Is it legal?
Raise chickens in the city?!?! Yes, some cities do allow chickens! The first step in raising chickens in your backyard is to determine if your city allows chickens. In my city, for example, hens are allowed, but NOT roosters.
Check the “zoning ordinance” for your city. You can likely find the information on the city website. The information was located under “use-specific regulations” in the city I live in.
The regulations for my city have requirements regarding the location of the chicken coop, free range requirements, noise requirements, etc.
How many can I keep?
Regulations may also limit how many hens you can have based on the square footage of your property. I believe in my city you can have one hen per 13000 square feet.
What do I need to get started?
You will have a few start up supplies that you will need to raise chickens in the city. Luckily I had some great friends who had gotten out of chickens who gave me everything I would need.
- feed and water containers. I suppose you could use something you have around the house, or you could purchase locally or online.
- You will need something to keep the baby chicks in to start them out. This is where I used a large tote. People use all kinds of stuff for this phase of chicken keeping. I have even seen pack and plays used!
- feed
- bedding
- A heat lamp or a way to keep them VERY WARM.
And that is really it for the necessities. As they start to move around more you will need things for them to “play” on. You can see I have things like empty boxes or laundry basket. Again, this doesn’t have to be anything fancy.
Chicks
I think most people opt to purchase chicks, but in theory you could raise chickens in the city by getting an incubator and hatch your own. Tractor supply is where I purchased my hens. My husband said we would have “dead loss” since they would be so young, so we might end up with 5. I tell him frequently that he apparently underestimated my abilities to keep baby chicks alive because we now have 10 full grown laying hens. Which in reality is about 5 too many, legally.
Chicks require A LOT of heat. The first couple weeks it is imperative that they chicks stay around 90 degrees. Despite living in the city, I also have 14 cats…. I had to be VERY CAREFUL with my chicks. 12 of my cats are formal ferals who live outside and I have 2 inside cats. And 1 dog. Due to all this my husband and I decided to keep the chicks in our bedroom closet. I do not recommend, but we did what we had to do and I will remind you I still have 10 chickens.
We started with a big plastic tote that a friend gave to us from when they had their chicks. It worked great…. for about a week. Chicks grow FAST! Luckily I had a neighbor who had one of those troughs like tractor supply has the chicks in and she wasn’t using it. She agreed to let me borrow it for a few weeks so I moved the chicks from the bedroom closet….. to the bedroom!
If you have never spent a night sleeping with the sound of baby chicks chirping, I HIGHLY recommend it! So peaceful. Eventually though it became obnoxious.
The in-between phase
As I mentioned, chicks grow FAST! Within a month you have a whole different animal, quite literally. They become very active – and messy! It was definitely a struggle keeping everything cleaned constantly as well as keeping the chickens contained, but it was so worth it. It would probably be much easier if you don’t have 14 cats to keep away from them.
Transition to Outside
The transition to outside was very scary for me. I had to be EXTRA SURE that none of my cats could get in the coop. We started with a second hand coop and it needed a good bit of work to be use-able, but it was only temporary.
It was the cutest thing, but if you look close you can see the bottom was pretty rotted. We made it work for our needs though and it served us well. Once we were done with it we passed it on to the next person who needed a starting point!
Final Steps
The final steps for us to raise chickens in the city was the permanent set up. Luckily we had an outside building that housed our laundry and not much else besides junk. We were able to build a wall in the center and make 2 rooms. One for laundry, and one for chickens! We added a few nesting boxes on the newly built wall and that was that!
From there we built a run attached to the building and created a door for the chickens to go in and out. In hindsight I think we should have went a bit bigger, but overall we are very happy with it. Again were were lucky to have most of the tools and supplies needed minus the hardware cloth and 2×4’s.
How noisy will they be?
Now you have them outside, are they going to annoy the neighbors? Aside from the chirping chicks, I had no idea chickens made so much noise! Generally speaking its the roosters that get the bad rap for noise, but hens do make a good bit of noise, too. Roosters are the ones (usually) who crow at the crack of dawn, or earlier, but the hens do a good bit of chirping or singing type sounds. They also do a bit of cackling when they lay an egg.
Luckily these sounds are more pleasant and most of my neighbors don’t even know I raise chickens in the city!
What’s the daily maintenance like?
So let’s discuss the time involved. Really, it isn’t that bad at all. I was a bit intimidated at the thought of it, but if you set it up right its a breeze. Fresh food and water is required every day. And chickens WILL poop in their water, EVERY DAY! It’s really quite annoying. They will also kick dirt into their water so you want it as elevated as possible to limit this. We now have our water sitting on a stack of 3 or 4 paver stones to keep it higher.
We have a 3 gallon water container and we fill it every other day. Each day we do pour out any dirty water though and let it refill with clean. Their food is also in a large capacity container that usually can be refilled every other day. Chickens eat constantly, literally. Eat and poop over and over.
The daily maintenance for us though is literally like 5 minutes in the morning and then 5 minutes at night when we make sure they are all inside and the doors are closed. Chickens have poor eyesight in the dark so they do not want to stay outside when they cannot see. Due to this they will naturally go inside when it gets dark. They are also ready to go outside when they sun comes up, but luckily my husband and I are both morning people.
A recommendation
A lot of people stress over what to put in the bottom of the chicken run. I did mine with the dirt already on the ground. I HIGHLY recommend this. There isn’t much to clean. Once a week or so you can just take a rake in and move the dirt/poop around and it is essentially cleaning itself.
We also like put things like grass clippings or leaves in their for the chickens to “dig” through. They love it and it just decomposes naturally, no real cleaning required.
Our coop is not done this way. Our coop has a cement slab floor which unfortunately does require cleaning. We keep it covered with hay though. Hay is not recommended for chickens, but we have had ZERO issues with it.
We actually bought hay that had been wet and let it dry out and used it. The chickens don’t eat it so it works fine for their bedding. We may try pine straw next and see if its different or better.
I hope you have found this information useful. Don’t be afraid to venture outside of the box and try something that works for you. Just because it isn’t main stream doesn’t mean its wrong!
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Want to turn your urban flock into extra income? Read my guide on making money selling eggs.