Afloat with Purpose.

What Oregon and Washington built on the water, and why the rest of the coast hasn’t caught up.

We get this question more often than you’d think. Someone calls. They may be a developer, or a private owner, or sometimes just a person who has been looking at the water for a long time. They come with a common question: can we design them a floating home? Not a houseboat, or a floating structure you dock at a marina and sleep on occasionally. A real home, on water, built with proper structure, real systems, and an interior worth living in.

The short answer is we can. But the harder question is whether the location they have in mind will actually permit us to build one.

In Oregon and Washington, this answer is almost certainly yes. In South Carolina, where we have an active project underway, the answer is a definite maybe, if you’re willing to navigate a regulatory system that was never designed to accommodate floating homes. In Maine, however, the legislature essentially banned new floating home installations in 2025. The gap that was already hard to work with has now become a formal wall.

Three regions, three versions of the same problem. This week, after Paul paid a recent visit to the area, we thought we’d share an account of the Pacific Northwest region and their approach. Why it’s working, and what it would take to do the same thing elsewhere.

Oregon: The Mature Market

Oregon’s floating homes started the way most things on the water do, practically rather than aspirationally. Workers in Portland’s river industries lived aboard because it was cheap and close to the job. By mid-century, organized moorages had turned improvised camps into a recognizable neighborhood type. Portland now has more than 3,500 floating homes, served by brokers, appraisers, lenders, and contractors who specialize in nothing else. That’s what a mature market looks like: not just the product, but the full professional infrastructure around it.

What produced that market is a regulatory framework built over decades. Oregon law defines a floating home as a moored structure secured to a pier or pilings and used primarily as a domicile, not as a boat. That definition is the foundation for everything downstream. Once a structure is classified as real property rather than a vessel, the design brief shifts. You’re engineering to residential code. You’re specifying materials for permanence. You’re designing for how people actually live, not for portability.

Oregon also requires every floating home to connect to shore-based municipal sewage. Nothing goes in the river. Wastewater flows into catchment basins beneath the home, gets pumped to the city sewer, and is treated the same as wastewater from any house on a street. This is the answer to the objection we hear most consistently in both South Carolina and Maine: that floating homes will foul the estuary. Oregon’s decades of monitored water quality say otherwise, when designed and regulated correctly.

The state also addressed what happens when someone owns their home but rents the slip. If you can’t move the house without destroying it and suitable moorage is scarce, the person controlling the slip controls your financial life. Oregon’s legislature wrote eviction protections against that asymmetry. Without tenure security, no one invests. The regulatory stack only works if all the pieces are in place.

Washington: A Century of Community

Seattle’s floating homes predate Portland’s by a generation, growing out of the logging industry around Lake Union. Today there are 507 homes across 70 docks in Eastlake, Westlake, Portage Bay, and the University District, many of them in the same families for generations and among the most sought-after properties in the city.

Washington’s most useful legislative contribution is a 2014 bill, SB 6450, that created a formal legal category called the Floating On-Water Residence (FOWR). Before that, floating homes lived in a gray zone between vessel law and land use law, subject to inconsistent treatment by different jurisdictions. SB 6450 established that an existing FOWR had to be treated as a conforming use and couldn’t be regulated out of existence. That gray zone is not history in South Carolina or Maine. It’s the present condition. The bill shows one path out: define the thing, establish its rights, and build from there.

Seattle went further with a four-category classification for water-based residential structures, each with its own design standards and location requirements. As part of a 2015 update, existing FOWRs were registered and assigned unique identification numbers. The result is a clear inventory, reliable legal status, and a permitting process that doesn’t have to relitigate what the structure is every time someone wants to do work on it.

South Carolina: The Active Case

We are currently working on a floating residential project in South Carolina. What follows is not abstract analysis.

South Carolina’s coast is physically well suited to floating residential communities. The tidal estuaries, sea islands, and protected sounds offer calmer water than the Columbia River or Puget Sound. The climate works year-round. The coastal economy already runs on water-based recreation and real estate. People want to be on the water here.

The regulatory environment has not kept pace with any of that.

SC Regulation 30-12 prohibits nonwater-dependent structures from being constructed, moored, or placed in tidal and coastal water critical areas. The exception to this is if there is an overriding public need demonstrated and no feasible alternative sites. Private residential or commercial installations do not meet this standard. Currently, there is no designated zone, no special permit category, no pathway to demonstrate that a well-designed floating home community would not harm the area it occupies. The default is no, and the default is the only option.

South Carolina law defines a vessel as every description of watercraft used or capable of being used as a means of transportation on water. A floating home has no identity in that framework. No conventional mortgage, no clear property tax classification, no legal basis for moorage tenant protection. The Bureau of Coastal Management applies a primary function test: if you live in it, it’s a structure, not a vessel. If it’s a structure in tidal waters, it’s not permitted.

A floating home community of 50 units in a sheltered Charleston-area tidal creek would represent $15 to $30 million in assessed personal property, generate annual tax revenue for the county, and employ local contractors in a construction niche the state doesn’t currently serve. None of this happens today. The prohibition isn’t protecting the coast from harm. It’s foreclosing an opportunity the coastline in this area is well suited to support.

Maine: The Formal Prohibition

Maine is our home base. We have designed on this coast for over thirty years. The 2025 legislative ban on new floating home installations in tidal waters is not an abstraction for us.

Maine’s situation differs from South Carolina’s in one specific way. Where South Carolina’s problem is the absence of a permitting pathway, Maine’s is a legislative act. The 2025 ban formalized what was already a difficult environment into a statutory wall. The path to change here runs through the legislature, not through project-by-project navigation of an agency framework.

The physical case for floating homes on this coast is strong. The Penobscot Bay, the Sheepscot River estuary, the Damariscotta, the protected harbors of the Midcoast offer exactly the sheltered, scenically rich conditions where floating communities have thrived in the Pacific Northwest for a century. The waterfront real estate market here is among the most competitive in New England.

The labor pool is already here. The shipyards, the boatbuilders, the finish carpenters who work on yachts are the same workforce that would build floating homes if the regulatory structure permitted it. Maine lacks a statutory definition of a floating home as real property, a mortgage framework, a property tax classification, and any moorage tenant protections. The definitional void is the same as South Carolina’s, even if the prohibition above it takes a different legal form.

Like South Carolina, Maine’s estuaries are genuinely worth protecting. The answer is the same as Oregon’s: mandatory shore-connection for wastewater, location-specific permitting that excludes sensitive marsh and bird habitat, and ongoing water quality monitoring. Every Immerst and OASys unit we have developed is built around shore-side systems integration from the first drawing. This is a design problem before it is a regulatory one, and it has a design solution.

Side by Side: The Comparison at a Glance

The table below maps the four geographies against the dimensions that determine whether a floating home market can function and grow.

The Cost of Standing Still

Oregon and Washington didn’t build their floating home frameworks in one session. They built them over decades, through litigation, environmental negotiation, and detailed considerations over everything from evictions to sewage lines. While the result may be considered imperfect by some, it’s a highly functioning framework that protects both homeowners and local waterways. Rules exist to enable responsible development, protect the environment, and support communities of people who chose to live on the water.

The lesson for South Carolina and Maine isn’t that they need to replicate that history. It’s that the process has to start somewhere. And the starting point is design, showing what responsible floating residential development looks like in these specific coastal environments before asking regulators to “imagine it.”

That’s what we’re doing in South Carolina. It’s what we’d like to do in Maine. The regulatory conversation is harder without a design on the table. With one, it changes.

The water is here. In some places, the will is starting to be. Interested to learn more, or to take up productive conversations with state and local legislators? Reach out and tell us more.

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Sources
South Carolina Code Title 50 / SC Regulation 30-12 / SC Regulation 30-1 / Oregon Revised Statutes Chapter 90 / Oregon Administrative Rule 250-023 / Washington SB 6450 (2014) / Seattle Municipal Code 23.60A / Lozman v. City of Riviera Beach, 568 U.S. 115 (2013) / Seattle Floating Homes Association / Clean Marina Washington Program / Portland River Community Advisory Committee / Maine Legislative Document H.P. 1182 (April 23, 2025)