Earlier this month, the Washington Post noted that more people are living in RVs because of the rising cost of home ownership. Rather than buy a $400,000 townhouse with skyrocketing property taxes, people were instead buying RVs and renting a space at local trailer parks and camp grounds.

Well, if camping isn't your thing, how about boating. Now the Post reports that many people are choosing to live on the water.

After years of watching home prices skyrocket out of his reach, Hank Clay has finally found affordable housing. The one-bedroom home costs him just $200 a month. It comes free of any property taxes.

And it floats.

Christian Yingling, a computer trainer for the Department of Justice in Chantilly, pays about $600 a month in dock fees and $300 toward his boat mortgage to live on "Sea Monkey" at the Gangplank Marina in Southwest, where he has a view of the Washington Monument.

For the past eight months, Clay, 55, has lived aboard a creaky, 27-foot sailboat on Chesapeake Bay that he shares with a parrot named Jorge. Although the vessel is cramped and frigid in the winter, docking it at Beacon Marina in Southern Maryland is a lot cheaper than his old $800-a-month rent for a tiny studio in Alexandria.

That they don't pay any property tax is a bit of a half-truth. They don't pay direct property taxes, the same way that renters don't pay them. But its still factored into your rent. The taxes are merely spread over a group of people, and included in the price of a slip.

They actually risk paying double taxes, because politicians are starting to take notice of this so-called tax avoidance. How long before communities start taxing people who choose to live on the water?

St. Mary's County prohibits floating homes. Calvert County limits marinas to one liveaboard for every 100 slips, although the rule is not strictly enforced.

"There was some concern that liveaboards don't pay property taxes and that they pollute the bay," said Greg Bowen, the county's director of planning and zoning.

They've already banned pretty much everything else, so it figures that Maryland localities would try to prohibit people from living on water.

Personally, living on a nice houseboat doesn't seem like a bad idea. (As long as there is room for a decent shower, a fridge, kegerator, TV, and gun safe.) But in this area that would require living in D.C. or Maryland, both of which are bastions of tyranny and therefore ruled out.