
David Imus’ “The Essential Geography of the United States of America” (2012) - Tomte
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/01/the_best_american_wall_map_david_imus_the_essential_geography_of_the_united_states_of_america_.single.html
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poulsbohemian
Imus' map of the Wallowas is amazing. I've probably owned or bought for
friends at least 15 copies over the years. There is one hanging framed next to
my desk. So glad to have that level of depth and accuracy of an area I love.
The most recent printing is a little blurry and they are now using a glossy
paper. The old matte finish was easier to read and felt higher quality. Richer
details than any of the Forest Service maps of the area I've seen.

Edit: Last summer I was backpacking and found myself recalling what I thought
I had seen on the map, wondering if perhaps I'd found an error. I was on the
trail to Francis Lake, pulled out the map and it was then I really appreciated
the level of perfection, realizing that nope, he got every detail right.

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SwellJoe
I've been shopping for land to build a tiny house, lately...and I've kinda
fallen in love with maps. It began by necessity; most places near metropolitan
areas have zoning ordinances that mandate large (often _very_ large) houses.
So, every time I find a possible option (close enough to a place I'd want to
call home, in my price range, has a reasonable road to get to it, etc.), I
usually have to spelunk deep into the GIS maps for the city/county, to figure
out zoning, whether water and sewer will be reasonable to hook up to, the
actual boundaries of the parcel, etc.

So, I had no idea that I'm a maps nerd...but I'm a maps nerd. I'm really
enjoying doing the research at this point; I hated it until I figured out that
a large percentage of counties provide web-based GIS map access. And, GIS
provides a tidal wave of data to play with. Combined with Google maps (for
street view and satellite) and Bing maps (for the Bird's Eye view), I can rule
out properties without ever leaving the house or picking up the phone. I can
usually know within a few minutes the zoning, the kinds of neighbors I'd have
and how far away they are, how far I'd have to run water/sewer or whether I'd
need septic and a well, etc.

Anyway, these really are gorgeous maps. I'm absolutely gonna pick up Imus'
Texas map for the wall of my tiny house (or whatever state I end up settling
in, as I'm also considering NM, for the much more flexible natural building
codes).

~~~
pnathan
> It began by necessity; most places near metropolitan areas have zoning
> ordinances that mandate large (often very large) houses

Really! do you have an example I could go look up? I'm curious.

You might be a map nerd, but I'm turning into a public policy nerd. :-)

~~~
SwellJoe
Nearly all of the sub-cities around Austin and Dallas, and Austin and Dallas
themselves, for instance, have minimum interior area requirements spanning
from 1200 to 2000 square feet. Red Oak, just south of Dallas, is particularly
egregious.

The smallest house you can build anywhere in the city of Red Oak is 1650
square feet (and there are only a couple of small pockets where even that is
OK). The other zoning areas mandate 1800 and 2000 square feet. It's a nice
area, with some nice property for sale, but the rules are absurd.

Here's the zoning categories in Red Oak (left menu allows choosing the various
zoning categories; notice that even agricultural land requires a 2000 sq ft
house, and prohibits all "temporary" structures, like mobile and manufactured
homes):

[http://www.redoaktx.org/380/Generally](http://www.redoaktx.org/380/Generally)

There's also a huge amount of (cheap) land in Bastrop and Lago Vista, to the
east and west of Austin, respectively. Same basic story; mandates a very large
traditional house, no mobile homes, no manufactured homes (ruling out a "tiny
house on wheels", which is how some folks get around zoning or at least evade
code enforcement for a while). Even worse, natural building techniques are
ruled out by the aesthetic requirements; they'll often mandate
brick/stone/stucco, etc. front.

Houston seems like it should be a breath of fresh air, as the city itself has
no zoning laws. But, there are often deed restrictions that convey with the
property. And, because the deed restrictions are effectively private zoning
laws, enforced by the city, they can be harder to track down if the seller
doesn't tell you about them in their ad. In some ways, Houston is nicer; deed
restrictions often date back before the McMansion phenomenon, and so they very
rarely mandate large houses (though I've seen 800 sq ft minimums, quite a bit,
which is still pretty big), but may impose other restrictions that are
onerous. On the plus side, the enforcement in Houston is reportedly complaint
driven, so I think one could _probably_ get away with building small in
Houston, as long as you're up to safety codes and on good terms with your
neighbors. But, more research would be needed; I've mostly settled on either
being near Dallas or Austin if I end up buying in Texas, as I have more
friends in both of those cities than Houston.

What's interesting about a lot of places with these rules in Texas is that
people seem to buy the land and stick mobile homes on them _anyway_. I guess
they do it without getting a permit (the land I'm looking at is somewhat
isolated, so I can see how one might get away with that for a while). Browsing
Google maps reveals tons of examples of mobile homes in neighborhoods that
clearly aren't zoned for them.

The Bastrop example is one that is especially annoying, for me. I'd love to be
near Austin, and there's an entire massive subdivision of hundreds of vacant
lots called Tahitian Villages. The land is cheap and plentiful but includes
onerous building rules. I'm frustrated that developers seem to come into
cities, acquire huge swaths of land, get special treatment by the city to
impose additional usage rules, and then they end up going bankrupt or
abandoning the development (presumably after cheating people who bought
property in the neighborhood at retail prices based on promises of a completed
development), leaving a bunch of prime land that can't be used in any way
except for McMansions. Lago Vista seems to have an almost identical story.
It's frustrating that there's so much vacant land, in a region where housing
prices have doubled in the past few years.

~~~
pnathan
> Nearly all of the sub-cities around Austin and Dallas, and Austin and Dallas
> themselves, for instance, have minimum interior area requirements spanning
> from 1200 to 2000 square feet. Red Oak, just south of Dallas, is
> particularly egregious.

Whoa. That's pretty crazy. Why can't you just build a cottage on your land and
live quietly?

~~~
SwellJoe
On further research, it's a new phenomenon in many of these places. Just in
the past ~10 years or so. Red Oak (among the most ridiculous examples I've
found) changed their zoning in 2009. Which may explain why there are so many
mobile homes in these places...maybe they've been there since 2009 (though
several look much newer than that).

One of the scarier bits, to me, is that people who are _already_ living in a
mobile or manufactured home in Red Oak could stay. _But_ , if they ever needed
to do major work on their home, they'd have to get a new permit, and there are
several seemingly arbitrary conditions under which the city could force them
to remove their home from their property.

Worse, if they wanted to replace their mobile or manufactured home with a
newer/bigger/whatever one, they would by denied a permit. This kind of clause
is pretty common across the country (though most of the actual examples I've
found were in the south, including Texas); there have been lawsuits alleging
discrimination (unsurprisingly, the rules are seemingly occasionally used
against black and brown families to force them out), but I don't think
anything good has really come of those suits. The laws are still on the books,
so I guess they're still pretty confident they'll win lawsuits.

I've never really been all that interested in zoning and the like; it's just
such a dry topic. And, while I've owned a house in the past, I just bought it
the traditional way...got a realtor, looked at a bunch of houses, and bought
the wrong one for too much money. Now that I'm really digging in and wanting
to have more direct involvement in my home, I'm just amazed at how crassly
classist (and only slightly more subtly racist) housing is in most major
municipalities.

On a more positive note, Austin has added "granny cottage" rules to some areas
of the city, so a secondary tiny home can be added to properties that are
large enough and in some parts of the city. And, there are several efforts to
enable natural building. Unfortunately, there's so little land available in
Austin, and so much demand for housing, that it's not reasonable for me to buy
there ($120k is about the cheapest suitable lot I've come across).

And, even more positive, I've been studying the Dallas zoning and code
tonight, and I can't find anything _prohibiting_ small houses or even
manufactured houses. So...I think Dallas might actually be kinda OK. Their
building code appears to be the ICC code with minor amendments, which recently
has evolved to make tiny houses plausible (there used to be some minimum room
size requirements that made houses smaller than ~240 sq ft impossible). I plan
to drive over and talk to the city and look at some properties next week, so
I'll hopefully have more firm answers on the question of whether I can buy
property there and be able to build a house without needing to fight the city
for years.

I may be a little ranty since it's been a bit frustrating (though the maps are
still fun to play with, even when I'm pissed off at certainly classist and
probably racist Texas cities).

~~~
pnathan
So _why_ would they change it so recently? Since it's so recent, maybe some of
the discussion around it is available/recallable?

I mean, I could remark snarkily about the polarization of America and urban vs
exurban divides etc, but that _probably_ doesn't relate here. Probably.

~~~
SwellJoe
I was just talking to my mom about this; she lives in the suburbs of Atlanta,
in a neighborhood with those kinds of rules. She suspects, and I agree, that
it is to do with the growth of the area itself, due to the growth of the major
city nearby. Dallas/Fort Worth is growing pretty fast, Red Oak is nearby, and
has seen a lot of new development. All those folks who've bought houses there
don't want their housing prices reduced because of very small or manufactured
houses nearby. Since house prices are kinda set based on "comparables"
anything that makes a neighborhood look cheaper reduces the price of
everything in the area.

It's sort of rent-seeking by the folks who already own homes in the city, from
anyone who might move in in the future. I don't think it is _specifically_
racist or classist, that's just a side effect (that is probably also
considered good by many of the homeowners). Basically, home pricing is the
recurring theme when it comes to all of these kinds of regulations. Current
owners who show up to city council meetings want their house prices to go up;
poor folks don't show up to city council meetings (they're busy working their
second job), so wealthier folks get their way.

It makes me far less interested in living there. I grew up in the homogeneous
suburbs, and never want to live there again. I want a corner store in walking
distance, I want weird neighbors with a massively overgrown jungle of a yard,
I want old houses and new houses...suburban zoning makes all of that illegal.

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torg
I bought this map from Mr. Imus' website a couple years ago. It really is
amazing how clearly it conveys information at different levels.

At a glance I can clearly see the distribution of mountains, vegetation, and
urban centers across the country, but if I look closely at any single area,
there's wealth of detailed information.

It's a piece that encourages and rewards exploration.

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morsch
The article has a few example details; the artist's map of Oregon is available
to browse in fairly high resolution in his shop (press the small "enter full
view" button): [http://www.imusgeographics.com/oregon-
map](http://www.imusgeographics.com/oregon-map)

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ghaff
Another US map that I find endlessly fascinating is United States Landforms
And Drainage from Raven Maps (who have a variety of cool products). I had this
on my office wall at one point but don't have a good spot for it today as it's
pretty large.

