Tiny house for municipalities and tourism boards

Pilot site, settlement or tourism offer: three different projects

Municipal tiny-house projects usually take one of three forms. A pilot site where a few units stand for a limited time to gather experience. A settlement for which a development plan is drawn up or amended and in which units are lived in permanently. Or a tourism offer — overnight units by a lake, on a municipal campsite, along a hiking trail — operated by a tourism board or a municipal company.

The three need different documents and different schedules. A pilot site can stand within a season; a settlement needs the land-use planning procedure with participation; a tourism offer needs an operator and a calculation in nights. We first ask which project is meant.

Documents for land-use planning and procurement

An administration preparing a project needs information that can be carried into a development plan, a council paper or a specification: dimensions per model, weights, footprint, height, placement on supports without a foundation, connection requirements for power, water and wastewater, removability. We supply this as technical product documents.

What we do not supply is the planning itself. Land-use planning, environmental assessment, participation and procurement are tasks of the municipality and its planners; we do not replace legal, planning or procurement advice. The documents are written so that they fit into those procedures.

Current procedures, with source and check date

We monitor current municipal procedures on tiny-house sites in Germany and its neighbours — participation procedures, development plans, tenders — and publish them on the news page with the official source and the date we last checked them. A figure the source does not give, we do not give.

For a municipality preparing its own project these procedures are references: how other municipalities designated the site, ran the participation and regulated the use. The page links to the original documents, not to our summary.

Several units, one schedule, one contact

A municipal project rarely delivers one house. It delivers five or twenty, to a site prepared for it, in a window the resolution sets. Delivery is planned as one job: route, access, placement sequence, connection. The way from production is by road, with a Ro-Ro or ferry leg depending on the destination; the 2.55 m base width of all models keeps transport possible without oversize.

For the administration that means one contact for all units, one schedule and one set of documents — and the option of relocating or removing the units later, because they stand on supports and not on foundations.