Kirsten Dirksen and her family drive through New Mexico and Texas looking for the places where building codes barely reach, and for the people building there anyway. Brad Kittel salvages materials for Tiny Texas Houses, Luke Iseman converts shipping containers under the Boxouse name, and Tom Duke shows off Earthships built from tires and bottles. John Wells runs an off-grid Field Lab in the West Texas desert, and Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti stands as a decades-old experiment in dense, code-defying urban design. The film stops in Marfa and the near-ghost town of Terlingua, where Mimi Webb Miller talks about a place minimalist artists adopted as their own. A planner from Marin County and a microapartment developer supply the establishment counterpoint, defending codes that trace back to the London fire of 1666 and, further still, to Deuteronomy's rules on rooftop railings. Dirksen lets both sides make their case: codes save lives, but in the emptiest corners of the Southwest they have also priced people out of shelter altogether.