That's what they call them, tiny houses; and in the truth-in-naming department you can't do much better than that. Tiny houses are two-hundred-square-foot jobs, conveniently sized to fit into a single parking space. Except, if you lived in a parking space you'd have more room because you wouldn't have to share your living quarters with a furnace and a water heater.

Tiny houses are the city of Portland's newest, most environmentally correct way of encouraging neighborliness and doing something about urban sprawl at the same time. "Infill" is the word the planners use to justify them: 11, maybe 20 of the things bumper to bumper on a standard neighborhood lot. A business opportunity is what my wife called them. We could crowd a few dozen in the backyard, charge rent, and kayak the income stream into a comfortable old age.