8 ms·

Tiny flats taking over Latin America

basicplus2 7y ago
come on everybody.. you are ALL part of the slave class now.. you need to down size and reduce your living standards in all areas of your life.. the super rich must be richer and need those extra 20 rolls royces, lear jets, bigger mansions. Car companys, nations, banks, whole economys dont be fooled, the odd millionaire even billionaire are only stealing from their fellow slaves.. The 1%ers are stealing from everybody
- dang 7y ago
  Could you please not take HN threads into flamewar? or post unsubstantive comments? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
zoomablemind 7y ago
> "Our products are for middle class people who don’t have access to housing and can’t afford to buy," That's quite broad definition of middle-class. I could understand the middle-class buyers, not so much the dwellers. Perhaps, disintegration of middle-class is a root cause for people considering such living standards as 'convenient'. Effectively,you live in a tight dorm.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  Not much disintegration. Home prices skyroccketed, so even rich (not super-rich) people have difficulty on buying, what is a different thing. There has been some middle class disintegration too, but it is much slower and smaller.
  - zoomablemind 7y ago
    If prices are beyond the reach of the supposedly stabilizing part of the society, then who's buying what's on the market? Either there's a high degree of consolidation on the real estate market, such that the properties are in hands of large conglomerates (maybe foreign). Or the middle class effectively has low buying power, which again asks to reconsider its middle definition. Clearly there's some serious disbalance at play. Small square footage offerings are not a solution, rather it's another way to further increase a unit-price.
    - lsc 7y ago
      I... think per-squarefootage costs right now fit my budget just fine? but only ifyou sell me a 300sqft place, like this describes. Most "middle class" owners bought in before prices came up; real-estate, like everything, is priced at the margin
    - marcosdumay 7y ago
      There hasn't been much of a market lately. On the largest cities centers, housing mostly does not sell. The very small amount that sells is usually brought by rich people making unsound decisions (like betting they'll never have a month without a job on the next 30 years). People have been moving away from those centers and leaving housing there empty.
- lsc 7y ago
  >Perhaps, disintegration of middle-class is a root cause for people considering such living standards as 'convenient'. Effectively,you live in a tight dorm. so, uh, I didn't go to school, so maybe I'm missing something, but I thought that dorms were usually shared bedrooms or something; personally, I think there's a huge difference between having a small private space and having no private space, and most of the problem with living in a dorm is having no private space. That's where this sort of thing comes in. A lot of the single people I know in silicon valley, even a lot of the high earners, rent rooms in houses; houses that are designed for families. The thing is, if you are an introvert, you'd be better off with something built in a more hotel-like way, with more private area per common area, and with more bathrooms. (oh my, with more bathrooms.)
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Private bathrooms and rooms really start to pump up the required living area. The minimum size is about 200 sq. Ft. and that’s without even minimal kitchen/dining facilities. Or really anyplace for someone to sit other than a bed or a small desk chair.
    - lsc 7y ago
      sure, but the things we're talking about are 10m^2, or a little more than 300sqft. If you are building for me, you have a water closet with toilet and shower, and then a sink, but no real kitchen. I eat out or at work anyhow; a desktop convection oven is overkill for my kitchen needs. I mean, I think at this point we're around/above the size of the bedroom most people rent around here? I mean, at that size, I want a murphy bed, but even without, this is a size a lot of people live with right now. Sure, I'd prefer some place bigger... but if you sell me 10m^2 in the bay area, say, for a quarter million dollars? I'd vastly prefer that to the really big place that a quarter million gets me in the midwest. Preferences vary.
      - zoomablemind 7y ago
        Just to realign your expectations - 10m^2 yields you about 107sqft. Roughgly, a 6ft tall person fits twice on either side.
- richajak 7y ago
  I think this phenomenon is an obvious sign of incompetent government based on my experience living and traveling in several countries (not in the same sub-continent mentioned in the article). An apartment, smaller than the hotel room (typical 4x6m) is not a proper living place, whether it's meant for single guy or a small family. I like the approach in one country, where all the apartments must fit certain size, e.g. 80sqm for a family with 2 kids. Even, for low-income income families, they still have to get at least 50sqm, government will subsidize.
  - bigato 7y ago
    I reserve the right to live in a smaller space than what you consider proper, and I do so by choice and not out of need. My 4x3m plus small bathroom is great and easy to maintain.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    > An apartment, smaller than the hotel room (typical 4x6m) is not a proper living place Why?
  - matz1 7y ago
    Its might not be for you but its a proper living space for me. I would choose to move to smaller than 4x6m apartment, even though I can easily afford much larger size. Why? simply because I don't need the extra space. If I can save couple hundred bucks a month then I'm all for it. The problem is those apartments is not available in my area, no one is building it. To me its the fault of the incompetence government and its regulation.
golemiprague 7y ago
Nothing new, been in Japan for ages, 12sqm apartments that includes everything one person needs and are cheap. It is not for hosting people but good enough for dwelling. I wish there were more like those in other cities, not an overly designed ones but just simple, functional and cheap like in Japan.
stevenjohns 7y ago
The title doesn't seem to match the contents. It seems like "Tiny flats might take over Sao Paulo" might be more appropriate. Personally, as someone who owns a property development company in Latin America, I can't ever see this becoming a major trend. If it is in fact becoming popular and not a one-off architectural/engineering/artistic effort, then it's really just exploitation and profit maximization and not something that is culturally wanted or a consequence of the local economies.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  If it becomes popular it is a consequence of the local economies. People may not want these flats but they want them more than the alternative they declined to get them. Better, for some, to live in a closet in a desirable area, than in a more spacious apartment two hours travel from where they actually want to be. I’ve lived six to a room in Dublin city centre and had my own room in a house an hour from it and I’d pick the first over the second again if I was single and budget constrained. Closet apartments/SROs/dorms/flophouses would be superior again but if building housing is illegal it won’t be built and the poor will be unable to live in areas reserved for the middle and upper classes.
  - stevenjohns 7y ago
    I don't think it's directly a consequence of the local economies, moreso a consequence of bad town planning. Heritage town planning use to allow 3m * 15m houses with no setback. Many better-planned towns eventually introduced more complex legislation to stop this. In lots of parts of Latin America they haven't. Today, in many parts of Colombia, you can take a 150m2 block and build six (!) floors on it provided you have just 10m frontage. So instead of expanding outwards, the cities just became a lot denser, and economics forced up the price up of the land because the land potential is so high. What it takes is a gutsy mayor to implement policies such as requiring at least 1m side setback on houses and 3m for apartments, having caps on the floor-space ratio to 50% instead of 98%, not allowing subdivisions on lands that have less than 15m frontage or 600m2 total area etc. This would basically see the housing market crash - lots of people will lose lots of money. But its a necessary evil. The other angle to this is welfare being given based on the area you live in. Instead of housing support (in the form of tax and utility cost concessions) being distributed based on someone's personal financial situation, the means-test is based on the land classification that the property is built on. The land classification doesn't change whether the house is old or new, or if you build an apartment block on it. Which basically forces higher density in areas with better tax and utility cost concessions - aka poorer areas. In Colombia, this means that buying land in the highest-class areas costs as much - or in many cases less - than middle-class areas. This also introduced an almost caste-like system where people would only hang out from people from their own classification and would look down on people in lower classifications. I appreciate shared-housing is a thing in Dublin (it is in Sydney too, and I have similar feelings to you about it) but the situation in many parts of Latin America exists for somewhat different reasons.
neilv 7y ago
There have been many times, over student, young professional, research staff, and startup years, that I would've killed for what was effectively a clean, safe, peaceful, stable hotel room-sized place of my own. Living in a high cost of living city (where the opportunity is), when you can't actually afford basic minimum housing, but manage to swing something anyway, often means a lot of sacrifices of what should be basics. And your finances are probably still getting strained, despite the sacrifices. There've been times that converting a van or class B RV, and shifting it to a new city parking spot every night, seemed safer and more stable than bottom-end city apartment situations. I sympathize with and admire the Bay Area dotcom workers who managed to do something like that, in a recent HN post. That said, we're seeing things here like new micro-apartment developments being pitched to relatively affluent new grads, at ridiculously high prices for what you get, with some lifestyle story. That seems more an investment ROI solution for the developer, not a housing and social justice solution.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ido 7y ago
  Why not share an apartment? I had great (and bad, but also great) experiences with roommates between ages 19 and 28 (when my then girlfriend, now wife, moved in with me). I could (and intermittently have) afford to live in my own but the social benefits of roommates were worth it.
  - yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
    Never met an introvert?
- puranjay 7y ago
  I had bad experiences with roommates early on and swore off sharing a house with anyone when I was in my early 20s. This meant that often a big part of my income would just go to housing. In a way, it helped since it pushed me to pick up side projects and learn new, marketable skills. But man, if I had access to a clean, affordable room + kitchen, I would have had a far happier and more social time in my 20s.
barry-cotter 7y ago
How is making certain types of housing illegal just? If people don’t want the combination of location and price that’s on offer they’ll go empty. If they do want them depriving them of the choice is unjust. Build more housing is the better solution, like Tokyo, but better for it to be possible for a new grad to live in a shoebox in Manhattan if they want to than not to have the choice at all.
- neilv 7y ago
  For just one aspect... The city here is allowed to, and does, exercise a lot of control over what can be built, to serve the common good. If the city then uses that power to allow a developer to squeeze every last drop of money they can out of new grads (and others) who are desperate, that wouldn't seem very just stewardship by the city.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    If their conception of the common good is high property prices sure. If it’s letting people live where they want to then more housing is better. Every capsule apartment a new grad is living in is a larger one further away someone else can live in.
    - neilv 7y ago
      So small apartments might be permitted, but with restrictions on the rents or sale prices that can be charged, for example.
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        That’s just a restriction on how many will be built. The less profitable an investment is the less likely it is to be made. If the government makes profitably housing people who want housing illegal it can solve the problem by building the housing itself and eating the loss, whether an actual monetary loss or the loss of the better use the money could have been put to. But if the aim is to house people where they want to live, in conditions they want to live in more choice is better. If there’s an aesthetic preference for government provision over private provision that preference is costly both in terms of money and unsatisfied preferences.
anonymous5133 7y ago
I think this idea is brilliant and has a lot of potential to disrupt the traditional western housing model. I think a lot of young people will definitely be willing to make the trade off of living in a smaller space to get ahead in life.
WalterBright 7y ago
With a common area, they aren't unlike many dorms in college.
melling 7y ago
“ In cities such as Buenos Aires, Bogota and Mexico City, commutes can be up to three hours.” Wouldn’t better mass transit fix part of the problem?
- jeromegv 7y ago
  Buenos Aires has quite good public transit so I was surprised to read that
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Public transit based commutes typically are longer. In downtown DC, you can often bike faster than the subway though downtown because of all the stops.
  - cryptonector 7y ago
    Subways run every 3 minutes during rush hour, and the buses are all private and provide unbelievable coverage of the city and suburbs, with fantastic frequencies too. The subway system is rather small, but the buses provide all the coverage needed. (There's also rail, but buses are the real workhorse, and again, they're private.)
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > Wouldn’t better mass transit fix part of the problem? Adding transit might help, but not as much as adding housing. If you have a three hour commute and they put in better transit, now you have a two hour commute. But your rent goes up because you're closer to better transit, so you either have to pay more (which you can't afford) or move to somewhere with a 2.5 hour commute at your original rent (and pay moving costs). And there is no feasible transit you can add to make the housing which is 150 miles from the jobs have a reasonable commute. The only thing for it is more housing near the jobs.
  - melling 7y ago
    “Nightmarish traffic jams...” The very first line of the article makes me believe that people don’t live 150 miles away. Maybe 30-50 miles and you’re driving 10-15 miles an hour?
jscholes 7y ago
> "People sleep in their apartments, but the rest of the building is part of their house too," This is the definition of renting a bedroom, not an apartment.

come on everybody.. you are ALL part of the slave class now.. you need to down size and reduce your living standards in all areas of your life.. the super rich must be richer and need those extra 20 rolls royces, lear jets, bigger mansions. Car companys, nations, banks, whole economys dont be fooled, the odd millionaire even billionaire are only stealing from their fellow slaves.. The 1%ers are stealing from everybody

dang 7y ago
Could you please not take HN threads into flamewar? or post unsubstantive comments? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

zoomablemind 7y ago

> "Our products are for middle class people who don’t have access to housing and can’t afford to buy," That's quite broad definition of middle-class. I could understand the middle-class buyers, not so much the dwellers. Perhaps, disintegration of middle-class is a root cause for people considering such living standards as 'convenient'. Effectively,you live in a tight dorm.

marcosdumay 7y ago
Not much disintegration. Home prices skyroccketed, so even rich (not super-rich) people have difficulty on buying, what is a different thing. There has been some middle class disintegration too, but it is much slower and smaller.
- zoomablemind 7y ago
  If prices are beyond the reach of the supposedly stabilizing part of the society, then who's buying what's on the market? Either there's a high degree of consolidation on the real estate market, such that the properties are in hands of large conglomerates (maybe foreign). Or the middle class effectively has low buying power, which again asks to reconsider its middle definition. Clearly there's some serious disbalance at play. Small square footage offerings are not a solution, rather it's another way to further increase a unit-price.
  - lsc 7y ago
    I... think per-squarefootage costs right now fit my budget just fine? but only ifyou sell me a 300sqft place, like this describes. Most "middle class" owners bought in before prices came up; real-estate, like everything, is priced at the margin
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    There hasn't been much of a market lately. On the largest cities centers, housing mostly does not sell. The very small amount that sells is usually brought by rich people making unsound decisions (like betting they'll never have a month without a job on the next 30 years). People have been moving away from those centers and leaving housing there empty.
lsc 7y ago
>Perhaps, disintegration of middle-class is a root cause for people considering such living standards as 'convenient'. Effectively,you live in a tight dorm. so, uh, I didn't go to school, so maybe I'm missing something, but I thought that dorms were usually shared bedrooms or something; personally, I think there's a huge difference between having a small private space and having no private space, and most of the problem with living in a dorm is having no private space. That's where this sort of thing comes in. A lot of the single people I know in silicon valley, even a lot of the high earners, rent rooms in houses; houses that are designed for families. The thing is, if you are an introvert, you'd be better off with something built in a more hotel-like way, with more private area per common area, and with more bathrooms. (oh my, with more bathrooms.)
- ghaff 7y ago
  Private bathrooms and rooms really start to pump up the required living area. The minimum size is about 200 sq. Ft. and that’s without even minimal kitchen/dining facilities. Or really anyplace for someone to sit other than a bed or a small desk chair.
  - lsc 7y ago
    sure, but the things we're talking about are 10m^2, or a little more than 300sqft. If you are building for me, you have a water closet with toilet and shower, and then a sink, but no real kitchen. I eat out or at work anyhow; a desktop convection oven is overkill for my kitchen needs. I mean, I think at this point we're around/above the size of the bedroom most people rent around here? I mean, at that size, I want a murphy bed, but even without, this is a size a lot of people live with right now. Sure, I'd prefer some place bigger... but if you sell me 10m^2 in the bay area, say, for a quarter million dollars? I'd vastly prefer that to the really big place that a quarter million gets me in the midwest. Preferences vary.
    - zoomablemind 7y ago
      Just to realign your expectations - 10m^2 yields you about 107sqft. Roughgly, a 6ft tall person fits twice on either side.
richajak 7y ago
I think this phenomenon is an obvious sign of incompetent government based on my experience living and traveling in several countries (not in the same sub-continent mentioned in the article). An apartment, smaller than the hotel room (typical 4x6m) is not a proper living place, whether it's meant for single guy or a small family. I like the approach in one country, where all the apartments must fit certain size, e.g. 80sqm for a family with 2 kids. Even, for low-income income families, they still have to get at least 50sqm, government will subsidize.
- bigato 7y ago
  I reserve the right to live in a smaller space than what you consider proper, and I do so by choice and not out of need. My 4x3m plus small bathroom is great and easy to maintain.
- icebraining 7y ago
  > An apartment, smaller than the hotel room (typical 4x6m) is not a proper living place Why?
- matz1 7y ago
  Its might not be for you but its a proper living space for me. I would choose to move to smaller than 4x6m apartment, even though I can easily afford much larger size. Why? simply because I don't need the extra space. If I can save couple hundred bucks a month then I'm all for it. The problem is those apartments is not available in my area, no one is building it. To me its the fault of the incompetence government and its regulation.

golemiprague 7y ago

Nothing new, been in Japan for ages, 12sqm apartments that includes everything one person needs and are cheap. It is not for hosting people but good enough for dwelling. I wish there were more like those in other cities, not an overly designed ones but just simple, functional and cheap like in Japan.

stevenjohns 7y ago

The title doesn't seem to match the contents. It seems like "Tiny flats might take over Sao Paulo" might be more appropriate. Personally, as someone who owns a property development company in Latin America, I can't ever see this becoming a major trend. If it is in fact becoming popular and not a one-off architectural/engineering/artistic effort, then it's really just exploitation and profit maximization and not something that is culturally wanted or a consequence of the local economies.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
barry-cotter 7y ago
If it becomes popular it is a consequence of the local economies. People may not want these flats but they want them more than the alternative they declined to get them. Better, for some, to live in a closet in a desirable area, than in a more spacious apartment two hours travel from where they actually want to be. I’ve lived six to a room in Dublin city centre and had my own room in a house an hour from it and I’d pick the first over the second again if I was single and budget constrained. Closet apartments/SROs/dorms/flophouses would be superior again but if building housing is illegal it won’t be built and the poor will be unable to live in areas reserved for the middle and upper classes.
- stevenjohns 7y ago
  I don't think it's directly a consequence of the local economies, moreso a consequence of bad town planning. Heritage town planning use to allow 3m * 15m houses with no setback. Many better-planned towns eventually introduced more complex legislation to stop this. In lots of parts of Latin America they haven't. Today, in many parts of Colombia, you can take a 150m2 block and build six (!) floors on it provided you have just 10m frontage. So instead of expanding outwards, the cities just became a lot denser, and economics forced up the price up of the land because the land potential is so high. What it takes is a gutsy mayor to implement policies such as requiring at least 1m side setback on houses and 3m for apartments, having caps on the floor-space ratio to 50% instead of 98%, not allowing subdivisions on lands that have less than 15m frontage or 600m2 total area etc. This would basically see the housing market crash - lots of people will lose lots of money. But its a necessary evil. The other angle to this is welfare being given based on the area you live in. Instead of housing support (in the form of tax and utility cost concessions) being distributed based on someone's personal financial situation, the means-test is based on the land classification that the property is built on. The land classification doesn't change whether the house is old or new, or if you build an apartment block on it. Which basically forces higher density in areas with better tax and utility cost concessions - aka poorer areas. In Colombia, this means that buying land in the highest-class areas costs as much - or in many cases less - than middle-class areas. This also introduced an almost caste-like system where people would only hang out from people from their own classification and would look down on people in lower classifications. I appreciate shared-housing is a thing in Dublin (it is in Sydney too, and I have similar feelings to you about it) but the situation in many parts of Latin America exists for somewhat different reasons.

neilv 7y ago

There have been many times, over student, young professional, research staff, and startup years, that I would've killed for what was effectively a clean, safe, peaceful, stable hotel room-sized place of my own. Living in a high cost of living city (where the opportunity is), when you can't actually afford basic minimum housing, but manage to swing something anyway, often means a lot of sacrifices of what should be basics. And your finances are probably still getting strained, despite the sacrifices. There've been times that converting a van or class B RV, and shifting it to a new city parking spot every night, seemed safer and more stable than bottom-end city apartment situations. I sympathize with and admire the Bay Area dotcom workers who managed to do something like that, in a recent HN post. That said, we're seeing things here like new micro-apartment developments being pitched to relatively affluent new grads, at ridiculously high prices for what you get, with some lifestyle story. That seems more an investment ROI solution for the developer, not a housing and social justice solution.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ido 7y ago
Why not share an apartment? I had great (and bad, but also great) experiences with roommates between ages 19 and 28 (when my then girlfriend, now wife, moved in with me). I could (and intermittently have) afford to live in my own but the social benefits of roommates were worth it.
- yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
  Never met an introvert?
puranjay 7y ago
I had bad experiences with roommates early on and swore off sharing a house with anyone when I was in my early 20s. This meant that often a big part of my income would just go to housing. In a way, it helped since it pushed me to pick up side projects and learn new, marketable skills. But man, if I had access to a clean, affordable room + kitchen, I would have had a far happier and more social time in my 20s.

barry-cotter 7y ago

How is making certain types of housing illegal just? If people don’t want the combination of location and price that’s on offer they’ll go empty. If they do want them depriving them of the choice is unjust. Build more housing is the better solution, like Tokyo, but better for it to be possible for a new grad to live in a shoebox in Manhattan if they want to than not to have the choice at all.

neilv 7y ago
For just one aspect... The city here is allowed to, and does, exercise a lot of control over what can be built, to serve the common good. If the city then uses that power to allow a developer to squeeze every last drop of money they can out of new grads (and others) who are desperate, that wouldn't seem very just stewardship by the city.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  If their conception of the common good is high property prices sure. If it’s letting people live where they want to then more housing is better. Every capsule apartment a new grad is living in is a larger one further away someone else can live in.
  - neilv 7y ago
    So small apartments might be permitted, but with restrictions on the rents or sale prices that can be charged, for example.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      That’s just a restriction on how many will be built. The less profitable an investment is the less likely it is to be made. If the government makes profitably housing people who want housing illegal it can solve the problem by building the housing itself and eating the loss, whether an actual monetary loss or the loss of the better use the money could have been put to. But if the aim is to house people where they want to live, in conditions they want to live in more choice is better. If there’s an aesthetic preference for government provision over private provision that preference is costly both in terms of money and unsatisfied preferences.

anonymous5133 7y ago

I think this idea is brilliant and has a lot of potential to disrupt the traditional western housing model. I think a lot of young people will definitely be willing to make the trade off of living in a smaller space to get ahead in life.

WalterBright 7y ago

With a common area, they aren't unlike many dorms in college.

melling 7y ago

“ In cities such as Buenos Aires, Bogota and Mexico City, commutes can be up to three hours.” Wouldn’t better mass transit fix part of the problem?

jeromegv 7y ago
Buenos Aires has quite good public transit so I was surprised to read that
- rayiner 7y ago
  Public transit based commutes typically are longer. In downtown DC, you can often bike faster than the subway though downtown because of all the stops.
- cryptonector 7y ago
  Subways run every 3 minutes during rush hour, and the buses are all private and provide unbelievable coverage of the city and suburbs, with fantastic frequencies too. The subway system is rather small, but the buses provide all the coverage needed. (There's also rail, but buses are the real workhorse, and again, they're private.)
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> Wouldn’t better mass transit fix part of the problem? Adding transit might help, but not as much as adding housing. If you have a three hour commute and they put in better transit, now you have a two hour commute. But your rent goes up because you're closer to better transit, so you either have to pay more (which you can't afford) or move to somewhere with a 2.5 hour commute at your original rent (and pay moving costs). And there is no feasible transit you can add to make the housing which is 150 miles from the jobs have a reasonable commute. The only thing for it is more housing near the jobs.
- melling 7y ago
  “Nightmarish traffic jams...” The very first line of the article makes me believe that people don’t live 150 miles away. Maybe 30-50 miles and you’re driving 10-15 miles an hour?

jscholes 7y ago

> "People sleep in their apartments, but the rest of the building is part of their house too," This is the definition of renting a bedroom, not an apartment.