13 ms·

Where the missing middle of housing isn't missing

60 points by jseliger 6y ago

bluedino 6y ago
>> Often, you can find this in college towns. A monoculture of single-family homes is so obviously ill-suited for a population dominated by students Not sure if that's a great example. My aunt owned a home in Ann Arbor that she paid $45,000 for. Over the next 20 years, almost every other home around her turned into a rental units for students. Landlords made tons of money, who could blame them. She was older and didn't like living in between parties and chaos, and let's not even get into Saturdays during football season. She did sell the house for almost nine times what she paid for it, though. There's no more empty land there, and hasn't been in forever, so what do you do. The neighborhoods makeup and appearance is very close to UW, you could swap the buildings in the article and never know the difference.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > A monoculture of single-family homes is so obviously ill-suited for a population dominated by students Don't the students get together in little groups of four to six and rent a family home? That's what they do in the UK.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    Yeah. That's how it was where I went to college. Even the dorms were 4 to an apartment.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Yeah, but lot's of cities (I'm also in the UK) now have the problem that there are so many students that there aren't enough houses for families (because landlords can charge more to six students sharing a house than one family). We need to build more houses.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      > We need to build more houses. The problem is when we do: - the quality is absolutely atrocious - they're so extremely small that they hardly seem livable when you look around - they have terrible gardens with hardly any soil - frankly, they're really ugly - simple cubes, no shape or space or nooks and crannies - they're in terrible areas and have no walkable shops or pubs I don't think I'd ever consider buying a house built after 1950. I worry we're building disposable, treeless, joyless, community-less slums.
      - sershe 6y ago
        Funny, in the US, I live in a 1906 craftsman house (it was a mistake to buy, and my wife is afraid of change plus it's a non-trivial monetary loss to switch) and everything I dont like about it is the opposite of what you describe. The quality of new houses is obviously much better, as I now realize having lived in both (sure, it looks good on the surface until you actually live in it and try to make modifications or run into issues). Plaster, old wiring, wooden windows, hardwood etc. really suck compared to drywall, plastic, laminate, etc. The only old houses I saw with good quality are the ones that were gutted out and redone with new stuff. Thank god this one was almost entirely rewired, if the entire house was as bad as a few places with old wiring, I would have definitely moved out. The garden is a huge hassle. I waste 30-60 minutes a week on it and it still mostly looks like crap, I am not going to spend any more time and not going to pay anyone on principle to make it look better - it's like spending money to buy a Porsche to park it in your driveway for display, pointless. Next time I'd opt for less garden. It has slanted roof (in place with minimal snowfall) - colossal waste, I cannot finish the attic because it would only be livable for gnomes, I've seen finished attics like that; I cannot go on the roof to enjoy the views - I wish it was shaped like a cube! Slanted roofs are 100% pointless unless you have massive snowfall. The only reason to not want a house shaped like a cube is sentimental attachment. All the nooks and crannies waste a ton of space (speaking of small), it's ~15% bigger on paper than our last apartment but lives much smaller. It's in a great area, but because of all the sprawling gardens it's quite a walk to a pub or a shop - compared to your average dense townhouse development.
        6y ago
  - joerickard 6y ago
    In some areas that is not allowed due to zoning laws. Boulder CO for example limits household sizes to 3 or 4 unrelated people depending on location. Family homes are often over $3000/mo making affordable housing difficult to find.
    - rch 6y ago
      ADUs and Rooms in owner occupied homes can be much more affordable, but people offering a portion of their primary residence to renters are subject to the same restrictions as houses that are part of a landlord's asset portfolio. Move the needle on existing regulations and landlords acquire even more housing stock and raise rents across the board. Equity based cooperatives and land trusts should be getting more attention in Boulder, since both have solid track records of providing permanently affordable housing elsewhere. Instead, local activists are following the national trend of pushing measures designed to facilitate the large scale transfer of private property into corporate rental portfolios.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    They do, but then the neighbors complain about the noise and all of the kids on their lawns and pass town ordinances outlawing it.
    - asdff 6y ago
      In my experience the neighbors complaining about college students partying moved far away from campus about 4 or 5 decades ago.
  - asdff 6y ago
    That's typically what is done. At my uni, most of the housing stock was 1920s sears catalog foursquare houses. some were duplexes right off the bat with 7 bedrooms each half, but most single family homes had at least 4 bedrooms. Some of the houses themselves were crudely subdivided into apartments, where you might get a floor with a retrofitted kitchen and a couple bedrooms, as well as an attic apartment. At my uni, rent hovers around $500/mo for your own bedroom in an apartment or house. In high cost of living cities, students share bedrooms to get rent down, and even in LA students who are sharing bedrooms might be paying around that $500/mo price too.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  I'm not sure what alternative you're proposing given that she did in fact live in a college town? Some kind of "no students allowed" subdivision? Keep in mind the FHA requirements.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Keep in mind also that excluding young people is the only permitted discrimination under the FHAA (because of HOPA).
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      Where "young" is defined as anyone under 55, sure. Creating a retirement community just falls into the umbrella of creating a dedicated subdivision for people like her though. There's probably not much demand for that in college towns?
- nitwit005 6y ago
  Having the neighborhood slowly change is going to be a thing that happens no matter what laws you pick. Twenty years is a long time.
flerchin 6y ago
The legislation followed popular opinion. The housing was built to satisfy market demand. If no one bought single family homes, fewer would be built. Every person was a kid, and raising kids is by far more comfortable in single family homes.
- apsec112 6y ago
  Most people don't vote in local elections. ~99.9% of the US (by land area) bans multi-family housing, and those laws mostly come from city councils and neighborhood committees dominated by wealthy, retired homeowners.
  - choeger 6y ago
    Interesting. In Germany you see kind of the opposite: The (often wealthy and well-connected) people in local politics vote for whatever drives the prices for real estate upwards. Guess who owns the real estate that is not (yet) allowed for building?
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      That's how it is in the USA too. San Fran is the most salient and popular example of this. It's not limited to just wealthy here either. Almost every considers how something will "affect their property values." Oh, and it's not even like people use studies to determine how property values are effected. They literally just make shit up in their head, and if they think it will drive down property values, it's a veto. It's why things in the USA are the way they are. Anything not SFHs with big yards and 3 car garages are "bad for property values."
    - khuey 6y ago
      They vote for higher real-estate prices but that doesn't in general require multifamily housing, scarcity works just as well.
      - choeger 6y ago
harimau777 6y ago
My concern is whether owning a multi-family home would really give me the autonomy that leads me to want to own a home in the first place. It seems to me that non-single family homes are more similar to rental apartments than they are to true ownership. For example: - You probably can't put in a workshop because the noise would bother the neighbors. - You often don't have any sort of yard or outside space so you can't pursue hobbies that can't reasonably be practiced indoors. - You can't modify the outside of the house so you are limited in your ability to customize your home. I guess my concern is that this would lead to a world where only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes. At least in the current system the middle class and the richer end of the working class can often afford single family homes.
- guyzero 6y ago
  https://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/market-focus-amateur-woodworkers-32900/all/ https://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/market-focus-amat... - " A survey conducted by National Family Opinion on behalf of Wood magazine found that approximately 5.5 million Americans actively participate in woodworking as a hobby" There are approx 128.6 million US households so at most 4.2% of US households have someone who considers themselves a woodworker. There are numerous shared wood shops out there, so an even smaller percentage will have home woodshops. I think the "missing middle" seems like a great option for the 95+% of US households who don't need a wood shop. edit: I just realized you said "workshop" and not "woodshop" but I don't think it makes a huge difference to my argument.
  - harimau777 6y ago
    For what it's worth, I actually was thinking of woodworking! (Except for the "outside hobbies" thing in which case I was thinking of blacksmithing)
- dionidium 6y ago
  I don't know what you're picturing, but I'm in the process of buying a two-family home in Providence and it invalidates each of your objections: - There is a detached garage and a basement, so you have workshop options similar to any homeowner's. - There is a yard (and this is common in most U.S. cities where two-, three-, and four-flats are prevalent). - Of course you can modify the outside of the house? I'm confused by this objection. You own the home. You can modify its appearance within the bounds of the law, just as you can with a SFH. (Edit: perhaps you're imagining owning a unit in the home and not the home itself? That makes more sense.) Obviously, it's not exactly like living in a SFH; it's a multi-family building, after all. But I've lived in these kinds of two-flats both as a renter and a homeowner and it's much more like owning (even as a renter) than it is like living in an apartment "complex."
cwhiz 6y ago
Why does this strongtowns crap keep showing up on HN? All of their "evidence" is just anecdotal information, none of their claims are backed by any actual evidence, and their whole site is designed to get you to pay money to become a member and/or buy their books. It's not technical, and it's not even news. What is it doing here?
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > All of their "evidence" is just anecdotal information, none of their claims are backed by any actual evidence It's a magazine, not a peer-reviewed journal. Sometimes that's fine. Sometimes a casual conversation about issues without a reproducible study is ok.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  What is it doing here? The same thing that everything else is doing here: someone submitted it. And enough people find it interesting that it makes the front page. Some of us want to live, not just code. We care about how we live, not just what we write. Mind you, I myself don't find these strongtowns articles particularly compelling. But enough people do for them to "keep showing up on HN". And I'm not going to say that those who find them interesting are wrong.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    If you want nonsense, go to an actual news site. This site was created for a specific purpose.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      From the guidelines: > What to Submit > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. You may be a "good hacker", but you're not the only one. Enough people here find this stuff interesting that it's within the purpose of the site.
tfehring 6y ago
Madison is a strange example to hold up considering that there's a drastic, almost Boulder-esque shortfall in housing supply, mostly driven by NIMBYism. It's still an awesome city - I'm in the process of moving there - but I know lots of people who've gotten priced out of the city itself, despite (or maybe because of) the coolness of its eclectic combination of architecture.
nickthemagicman 6y ago
I have a double and what I love about my double is that after it's paid off, one side will pay off property taxes, insurance, etc. All of that meta financial cruft that comes with owning a house is ameliorated. Cruft that can often add up to close to the price of rent.

60 points by jseliger 6y ago

>> Often, you can find this in college towns. A monoculture of single-family homes is so obviously ill-suited for a population dominated by students Not sure if that's a great example. My aunt owned a home in Ann Arbor that she paid $45,000 for. Over the next 20 years, almost every other home around her turned into a rental units for students. Landlords made tons of money, who could blame them. She was older and didn't like living in between parties and chaos, and let's not even get into Saturdays during football season. She did sell the house for almost nine times what she paid for it, though. There's no more empty land there, and hasn't been in forever, so what do you do. The neighborhoods makeup and appearance is very close to UW, you could swap the buildings in the article and never know the difference.

chrisseaton 6y ago
> A monoculture of single-family homes is so obviously ill-suited for a population dominated by students Don't the students get together in little groups of four to six and rent a family home? That's what they do in the UK.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  Yeah. That's how it was where I went to college. Even the dorms were 4 to an apartment.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Yeah, but lot's of cities (I'm also in the UK) now have the problem that there are so many students that there aren't enough houses for families (because landlords can charge more to six students sharing a house than one family). We need to build more houses.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > We need to build more houses. The problem is when we do: - the quality is absolutely atrocious - they're so extremely small that they hardly seem livable when you look around - they have terrible gardens with hardly any soil - frankly, they're really ugly - simple cubes, no shape or space or nooks and crannies - they're in terrible areas and have no walkable shops or pubs I don't think I'd ever consider buying a house built after 1950. I worry we're building disposable, treeless, joyless, community-less slums.
    - sershe 6y ago
      Funny, in the US, I live in a 1906 craftsman house (it was a mistake to buy, and my wife is afraid of change plus it's a non-trivial monetary loss to switch) and everything I dont like about it is the opposite of what you describe. The quality of new houses is obviously much better, as I now realize having lived in both (sure, it looks good on the surface until you actually live in it and try to make modifications or run into issues). Plaster, old wiring, wooden windows, hardwood etc. really suck compared to drywall, plastic, laminate, etc. The only old houses I saw with good quality are the ones that were gutted out and redone with new stuff. Thank god this one was almost entirely rewired, if the entire house was as bad as a few places with old wiring, I would have definitely moved out. The garden is a huge hassle. I waste 30-60 minutes a week on it and it still mostly looks like crap, I am not going to spend any more time and not going to pay anyone on principle to make it look better - it's like spending money to buy a Porsche to park it in your driveway for display, pointless. Next time I'd opt for less garden. It has slanted roof (in place with minimal snowfall) - colossal waste, I cannot finish the attic because it would only be livable for gnomes, I've seen finished attics like that; I cannot go on the roof to enjoy the views - I wish it was shaped like a cube! Slanted roofs are 100% pointless unless you have massive snowfall. The only reason to not want a house shaped like a cube is sentimental attachment. All the nooks and crannies waste a ton of space (speaking of small), it's ~15% bigger on paper than our last apartment but lives much smaller. It's in a great area, but because of all the sprawling gardens it's quite a walk to a pub or a shop - compared to your average dense townhouse development.
      - 6y ago
- joerickard 6y ago
  In some areas that is not allowed due to zoning laws. Boulder CO for example limits household sizes to 3 or 4 unrelated people depending on location. Family homes are often over $3000/mo making affordable housing difficult to find.
  - rch 6y ago
    ADUs and Rooms in owner occupied homes can be much more affordable, but people offering a portion of their primary residence to renters are subject to the same restrictions as houses that are part of a landlord's asset portfolio. Move the needle on existing regulations and landlords acquire even more housing stock and raise rents across the board. Equity based cooperatives and land trusts should be getting more attention in Boulder, since both have solid track records of providing permanently affordable housing elsewhere. Instead, local activists are following the national trend of pushing measures designed to facilitate the large scale transfer of private property into corporate rental portfolios.
- jandrese 6y ago
  They do, but then the neighbors complain about the noise and all of the kids on their lawns and pass town ordinances outlawing it.
  - asdff 6y ago
    In my experience the neighbors complaining about college students partying moved far away from campus about 4 or 5 decades ago.
- asdff 6y ago
  That's typically what is done. At my uni, most of the housing stock was 1920s sears catalog foursquare houses. some were duplexes right off the bat with 7 bedrooms each half, but most single family homes had at least 4 bedrooms. Some of the houses themselves were crudely subdivided into apartments, where you might get a floor with a retrofitted kitchen and a couple bedrooms, as well as an attic apartment. At my uni, rent hovers around $500/mo for your own bedroom in an apartment or house. In high cost of living cities, students share bedrooms to get rent down, and even in LA students who are sharing bedrooms might be paying around that $500/mo price too.
CydeWeys 6y ago
I'm not sure what alternative you're proposing given that she did in fact live in a college town? Some kind of "no students allowed" subdivision? Keep in mind the FHA requirements.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Keep in mind also that excluding young people is the only permitted discrimination under the FHAA (because of HOPA).
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Where "young" is defined as anyone under 55, sure. Creating a retirement community just falls into the umbrella of creating a dedicated subdivision for people like her though. There's probably not much demand for that in college towns?
nitwit005 6y ago
Having the neighborhood slowly change is going to be a thing that happens no matter what laws you pick. Twenty years is a long time.

flerchin 6y ago

The legislation followed popular opinion. The housing was built to satisfy market demand. If no one bought single family homes, fewer would be built. Every person was a kid, and raising kids is by far more comfortable in single family homes.

apsec112 6y ago
Most people don't vote in local elections. ~99.9% of the US (by land area) bans multi-family housing, and those laws mostly come from city councils and neighborhood committees dominated by wealthy, retired homeowners.
- choeger 6y ago
  Interesting. In Germany you see kind of the opposite: The (often wealthy and well-connected) people in local politics vote for whatever drives the prices for real estate upwards. Guess who owns the real estate that is not (yet) allowed for building?
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    That's how it is in the USA too. San Fran is the most salient and popular example of this. It's not limited to just wealthy here either. Almost every considers how something will "affect their property values." Oh, and it's not even like people use studies to determine how property values are effected. They literally just make shit up in their head, and if they think it will drive down property values, it's a veto. It's why things in the USA are the way they are. Anything not SFHs with big yards and 3 car garages are "bad for property values."
  - khuey 6y ago
    They vote for higher real-estate prices but that doesn't in general require multifamily housing, scarcity works just as well.
    - choeger 6y ago

harimau777 6y ago

My concern is whether owning a multi-family home would really give me the autonomy that leads me to want to own a home in the first place. It seems to me that non-single family homes are more similar to rental apartments than they are to true ownership. For example: - You probably can't put in a workshop because the noise would bother the neighbors. - You often don't have any sort of yard or outside space so you can't pursue hobbies that can't reasonably be practiced indoors. - You can't modify the outside of the house so you are limited in your ability to customize your home. I guess my concern is that this would lead to a world where only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes. At least in the current system the middle class and the richer end of the working class can often afford single family homes.

guyzero 6y ago
https://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/market-focus-amateur-woodworkers-32900/all/ https://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/market-focus-amat... - " A survey conducted by National Family Opinion on behalf of Wood magazine found that approximately 5.5 million Americans actively participate in woodworking as a hobby" There are approx 128.6 million US households so at most 4.2% of US households have someone who considers themselves a woodworker. There are numerous shared wood shops out there, so an even smaller percentage will have home woodshops. I think the "missing middle" seems like a great option for the 95+% of US households who don't need a wood shop. edit: I just realized you said "workshop" and not "woodshop" but I don't think it makes a huge difference to my argument.
- harimau777 6y ago
  For what it's worth, I actually was thinking of woodworking! (Except for the "outside hobbies" thing in which case I was thinking of blacksmithing)
dionidium 6y ago
I don't know what you're picturing, but I'm in the process of buying a two-family home in Providence and it invalidates each of your objections: - There is a detached garage and a basement, so you have workshop options similar to any homeowner's. - There is a yard (and this is common in most U.S. cities where two-, three-, and four-flats are prevalent). - Of course you can modify the outside of the house? I'm confused by this objection. You own the home. You can modify its appearance within the bounds of the law, just as you can with a SFH. (Edit: perhaps you're imagining owning a unit in the home and not the home itself? That makes more sense.) Obviously, it's not exactly like living in a SFH; it's a multi-family building, after all. But I've lived in these kinds of two-flats both as a renter and a homeowner and it's much more like owning (even as a renter) than it is like living in an apartment "complex."

cwhiz 6y ago

Why does this strongtowns crap keep showing up on HN? All of their "evidence" is just anecdotal information, none of their claims are backed by any actual evidence, and their whole site is designed to get you to pay money to become a member and/or buy their books. It's not technical, and it's not even news. What is it doing here?

chrisseaton 6y ago
> All of their "evidence" is just anecdotal information, none of their claims are backed by any actual evidence It's a magazine, not a peer-reviewed journal. Sometimes that's fine. Sometimes a casual conversation about issues without a reproducible study is ok.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
What is it doing here? The same thing that everything else is doing here: someone submitted it. And enough people find it interesting that it makes the front page. Some of us want to live, not just code. We care about how we live, not just what we write. Mind you, I myself don't find these strongtowns articles particularly compelling. But enough people do for them to "keep showing up on HN". And I'm not going to say that those who find them interesting are wrong.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  If you want nonsense, go to an actual news site. This site was created for a specific purpose.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    From the guidelines: > What to Submit > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. You may be a "good hacker", but you're not the only one. Enough people here find this stuff interesting that it's within the purpose of the site.

tfehring 6y ago

Madison is a strange example to hold up considering that there's a drastic, almost Boulder-esque shortfall in housing supply, mostly driven by NIMBYism. It's still an awesome city - I'm in the process of moving there - but I know lots of people who've gotten priced out of the city itself, despite (or maybe because of) the coolness of its eclectic combination of architecture.

nickthemagicman 6y ago

I have a double and what I love about my double is that after it's paid off, one side will pay off property taxes, insurance, etc. All of that meta financial cruft that comes with owning a house is ameliorated. Cruft that can often add up to close to the price of rent.