Tiny Houses in Virginia

There are lots of reasons to give careful consideration of your goals and intents prior to specifying a location and (especially) purchasing property. Here’s a quick off-the-cuff overview. Please excuse any errors in my top-of-mind written recaps and summaries.

Movable tiny homes are typically viewed as RVs and thus that’s the structure under which any construct will most likely fall from a property use (zoning) classification. In cases where property may be used for recreational purposes you’ll find the most options where land is considered “unrestricted” (i.e. lacks zoning).

In some areas, you can install an RV site or two for (basically) unregulated personal use and/or rental. Rural counties are most likely to utilize more open use as Unrestricted, Agricultural, or other forms of Multi-use which often have greater allowances for use and dwelling types that may be used in a recreational and/or seasonal labor standpoint.

Hunt clubs and others that include semi-formal use of RV campers, park model RVs, and/or camping cabins (maybe boats) may be used By Right, via an already established county land use ordinance, or property specific Special Exception that’s often granted to property owners of campgrounds, recreational retreats, marinas, and the like. Somewhere in here you’re likely to set parameters for your property search (and family/investor pool).

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Were we to go the same route (and we have) we sought to buy property in a county that had Unrestricted land use. As implied above, tiny houses on wheels may look like homes, and — though they may be much better built than a code-minimum dwelling, and built by manufacturers with a form of RV certification — RV manufacturing is most often without any direct state regulation and thus THOWs are most intrinsically vehicles owned as personal property not Manufactured Housing units that conform to a factory-built, modular, industrialized building standard that enables their attachment to land, thus comprising a formal dwelling unit (street address, 911 call location, mailbox, etc.).

Since our interests were to live in our tiny home while building something more official, we looked for property with old mobile homes (or RV sites) so we had existing infrastructure for power, water, and septic. Some counties in SWVA include unrestricted land use with the allowance for two RV sites on existing residential infrastructure; to add three you apply to add a bath house and expand sites. When we thought to develop (or buy) a campground we also looked at county codes to see the minimum property size required to more formally setup a campground should we want to add something of a weekend retreat for our two adult children.

All the above is mentioned to help you establish the formal considerations and ways/means to create a family-oriented campground. There are many places where you’ll find rather lax enforcement of RV living, especially in more of an occasional family gathering standpoint than a more necessarily formal one-of-us-lives-here capacity. Driving through areas of interest while looking for RVs that are obviously lived in may help you understand the general allowance of RVs as private lot based campers.

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In my opinion, the best way is the one of due diligence where you can meet your short and long term goals without question of legality. The simplest route lies where there’s already an acceptance of the type of use you wish to enjoy with your property. However raw or improved, unrestricted or residentially certified, and occupied or vacant is up to you.

Just my opinions written off-the-cuff from our tiny home/office the tiny/alternative home design projects that await after-Christmas handling.