Decimal-Acre Reference / Sheet 0.02
0.02 Acres = 871 sq ft
Two hundredths of an acre, the size of a one-bedroom apartment floor plate. Almost never a buildable lot in its own right, but very common as a recorded parcel for easements, condo footprints, and road-taking remainders. The math is exact: 0.02 multiplied by 43,560 equals 871.2 square feet.
Square Feet
871.2
international ft2
Square Metres
80.94
m2
Hectares
0.0081
ha
Derivation: 0.02 acres × 43,560 sq ft per acre = 871.2 sq ft, exactly. Per the international acre constant from the 1959 IYPA.
Sheet 02 · The Easement-and-Remainder Class
Why 0.02 acres is rarely a place to live
A 0.02-acre parcel exists in the legal record more often than it exists on the ground as a usable building site. Three families of recorded use account for most of these tiny parcels. The first is the utility easement: when a power utility installs a transmission tower, a substation pad, a sewer pump station, or a fibre-optic vault, the resulting compound is typically 500 to 1,500 sq ft, recorded as a separate parcel with its own ID and tax bill (paid by the utility). The same logic applies to municipal water valve vaults, traffic-signal control cabinets, and emergency-services radio repeater sites. A typical small cell tower compound under FCC siting guidelines occupies 800 to 1,200 sq ft, well within the 0.02-acre bracket.
The second family is the road-taking remainder. When a state DOT widens a highway or a city extends a turn lane, the legal procedure (typically called a partial-take eminent domain) results in the original landowner retaining a residual strip of property on the new right-of-way side. These remainders are usually 5 to 25 feet wide and 50 to 200 feet long, ending up at 250 to 5,000 sq ft. The 0.02-acre size shows up in the middle of that range. The remainder is usually too narrow to develop independently and is often combined with an adjacent parcel or sold for a token price to the neighbouring owner. Until that combination happens, it sits in the assessor records as a 0.02-acre parcel paying a nominal tax bill.
The third family is the condo-mapped airspace footprint. Under most US condominium statutes, the recorded parcel for an individual unit is the airspace defined by the unit boundaries (the inside surfaces of the perimeter walls), not the ground area underneath the building. When a county assessor maps these condos for tax purposes, the recorded land area is sometimes set to the building footprint divided by the number of stories, or sometimes to the unit's share of the building footprint. Either way the result lands at 200 to 1,200 sq ft per unit (0.005 to 0.028 acres). A 0.02-acre condo unit on the assessor's map is normal in mid-rise apartment buildings of 5 to 10 stories.
Outside these three families, a 0.02-acre fee-simple residential parcel is rare. The closest thing is a substandard lot grandfathered in from a pre-zoning subdivision, where the original platting of the 1880s or 1900s produced lots smaller than the current zoning code allows. These are sometimes still buildable under variance procedures, but usually only with a specific legal nonconforming-use determination from the local planning department.
Sheet 03 · What Fits in 871 Sq Ft
Things that occupy 0.02 acres
To get an intuitive feel for 871 sq ft, it helps to think about familiar interior spaces. A typical US one-bedroom apartment averages 750 to 900 sq ft, putting 0.02 acres squarely in that range. A small two-bedroom apartment in expensive coastal markets can be 850 sq ft. A three-car detached garage of 30 ft by 30 ft is 900 sq ft. A standard New York City retail storefront frontage of 25 ft by 35 ft is 875 sq ft. The two-bedroom mobile home or single-wide manufactured home of 14 ft by 60 ft is 840 sq ft.
For outdoor reference, an Olympic high-jump landing area plus runway approach is roughly 800 sq ft. An NBA basketball court free-throw lane (called the paint or the key) is 380 sq ft, so 0.02 acres is about 2.3 free-throw lanes side by side. A standard college pole-vault landing pad is about 580 sq ft. Two billiards tournament tables (10 ft by 5 ft each) plus a 4-foot perimeter walking aisle on all sides totals 350 sq ft, so a billiard hall layout for 5 tables would need about 0.02 acres of floor.
On the commercial small-business side, 871 sq ft is the high end of the range for a small dental office, a single-chair barbershop, a yoga studio for one teacher and 15 students, a takeaway-only restaurant kitchen, or a single-operator nail salon. The Phoenix Children's Museum playspaces are mapped at roughly 600 to 900 sq ft per zone. The average new American CVS Pharmacy is 13,200 sq ft, so 0.02 acres is about 6.6 percent of a CVS. The average single-bay self-storage unit at a 10 ft by 30 ft size is 300 sq ft, so 0.02 acres holds three large self-storage units.
Adjacent Decimal-Acre Pages