the hurdles, you realize the envelope is smallest cost of housing development.

Wood framing, especially for a small single-level structure, is the de-facto in the US for a reason.

It's not so much that it the lowest cost, it is that there are fixed costs that correlate to 'per dwelling unit'. Some of those are monetary, e.g. digging a trench for a sanitary sewer is pretty much the same for a tiny house as a McMansion. But the amount of effort is also mostly constant: getting permits and other entitlement for a four unit project is not that much less than getting entitlement for a forty unit project (and forty high end units are likely to require less work during entitlement than forty low end units because the high end units tend to be more politically palatable because they better improve the tax base).

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