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There Are No Dream Homes
- compiler-guy 8y agoYes, some people over build and others over buy, but it’s a pretty big stretch to go from that to the title of the article. Plenty of people are happy in their custom homes, and stretched to get them. That there are some who have regrets doesn’t invalidate that fact.
- devoply 8y agoFor a steep discount I am sure it's someone's dream home who is in their 40s.
- fopen64 8y agoThat's what I thought. Put the house in an auction starting at $1 and it will find its price point. Biggest problem is people thinking someone will pay cost-plus-sentimental-value-plus-a-nice-profit when 2 houses could be built on the same dime and under modern standards. Used stuff must be sold at a discount.
- staticcaucasian 8y agoThat's why they say land is an investment and appreciates; houses depreciate. Bet the land in those remote areas is still worth the small value they paid for it while the houses are losing value by the minute.
- jacob019 8y agoCan relate. After moving around a lot we bought our "forever home" 10 years ago. Forever doesn't last that long. A big house owns you. We're trying to sell.
- blobbers 8y agoInteresting - we're contemplating buying our forever home in the bay area. Currently living in a 3 story townhouse style that's very walkable to whole foods, parks, caltrain etc. with a modest mortgage but considering moving into the more suburban areas / driving areas so we have a yard to set kids free. What about the big house is owning you? Mortgage and maintenance?
- jacobolus 8y agoSpeaking as a child of the suburbs, transit-accessible urban areas are a lot nicer for the kids themselves. Even the nicest American suburbs suck for anyone who can’t drive.
- svachalek 8y agoYards are great if you like gardening or have a dog, but I think most people overestimate how much the kids would use a yard. Some do use it a lot, but I think more commonly kids end up indoors, at the park, or in the street even when there's a yard available.
- mruts 8y agoMaybe suburbs sets kids free, but as they get older, the suburbs are a prison. When the only thing teenagers have to do is smoke and drink and go to mcdonalds, life kind of sucks for them.
- jacob019 8y agoMortgage is high, and we could put that money to better use but that's not it. We have yard service, laundry service, weekly cleaning service. But still the maintenance is stressful and overwhelming. 6500 sq. ft of space we mostly don't use. 3 HVAC units. Boat dock, so glad we sold the boat. I long for simpler times. Good years but I don't think I'll miss it much. Too much space fills up with too much stuff that isn't needed. Going through and taking care of stuff takes too much time. All the little things add up. One thing I now know is that space and stuff own you. Need more freedom.
- acangiano 8y agoInteresting. I bought a small house (shy of 1500 sq ft) and would kill for an extra 1000 sq ft, despite the fact that it's just the two of us and we don't have kids.
- nicklovescode 8y agoHow do you use the 1500sqft and how would you use the 1000sqft?
- a_thro_away 8y agoI use 1600 for main living, and 1200 in a nice "unfinished" poured wall walk out basement, with (insulated) concrete floor with no posts, as area for all storage, hobbies, crafts - kids roller skated, skateboarded, build forts, ping pong, foosball, TV, living room furniture, all winter long. I could even drive a car in. And it walks directly outside to an all sports freshwater lake. No additional taxes or insurance on 1200 b/c unfinished. You would not believe how inexpensive built new in the 2000s. People do make mistakes, in my opinion. Just watch how they buy motorhomes; same issue.
- ip26 8y agoNot the parent comment but 1500sqft roughly gets you something in the range of an ordinary 2br 2ba (waving my hands vigorously on room dimensions, whether 2br 2ba is ordinary, etc). That's most people's "basic/ordinary housing needs". So looking out from that position, people interested in another 1000sqft are usually thinking of hobbies, exercise equipment, shop space, media room, etc.
- mruts 8y agoI’ve found that one of the best investments you can make is a housekeeper and gardener. I have a big house with a big yard and definately could not do it without them. I live in a part of the world in which labor is very cheap so having a fulltime maid isn’t a financial issue. I understand that things might bw different in the US, but I don’t think it’s unaffordable to have someone clean up and do laundry a couple times a week and someone come to cut the grass every month or so. Maybe like $100/day for each? Only a couple hours of work if you are making a standard developer salary. But it’s just the feeling of freedom that I like about it. My wife can cook things without us worrying about the mess. I can spend my free time as actual free time, instead of worrying about household chores.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoLandscaping needs to be done at least every week, and I doubt you will find a house cleaner that does laundry for $100/day. You can assume half of wages go to taxes for independent contractors, plus a premium for it being contract work, so optimistically, $100/day is $50, and even at only 4 hours of work, that’s only $12/hour. That’s nothing in any higher cost of living city, which is where most high income people want to be. That kind of labor will probably easily run you $200/day or more.
- nickreese 8y agoBleh, what a terrible article full of generalizations. My wife and I considered building a large 6,000 sqft dream home on acreage but at the end of the day we realized that space wasn’t what made a home a “dream home” but instead utility of the space and the ability for it to support our lifestyle and kids. Having toured many multi-million dollar homes and having interviewed several architects we now view the opulance and oversized rooms as a liability in the “upkeep” column of our family’s time balance sheet. We decided to stay in our upper-middle class home and renovate it with things that require less upkeep so we can do more living in the house and less maintaining.
- pram 8y agoYeah thats my thought as well, after having a house for 5 years. It's only 1700 sqft but its cost about $100k to replace 1) the siding with hardie board 2) the roof 3) all the bathrooms and kitchen This house was built in 1981 and basically had zero renovations. I can't imagine trying to remodel a 5000 sqft house after this! I think a lot of these giant McMansion neighborhoods will fall into disrepair after a few decades unless they're in a place where the property values and wages are constantly going up.
- chongli 8y agoGreat plan. People spend most of their time in the kitchen these days anyway. Huge homes with giant formal dining rooms and formal living rooms are a waste of money and space. I'll take a home with a comfy, well-equipped kitchen and small family dining space any day.
- yitianjian 8y agoUnless you entertain/throw parties!
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- exabrial 8y agoThe one that's paid off is a pretty good step.
- elliotec 8y agoAnd almost always a very, very large step.
- randomdata 8y agoEven so, that makes for an unproductive use of money. Housing is no doubt a necessary evil, but nothing to dream about.
- stupidboy 8y agothe article is just a summary of the WSJ article. why not just post original?
- apo 8y ago... Eventually these houses will hold four families each, or they’ll go back to woods and fields, slightly formaldehyde-tainted from the lumber. ... It's interesting to think of the future scenarios that would cause each outcome to play out: 1. Housing continues to skyrocket beyond any reasonable consumer inflation expectation. The only way to "get in" is to go in with one or more other families. 2. Housing prices begin to fall like so many prices throughout the rest of the economy. Nobody wants to take the risk of being stuck with an overly expensive thing they can't unload.
- andrewem 8y ago1 almost certainly requires zoning changes to allow multi-family housing in the places people hype these kinds of huge houses today. Don't count on the neighbors to support that, and keep in mind the ones with money will use that money to buy influence.
- jlokier 8y agoThat zoning change might raise local prices a lot. Neighbours may believe their own property will appreciate in value massively, and approve the zoning change just for that reason, especially if it's advertised that way to them. Never underestimate the ability of people to ignore everything else, when property price increases are at the forefront of their minds.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoThe accurate prediction would have been: Eventually these houses will sell at a lower price.
- bilbo0s 8y agoNo guarantee they will sell. No guarantee they won't. The idea of them going back to nature is not that far fetched. A lot of well off Detroit residents built large homes a long time ago. Most of them are in the loving embrace of Mother Nature right now. But it's also possible that someone comes in, bulldozes the whole thing, and then builds something else entirely. Anything could happen.
- rootusrootus 8y agoI am unsure what that blog post is trying to say, exactly. That some people build big houses and regret it? Some others buy a house and then grow to old to maintain it? Okay, so what? A lot of people build their perfect house and love it. Many people live decades in their home (my parents have been living in their house since 1970...). My dad still mentions to me every time we're sitting in his back yard (an acre filled with trees he planted himself) that it is his dream home and he can't imagine living anywhere else.
- nlawalker 8y agoThe pull quote in the middle sums it up nicely. "People guess who they are and what their lives are about, and they guess wrong."
- compiler-guy 8y agoSome people guess right and never have any regrets. Some people guess right, and then life happens. And yes, some people guess wrong. But that article thinks everyone guesses wrong.
- smallnamespace 8y agoIf people who guess wrongly bemoan it loudly, while those who guess correctly enjoy it quietly, then all we will hear is regret even if most people get it right. I think this goes doubly so online, where the loudest voices dominate.
- Aeolun 8y agoI am honestly unsure what I would use a 7500sqft house for. Not even including the garden/land. Our (me plus wife and kid) previous apartment was 900sqft, and our house is now 800sqft, and while a bit tight, this works pretty well for our family. I like the aesthetics of big homes, but practically, I just don’t need all that space. We spend pretty much 80% of the time in the same 250sqft (living). I would love me a garage/workspace though.
- jfoutz 8y agoI think it’s really great when everyone has their own space to hang out. Kids, or teenagers can have their own room. The adults probably share a bedroom, so maybe two extra places they can each make their own is pretty nice. Nothing needs to be huge, but I think a door is a pretty big deal.
- Aeolun 8y agoTrue, and we do actually have 3 bedrooms in that space. Just pretty tiny ones.
- fopen64 8y agoDepends on the hobbies you pick up. Model railroading, snooker, I regret not having space for such things since I moved from a house to an apartment.
- refurb 8y ago800 sq ft? It's not super small, but the average size of a 2 bedroom apartment in the US. Personally, have the extra space is nice up to a point. I'd say 1200 sq ft is good for a family of 3. Can you make it work with less? Of course, but the extra space has a lot of utility.
- bilbo0s 8y ago>* I'd say 1200 sq ft is good for a family of 3...* Sigh. And then your daughter becomes a teenager. (I'm in 1100 sq ft. But that was intentional, so we just have to deal with it now. She'll be in college next year, so there's light at the end of the tunnel.)
- jaco8 8y agoOur real estate agent summed it up: A Dream Home is any property my client buys as long as I make money.
- openloop 8y agoSharp. Real.
- shalmanese 8y ago“How buildings learn” is a book every software engineer should read. The thesis of the book is that we predominantly take an aesthetic judgement of buildings as static spaces and this pushes us into processes that are big design up front. HBL makes the argument that all buildings will intrinsically change in need and purpose over time and “great” buildings are those who have adaptability built in. He points to Building 20 at MIT as an example of a building that was accidentally built to be adaptable and generally ignored within architecture circles but beloved by the building inhabitants.
- elliotec 8y agoThis is one of my favorite books of all time. I read it while remodeling my house (and am also a software engineer), and I bought 5 copies to give away afterward.
- cheerioty 8y agoHow do these non-tech, low-quality, overgeneralized articles make it to the top of HN these days? Voting broken or does it really appeal to the HN audience?
- 1123581321 8y agoIt’s certainly possible to draft a list of true needs, and wants that are unlikely to change, and systemically search for or build a property that meets them without introducing new needs or wants. For us, it’s a 2,000 sq ft Sears kit bungalow we purchased after considering whether we could live the rest of our lives here and whether our children would be likely to appreciate having growing up in it.
- isoskeles 8y agoApologies that this isn't a particularly constructive comment, but I have to say: There is little more I hate in the world than articles that have a full sentence as some header text and then repeat that exact sentence almost immediately in the paragraph following the header text.
- richk449 8y agoWhy?
- isoskeles 8y agoI feel like I've been tricked into reading the same sentence twice. My precious time has been wasted. (I'm half-joking.) In the case of this article: > A house is an investment, except it’s also a necessity, and it’s also an expression of status, which together make the investment wildly expensive and illiquid. This sentence exists twice. Why include it as a header? The sentence is long enough and this isn't poetry, so it is fair to assume the repetition wasn't for any sort of artistic effect. Just leave that sentence within the context of the paragraph where it's written. Maybe even bold it, but the reader shouldn't have to look at those words twice. I can maybe understand it when it's a quote from another person, under some arbitrarily small word count, like ten. I assume there are some rules in journalistic writing that allows for that style, such that it's normalized to the reader.
- function_seven 8y agoThose aren't headers, they're pull quotes. Badly formatted to look just like a header. Also, I hate pull quotes for the same reason you do. I can't not read them, and half the time they're something I already read, half the time they're something I'm about to read anyway. I just don't see the point.
- asdff 8y agoPull quotes don't belong on the web. They made sense when people were thumbing through magazines, not lists of website headlines. If I click your headline, I'm already going to read the article.
- dawhizkid 8y agoI don't get the point of this article. Some people regret buying mansions? I agree that as someone who is passively looking and going to the occasional open house, my "dream home" is one that is 1) in an urban center 2) does not require a car to get to/from 3) is priced so that the mortgage payment is comfortably below what I expect to earn 4) has a good amount of natural light 5) small enough to easily maintain and 6) the small space is functional. Basically, I just want a small, functional, well-designed space in an urban center within budget.
- war1025 8y agoI don't know how or even really if it applies, but the phrase "too clever by half", and in particular the article that has appeared here several times before [1] came to mind. Also a thing I've thought about, which is echoed in the opening bits of the article, is that many people will buy or build a starter home, and then over time build it up into something much fancier or larger. At which point, it isn't really a starter home anymore, and who is going to want to buy such a thing when they could just do the same over time except in the style they actually wanted? [1] https://www.epsilontheory.com/too-clever-by-half/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/too-clever-by-half/
- griffordson 8y agoIt's always entertaining to look through the older Zillow listings for moderately to very expensive houses. Without fail they are testaments to bad taste. They'd cost a sizable percentage of the purchase price to renovate. Yet, the owners just keep holding out hope that someone with equally bad taste will eventually come along and snap it up.
- mr_tristan 8y agoI’m thought this article was going to be about McMansions losing value over time, but just seemed like an opinion piece with a couple of anecdotes about elderly people having problems selling very expensive estates. Here’s an article about McMansion depreciation: https://www.fa-mag.com/news/mcmansions-define-ugly-in-a-new-way--they-re-a-bad-investment-28633.html https://www.fa-mag.com/news/mcmansions-define-ugly-in-a-new-... What’s interesting is that the valuations mentioned for McMansions are... like an order of magnitude cheaper then the multimillion dollar estates mentioned in this piece. So... I looked for the WSJ article this was really a response to: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-growing-problem-in-real-estate-too-many-too-big-houses-11553181782 https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-growing-problem-in-real-estat... What is actually concerning was this statement: > Boomers currently own 32 million homes and account for two out of five homeowners in the country. So... given that boomers are less than 10% of the population but are 40% of the homeowners, I suspect there will be a strong downward pressure long term, since, well, all these boomers are probably in their home before “the home”.
- village-idiot 8y agoThat or there will be some very expensive government programs designed to maintain the valuation of the boomer owned homes.
- lostmsu 8y agoWon't most of them just pass their homes to their kids? I am trying to say, that maybe this 40%/10% is normal at any time.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y agoYeah, I was just going to say -- look at places like Greece. The home ownership rate is about ~75%. It's pretty common for people to own multiple homes, too. The average Greek person is not wealthy, but the value of these homes is not insignificant either. Mostly, Greek people live like they're poor, even though -- in theory -- their real estate holdings are worth a small fortune. I met a Greek lady with 4 houses, one of which was on a super desirable island now -- worth well over $2.5M. She can only afford to visit the island once a year for a week, but she refuses to sell the house. Not because she's speculating on the value continuing to increase. Just purely for sentiment. People are strangely attached to homes. And also (most) people see homes as good investments. Recent history is really working as confirmation biases for that. But long-term, objectively, housing has been an okay investment. I just can't see all that collapsing because of a little downward pressure. Especially when it DEFINITELY hasn't happened in most aging countries. One could argue that it has happened in Japan. But Japan's real estate boom in the 90s was truly unbelievable. So it's really hard to say if house prices have gone down in real terms -- or if they were just so ridiculously insane in the 90s that it had a long-lasting anchor effect on prices ever since.
- justincormack 8y ago“spent about $3.5 million in 2009 to build their dream home: a roughly 7,500-square-foot, European-style house“ er no that is not European we mostly live in much smaller apartments or houses.
- village-idiot 8y agoI'm in the process of purging a large portion of my possessions. I spent a distressing amount of money collecting items that got used once or twice, got put into a closet that cost me a lot to rent (hooray Socal!), and now are taking up a large amount of my mental space trying to find a way to ethically and economically dispose of them. I cannot possibly imagine how much useless crap you can accumulate in a 2,000 ft home, let alone 7,000 or larger! Why in the world would you want all that space?
- Razengan 8y agoI would quite prefer a “Wizard’s Tower”. A 4+ story vertical structure with 1-2 rooms per level, leaving more ground space for a garden/hedge maze etc. I wonder if more of us introverted techy types would prefer that too. Would it be impractical?
- i_feel_great 8y agoI am researching building an earthbag house in Australia. But I am scared it will look bat-shit weird and no one will buy it.
- keiferski 8y agoSounds like a lighthouse to me.
- bilbo0s 8y agoOwning a lighthouse definitely qualifies as Dream Home. At least it does for me.
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- groby_b 8y agoYes. It'll be fun, and magic, and amazing. And then you need to get a new piece of furniture on the 4th floor. A little bit later, you break a leg, and everything but the ground floor is off limits for weeks. You slowly age. Climbing stairs is not as easy as it used to be. Whenever you want to talk to your spouse, they're guaranteed to be 2 floors away. It's a dream home, but I'm not sure it'll survive reality.
- Razengan 8y agoYes, that raises the question of how the heck does the old wizard archetype manage to climb up and down all day?
- 8y ago
- sigi45 8y agoApparaently people don't watch enough of 'BBC Grand Design' and also 'YouTube Tinyhouses'. Otherwise they would know better :D 1600 sqft sounds relativly big to me and would double the space we have. But size is less important than: - Having light! Srsly like natural brightness - Good connection to work / city live - nice garden with a view - smart building design like having a extra room for washing cloth, power sockets which are well positioned etc.
- Animats 8y agoSure there are. But you can overdo it, or outlive it. The Bay Area's finest example of outliving it is Filoli. It's a estate off 280 near 92. More than one square mile, in Silicon Valley. At the end, it was occupied by one woman in her 90s, along with a large staff. (It's now open to the public. There are tours and a cafe. The house is big, but not monumental, like San Simeon. Mostly the place is gardens and pastures.)
- tonygrue 8y ago> More than one square mile, in Silicon Valley. I was momentarily outraged, until I found it on a map. The San Andreas fault runs _right_ through the center of the property. Makes me glad it's basically a garden now and not a housing development =)
- nikanj 8y ago> Ben and Valentina Bethell spent about $3.5 million in 2009 [..]. The couple listed the home in 2015 for $4.495 million, and have since reduced the price to $3.995 million. It's somewhat insane that houses are automatically assumed to appreciate. They have lived in the house for a decade, and it's no longer brand new. Why should the purchase price now be half a million more than the construction costs were?
- maehwasu 8y agoYou’re mostly correct in this case, but for more commoditized houses or complexes, that can generate income, the reasoning is as follows: There’s always significant uncertainty in construction: timelines, permits, cost overruns, contractor vetting, etc. In addition, two years you spend building are two years of rents that you don’t collect. As a result, there’s usually a premium, sometimes a significant one, for having something already built. The amount of the premium varies depending on how those factors interrelate in a given market, and of course speculative appetite in that market also comes into play.
- europsucks 8y agoUnfortunately, there is also a lot of uncertainty in buying a "used" home. There can also be issues the seller doesn't tell you about.
- ApolloFortyNine 8y agoUnless someone is going out of their way to buy a brand new home, nobody cares about the age. You have the home inspected, and if the roof is good (replaced recentlyish) and there's no structural damage, your good to go. It's not like depreciation on a used car. A house is a house. Hell, lots of times newer homes are more shoddily built then older ones.
- saiya-jin 8y agoThere are things which survive centuries like walls, and then stuff that slowly disintegrates and is a proper nightmare to change/replace - plumbing, electric wiring, general room layout with those thick structural walls, size/layout of windows etc. I can guarantee you that electric wiring from 1970 is something different than that from 2010 (personal experience, sockets slowly failing). Old apartment/house is definitely an additional maintenance cost and possibly tons of other inconveniences, and should be priced accordingly.
- znpy 8y agoIn the meantime, the tiny house movement is growing: > https://thetinylife.com/what-is-the-tiny-house-movement/ https://thetinylife.com/what-is-the-tiny-house-movement/ > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_house_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_house_movement > https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tiny+house+movement&t=ffab&atb=v151-2__&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tiny+house+movement&t=ffab&atb=v15...
- CalRobert 8y agoI just bought my dream home. It's about 680 square feet (almost double if you add in the wall thickness). It needs a lot of work. It's ~220 years old. It was 68,000 Euro and is near the train, on a few acres of loamy land, and has a few outbuildings I can use for woodworking, etc. At that price I can treat it as a thing I use, and not some stupid investment. It's cheap enough that if I want to move I don't have to chain together mortgages, etc. That's all I ever wanted in a home, really. Nobody seems to be building that now, aside from the tiny homes movement, and those are maybe a bit _too_ small (I have a kid).