She's Taking on a Tiny House Ban

Americans have been living in small homes for generations. People choose to live in small homes for a variety of reasons, from environmental concerns and simplicity to cost. But Calhoun, Georgia, like cities around the country, is denying people the ability to even make that choice. Despite the demand for small homes in Calhoun, the government is banning the construction of homes less than 1,150 square feet.

https://ij.org/case/georgia-tiny-homes/

Cindy Tucker started volunteering for Tiny House Hand Up, or THHU, to help hardworking residents of Calhoun and surrounding Gordon County achieve their dreams of homeownership by filling a niche for smaller, less costly homes. But the city of Calhoun has banned THHU from moving forward with their plan because the homes aren’t as large as the city demands.

Cindy and THHU are ready to break ground on the “Cottages at King Corner,” a community of beautiful, Southern-style cottages with 540 to 600 square feet of living space each. They have housing plans, support from a financial institution to help finance mortgages, and contractors at the ready. All they need is for the government to get out of the way.

There is no reason to ban smaller homes, which people have built and lived in for generations. Smaller homes comply with all building code requirements concerning health and safety. And it makes no sense to say that a community of beautiful cottage homes would negatively affect neighbors when Calhoun was willing to let Cindy and THHU build a truck terminal, warehouse, or scrap metal processing center in the same place. The only reason to ban smaller homes is to exclude so-called “undesirable” people who could afford to buy them and to artificially inflate property values in Calhoun by forcing people to build unnecessarily large homes.

That is not just wrong, it is unconstitutional. Georgia’s Constitution requires zoning laws to be substantially related to public health, safety, morality or general welfare. Calhoun’s ban on smaller homes is not related to anything other than excluding people with lower incomes and forcing people to live in homes that are larger than they want.

That is why Cindy and THHU have teamed up with the Institute for Justice to fight for their right to use their property the same way people have always used their property: to build and live in modestly sized homes. On October 27, 2021, they filed a petition to allow a lawsuit to go forward, asking the court to find that the City of Calhoun’s ban on smaller homes violates the Georgia Constitution.
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