After building her tiny home in 2016, Paula Loniak found out zoning ordinances prevent her from keeping it in Athens.
“I moved here in 1992 to go the Vet School at UGA and decided I wanted to stay in Athens after I graduated,” Loniak said. “I built my tiny house and they said, “Oh no, you can’t stay here because of the zoning, and we don’t know what to call this.’”
Loniak, manager of Vet-to-Pet House Calls for Dogs and Cats, said she found out zoning regulations prevent tiny homes owners from living in Athens while she was constructing her tiny home.
The zoning ordinance requires single-family homes to be a minimum of 1,000 square feet, which is problematic for tiny house owners, considering their average residences have around 500 square feet of space...
“That’s a pretty old portion of our code, something that hasn’t been changed very recently and certainly not since the tiny-home craze,” Beechuk said. “When the code was written, bigger was better. Bigger was more valuable, so by putting that low-end cap, you’re getting homes built to a cost that would increase the values for the other homes around them.”