“I am working on a Christmas gift of sorts for the natural building community and I could use some help.
What is it?
U.S. Building Codes by County is a website to collect, organize, and easily display building codes and permit requirements for building in every county in the US. (3,142 counties to be exact).
This project was started with the goal of creating a central place to document building codes and requirements for those looking to build a home for themselves. This is not an end destination with all the data a person would need but a springboard. If you are asking yourself, “I want to build and live in a [self built home, yurt, earthbag home, tiny home, strawbale, etc.] legally but where can I do that?”, then you have come to the right place.
What help do I need?
I’m working on pulling in information from various places as I find it but it’s space, incomplete, and scattered all over the place. I’m also not sure how widely the permitting requirements and building codes are so more information will help me structure the data better as well.
My goal is low bandwidth, information centric, and purpose focused. I want to make it stupid easy for people to find a list of places to start looking for where they want to buy land to start building. Here are 2 screenshots of what some parts of it look like.
Mike Grace
U.S. Building Codes by County website
Thanks Owen sharing my side project on his website. It is my hope that it will become a great tool in reducing the barrier to entry for those looking to find US counties where they can self build their own home and/or homestead. The current state of the site is a weekend minimum viable product so I look forward to lots of feedback :)
So I’m sure you’re looking for lots of good locations to add to your site. For starters you can work through our list at Counties With Few or No Building Codes. https://naturalbuildingblog.siterubix.com/counties-with-few-or-no-building-codes/ That should keep you busy for a while. That’s been our #1 most popular blog post every year, so obviously there’s a lot of interest in this topic.
The best thing about your site is all the information will be organized and easy to search. (There’s not much data there yet since he’s just getting started.)
This would be a dream come true, for sure. Thank you for taking on such a big job, for everyone’s sake.