“In the early days, the question of where you were going to put your tiny house didn’t come up much,” Turnbull explains. “People thought they were cute. And they went out and built them and traveled around in them. Then, a few years after the movement began, people woke up and began to realize, ‘We’re having trouble finding sites for these things.’ ”

The problem is that in the arcane world of zoning ordinances and building codes, tiny homes have been an outlier — a housing option still too new to be specifically addressed in local regulations. And that has caused headaches for owners hoping to settle in a community.

It has been particularly true for those who own houses on wheels, also known as movables. They’re generally classified as recreational vehicles, which means the only legal place they can stay is at an RV park — and usually there’s a limit on length of stay. Those who try to move their house onto the property of a friend or family member also run the risk of being ordered to leave at any time.