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So what do you think is the root problem? A national housing shortage? What do you think drives that shortage if so? What do you think are good solutions? I und

So what do you think is the root problem? A national housing shortage? What do you think drives that shortage if so? What do you think are good solutions? I understand it takes more than a blog post but every big problem takes more than a blog post, we can still have a conversation about it here. Could you shed a little light on the issue for us?

DoreenMichele 5y ago
We need to bring back smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods. We aren't providing the right kinds of housing. Our American ideal is a home designed for a nuclear family with a breadwinner father, homemaker mother and 2.5 kids because that's who had the money to finance the birth of the modern suburb. That was never the majority of our demographics but we've further diversified away from that in the decades since. Meanwhile, our housing stock has increasingly converged on their ideal home and that ideal home has grown larger and more sprawling over time because the only people who could afford it were people with good money. Our 1950s suburban home has more than doubled in size, from about 1200 sqft to over 2400 sqft in recent years. If we had just kept building 1950s style little suburban homes, we wouldn't have such a mess. But we didn't. Our homes today are that single family detached house dream on steroids. We need to reverse course. We have vastly more small households of just one to three people, meanwhile our housing stock tends to skew to three bedrooms or larger.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I personally live in a very very small home and live minimally and it cost me almost nothing. I'm sure I lucked out compared to the average person. So what is the reason that these smaller homes aren't more common? I would think that if there were a market for these homes someone would cash in on it, so is it zoning? Is it people's aversion to building their own homes themselves and the service-ification of everything? How do we reverse course and what are the pressures preventing that, in your view?
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    We need to remove administrative barriers, like zoning barriers. And we need financing mechanisms. The easiest thing to finance in the US is single family detached homes. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of them. It's quite hard to finance some types of housing popular in other countries, like cohousing.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      I'm right there with you on administrative barriers. What do you think of other housing options more common in the US, such as mobile homes, RVs, duplexes/quadplexes etc? What about ideas like renting rooms, dormitory style housing with shared spaces and things like that?
      - DoreenMichele 5y ago
        Mobile homes, RVs and the Tiny House movement are basically hacks to get around a broken system. The first tiny house was put on wheels to get around the zoning codes rather than fight them (I'm old enough, I read some of the earliest coverage of it back when it was a new idea). Those things are proliferating mostly because we won't fix our broken system. Not mostly because people actually prefer that stuff. Dorms, duplexes, renting a room etc fall under what I advocate for: SROs and Missing Middle Housing.
        betwixthewires 5y ago
        How are they hacks and not solutions? If smaller living spaces for smaller family units is a solution wouldn't they be solutions and not hacks? If people actually want smaller housing and choose these things, aren't they real solutions? Mobile homes date back to the same time as the modern suburb, were designed to target a similar demographic and are pretty ubiquitous across most of rural US, as are RVs in many places. I've seen tiny houses on wheels for the reason you state, I actually have neighbors with really beautiful houses like this.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

We need to bring back smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods. We aren't providing the right kinds of housing. Our American ideal is a home designed for a nuclear family with a breadwinner father, homemaker mother and 2.5 kids because that's who had the money to finance the birth of the modern suburb. That was never the majority of our demographics but we've further diversified away from that in the decades since. Meanwhile, our housing stock has increasingly converged on their ideal home and that ideal home has grown larger and more sprawling over time because the only people who could afford it were people with good money. Our 1950s suburban home has more than doubled in size, from about 1200 sqft to over 2400 sqft in recent years. If we had just kept building 1950s style little suburban homes, we wouldn't have such a mess. But we didn't. Our homes today are that single family detached house dream on steroids. We need to reverse course. We have vastly more small households of just one to three people, meanwhile our housing stock tends to skew to three bedrooms or larger.

betwixthewires 5y ago
I personally live in a very very small home and live minimally and it cost me almost nothing. I'm sure I lucked out compared to the average person. So what is the reason that these smaller homes aren't more common? I would think that if there were a market for these homes someone would cash in on it, so is it zoning? Is it people's aversion to building their own homes themselves and the service-ification of everything? How do we reverse course and what are the pressures preventing that, in your view?
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  We need to remove administrative barriers, like zoning barriers. And we need financing mechanisms. The easiest thing to finance in the US is single family detached homes. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of them. It's quite hard to finance some types of housing popular in other countries, like cohousing.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    I'm right there with you on administrative barriers. What do you think of other housing options more common in the US, such as mobile homes, RVs, duplexes/quadplexes etc? What about ideas like renting rooms, dormitory style housing with shared spaces and things like that?
    - DoreenMichele 5y ago
      Mobile homes, RVs and the Tiny House movement are basically hacks to get around a broken system. The first tiny house was put on wheels to get around the zoning codes rather than fight them (I'm old enough, I read some of the earliest coverage of it back when it was a new idea). Those things are proliferating mostly because we won't fix our broken system. Not mostly because people actually prefer that stuff. Dorms, duplexes, renting a room etc fall under what I advocate for: SROs and Missing Middle Housing.
      - betwixthewires 5y ago
        How are they hacks and not solutions? If smaller living spaces for smaller family units is a solution wouldn't they be solutions and not hacks? If people actually want smaller housing and choose these things, aren't they real solutions? Mobile homes date back to the same time as the modern suburb, were designed to target a similar demographic and are pretty ubiquitous across most of rural US, as are RVs in many places. I've seen tiny houses on wheels for the reason you state, I actually have neighbors with really beautiful houses like this.