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> In February, I, along with real estate developer Bobby Fijan, went on the Bloomberg podcast Odd Lots to talk about why it’s so hard to find a family-sized apa

• hooverd 3y ago
  Bobby Floorplans should know that the magic bullet is a land value tax, not single stair.
  • aorloff 3y ago
    Land value taxes assume real estate values always increase, which they don’t
    • reaperman 3y ago
      How is this assumption required by the LVT system? My basic reading of LVT suggests that the assessed tax value of land could increase or decrease just as the current property tax system can increase or decrease.
      • SoftTalker 3y ago
        When is the last time your property tax valuation decreased? Where I am the rate increases are capped but if they want more money they just work around that by increasing the valuations.
    • midasuni 3y ago
      If the rentable price was 6k one year and 5k the next then you’d simply pay less rent for the land.
  • epistasis 3y ago
    As a land value tax advocate, I also agree with Bobby Fijan here. There needs to be a way to build these safe, sensible floor plans in the US.
    • hooverd 3y ago
      Agreed, it's definitely a "yes, and" scenario.
• bobthepanda 3y ago
  One thing to keep in mind is that in the US there are often things like setback restrictions and distance separation requirements such, so a small increase in square footage can be the difference between a building fitting on a lot, and not. You can of course buy more lots to combine but that takes more money, and more time, because you have to wait for a bunch of adjacent lot owners to sell.
  • foofie 3y ago
    > One thing to keep in mind is that in the US there are often things like setback restrictions and distance separation requirements such, so a small increase in square footage can be the difference between a building fitting on a lot, and not. Any country with urban planning and building codes imposes this sort of restrictions.
    • bluGill 3y ago
      Some of those restrictions are worth having. Some are unreasonable. This is a debate worth having, but it cannot be done without going into details.
    • bobthepanda 3y ago
      I didn’t really say that as in only the US does it, but more in case I got an HN “well ackshually” about some other place.
• nottorp 3y ago
  > the kitchen has a refrigerator smaller than the one my American best friend uses for beer It's possible that you can walk 5 min to get more beer while he has to drive 30 minutes?
  • throwway120385 3y ago
    Nothing will drive this point home more than living on an island with a single ferry and no grocery store. You have to stock everything because everything you forget costs you $20 or $40 or more to go pick up.
  • bluGill 3y ago
    Most people in America can drive for 5 minutes for more beer. If you can't legally drive because of how drunk you are, then most stores won't sell you more beer. People might drive 30 minutes for beer, but that is about either price or selection, not availability. Though many cities have weird laws so some places you can't get beer at all in town, and that would push you to the 30 minute drive. But where I live many people have a separate beer fridge despite being 5 minutes from a store where they can get more.
    • watwut 3y ago
      You cant legally drive when you had one small beer. You can legally buy beers or other alcohol when you already had one beer. If the store is not selling you alcohol due to intoxication, you should stop driving several drinks ago. I can get good selection of beers or other alcohol at reasonable price in the regular store within 5-10 min of walk anywhere in the city assuming it is not middle of the night.
      • jessriedel 3y ago
        > You cant legally drive when you had one small beer Not in the US. The legal limit in almost all states is 0.08.
        • watwut 3y ago
• epistasis 3y ago
  It's not just Bobby Fijan, there's also Michael Elias, an architect, who has been trying to build family suitable apartments in the US after experiencing them in Germany. The problem really is the hallway cutting the building in half. It puts such restrictions on what can be built in sensible ways.
  • criddell 3y ago
    You could just put a staircase in the middle of the apartment and have two or three levels, no? That's how lots of homes are built, is there some reason reason why some apartments couldn't be like that as well.
    • SoftTalker 3y ago
      Yeah I've lived in and visited friends in "townhouse" apartments that are two or three stories, the bedrooms are upstairs and the living space and kitchen downstairs.
    • mperham 3y ago
      Those are called townhomes.
      • criddell 3y ago
        That’s not the kind of home Fijan or Elias are talking about. Those don’t generally have the problem of the hallway cutting the building in half.
  • wolverine876 3y ago
    You might mean Michael Eliason, who is part of the OP's organization: https://www.centerforbuilding.org/our-team https://www.centerforbuilding.org/our-team
    • epistasis 3y ago
      Oops, two mistakes on my part here, the spelling, and somehow missing that he's in one of the early paragraphs of the linked article... I've been following Eliason's work for a long time so I can't believe his name didn't pop out to me in the article!
• sspiff 3y ago
  >Just everything in Europe is tiny. T i n y. And frankly, it's not that much cheaper over here either. I would argue the other way, as a European, I've been to multiple places Asia and the Middle East and everything is either the same size or smaller than in Europe. I haven't been to Africa or the Americas, but I'd say from my perspective, that things in the US are just extra large.
  • Aurornis 3y ago
    > I would argue the other way, as a European, I've been to multiple places Asia and the Middle East and everything is either the same size or smaller than in Europe. The parent commenter moved from America to Europe, so the size difference is obvious. I agree that many parts of Asia have similar size standards. Things in America are just very large.
    • jorvi 3y ago
      > Things in America are just very large. Maybe harsh, but North Americans just love to consume consume consume planetary consequences be damned. Per capita CO2 emissions (aka carbon footprint): - 15.5 Canada (?!) - 14.5 USA - 8.5: China - 3.3: Vietnam - 15.5 Australia - 3.7: Sweden - 8.2: Germany - 7.8: Netherlands - 5.5: Italy - 1.9: Morocco - 6.8: South Africa - 3.6: Mexico - 2.2: Brazil If you live at nearly x2 the CO2 footprint of West/Central Europeans, and above x4 for most of the planet, it gets a lot easier to live large. Of course, North America having a lot of space geographically makes it easier to build big, and there is probably a ton of other factors as well. But it is an important thing to note.
      • throwaway44023 3y ago
        Canada is high probably because of the sparse northern population that uses fossil fuels year-round to get heat, transport and electricity.
      • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        You missed Australia, at 15.25. Probably because they have all those coal reserves, and like houses as big as Americans.
• petschge 3y ago
  In Europe a closet is furniture, not a built in room.
  • diggan 3y ago
    Not sure if that's wide-spread enough to claim "In Europe". I currently live in a flat in Barcelona (the European one) and two out of three bedrooms has at least one built-in closet in them.
    • oldtownroad 3y ago
      Either you’re misunderstanding closet to mean a built-in wardrobe or… I don’t know what other explanation there could be. American closets (i.e: a whole room of 100+ square feet, dedicated to storage of clothes) just don’t exist in “normal” European flats/apartments/homes. You’d be an outlier if you have an American-style closet in Europe. Regardless of how much you’re spending, they just don’t exist in >95% of properties.
      • TheCleric 3y ago
        A 100+ square foot closet is a rarity in America. Most are between 5-15 in my experience.
    • FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      What other internationally famous Barcelonas are there? I'm sure there might be "a" Barcelona in every Spanish speaking nation, but only one is the Barcelona everyone is thinking about making confusion on international forums unlikely.
  • FpUser 3y ago
    I do not think stuffing everyone in ever smaller boxes is a good policy.
    • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
      Forcing people to spend more money on a bigger box than they want isn't great, either
• varjag 3y ago
  Is this some old building? One egress on above ground floors is many decades since illegal to develop in EU harmonized bulding codes. The only exception I think if there are sprinkler points in the rooms. And TBH you can't really extrapolate your residence in one place to conditions in all of Europe, it is quite different.
  • diggan 3y ago
    > And TBH you can't really extrapolate your residence in one place to conditions in all of Europe, it is quite different. I'm guessing parent also lives in Lisbon or Oporto, which doesn't exactly extrapolate cleanly to rest of Portugal even.
  • wolverine876 3y ago
    > One egress on above ground floors is many decades since illegal to develop in EU harmonized bulding codes. The only exception I think if there are sprinkler points in the rooms. I might be misunderstanding, but isn't the OP all about how Europe allows single-stairway and the US does not?
  • bouncing 3y ago
    > Is this some old building? Not that old. 2010, maybe? It's a building with 4 stories. We're on the second (Portuguese would call it the first floor; like hackers, they count the ground floor as zero). If you walk out our door, you see an elevator and a stairwell with an insulated steel door to the stairs. That's it; that's the only point of egress. Though in a pinch, I could jump from the balcony and probably just break an ankle or something.
  • bogantech 3y ago
    > One egress on above ground floors is many decades since illegal to develop in EU harmonized bulding codes. I was living in an Apartment in Sweden built in 2018 with only a central staircase and no sprinklers and never actually noticed anything else in the few years I lived there
• Aurornis 3y ago
  > Just everything in Europe is tiny. T i n y. Having travelled through several parts of Europe and Asia, I think a more general takeaway would be that everything in America is very big. Even if 4-bedroom apartments were plentiful, I suspect people would still be pushing to live in a house rather than an apartment. If the demand for large apartments isn't there, builders aren't very incentivized to build them.
  • bluGill 3y ago
    How much of that is developers can't build an option so people don't know what they want? As I noted elsewhere, I think the demand for 4 bedroom apartments is mostly to the poor right now - they want 4 bedrooms in the same space of a current 2 bedrooms - make each bedroom smaller and only 1 bathroom to share (or may a half bathroom for the second bathroom not a full one). The layout of a US 4 bedroom by nature ends up with a lot of wasted space in expensive closets (unless you get a corner unit - there cannot be many of these in a two staircase building but they would look more like Europe) Though I have often asked what it would take to attract an upper middle class family to an inner-city apartment. They want large apartment - but it needs to be affordable (not downtown rents). But there is a lot else about inner city that needs to be fixed first (crime tends to be bad)
• ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > Just everything in Europe is tiny. T i n y. And frankly, it's not that much cheaper over here either The real kicker is that price of houses / assets is not attached to physical reality any more. Financialization drives up the price of real estate. When the financial markets trade real estate, no-one gives a rat's ass if it's a mansion or a shed - the only thing that matters is that number goes up. As was demonstrated in 2008, no-one even knew anything about underlying value of the asset and nobody cared. In every country in EU number of houses per person has been increasing, and at the same time, prices of houses have been increasing. You cannot build your way out of this. Real solution to the housing crisis is to reign in financial markets, it's not anything to do with building.
  • avidiax 3y ago
    30 year mortgages plus the 1/3rd of salary mortgage approval heuristic means that desirable real estate costs 10 years of salary. If we had 10 year maximum mortgages, real estate would cost 1/3rd as much, roughly.
  • antisthenes 3y ago
    > Real solution to the housing crisis is to reign in financial markets, it's not anything to do with building. 12 years of ZIRP certainly didn't help. It's a massive payout to the finance sector and to people who had assets to borrow against (or even just a bunch of cash to put in the stock market).
  • tmnvix 3y ago
    Absolutely. Nobody would be paying the current prices if they didn't expect the value to increase. Prices are a reflection of the financial value and not the utility. This is the reason that interest rates are fundamental. If we really have turned the corner on the steady decline of interest rates that we've seen over the last 20-30 years then property markets are not going to 'plateau'. They will fall to a point where new buyers can afford to service the loans. Of course, as noted above (prices being as high as they are due to expected future increases), if prices are falling then not only do new buyers wait for prices fall to a point where they can service the loans again, but they will also focus more on utility value as public sentiment moves away from 'property prices always go up'. This will compound the falls. That said, there will undoubtedly be a lot of policy engineering employed to avoid losses and kick the can further down the road. In the long run I don't think it will be successful. The only thing that will save the property market is a return to low rates. Every time the issue of housing affordability comes up on this site, the debate quickly moves to zoning and nimbys and such. In my view this is important to an extent (more so in some areas than others), and building more homes is always helpful, but it is not as significant as interest rates and the 'artificial' demand that is induced by speculation.
• lxgr 3y ago
  > as an American living in Portugal [...] Just everything in Europe is tiny. Sorry to invoke a cliche here but... Europe doesn't start and end in Portugal. There are plenty of large-family apartments in some cities. Especially new developments usually have a mix of studios, one-bedrooms and beyond. In terms of old buildings (i.e. older than ~100 years), many European cities have apartment buildings designed for wealthy families that would house their staff in the same building. The problem there is actually that these are too large to rent out to most families, not the opposite.
  • bouncing 3y ago
    I've lived/traveled outside of Portugal. It really holds true across the continent. Stuff is just smaller.
    • lxgr 3y ago
      With "stuff", are you comparing housing size in general? If so, I think that doesn't make sense given that single-family homes are just much more common in the US than they are in many European countries. Comparing apartment sizes (i.e. excluding single-family homes) makes more sense in a conversation about family-sized apartments. In my very limited experience, US apartments in expensive cities are often tiny as well, washer/drier in-unit is not a given (whereas any apartment without a washing machine would be considered archaic/unlivable in many places in Europe), and the most economical option to get more space is to move to a single-family house.
      • bouncing 3y ago
        Well yeah, that's a good example. I haven't always had a laundry room in apartments I've rented in the US. When I haven't, there's been a shared machine room that all the tenants use with rows of machines. But most of the apartments I've rented in the US have had laundry rooms. Laundry rooms are, as far as I can tell, something that simply doesn't exist this side of the Atlantic. They put clothes washers in the kitchen and even in humid Porto, vented tumble dryers are pretty uncommon. Granted, New York, Boston, and San Francisco are different. But if you're in Denver, or Austin, or Dallas, etc, you can expect an apartment with far more storage than similarly sized European cities.
• bluGill 3y ago
  In the famous book "the Wealth of the Nations", it points out that when people get more money they typically spend it on larger/better places to live. Just looking at the historical economy of US and the rest of the world post WWII it shouldn't be a surprise that people live in larger apartments in the US in general. Larger fridges are another luxury that I'd expect in the US as well. However this article is about people who live in apartments - in the US that means either those without a family or poor. Those without a family may want 3 bedrooms - either for offices (his and hers) or a guest bedroom, but cannot really see need for more than that. They also want them to be large and so are happy with the current state of things. You would expect the poor to want to compromise on smaller fridges, and bedrooms - but many would prefer to have 4 tiny bedrooms (with only beds in them), and 1 bathroom, all in the space of a current US 2 bedroom apartment. They still dream of the larger bedrooms, fridges and the like - but they well know they cannot afford it. Like you said, fire needs to be considered. Current codes are harming the poor, but it may be less harm than from allowing fire to kill them.
  • jltsiren 3y ago
    > Like you said, fire needs to be considered. Current codes are harming the poor, but it may be less harm than from allowing fire to kill them. The last time there was a discussion on fire codes on HN, I looked up some statistics and reports from Finland. It's a country with an unusually large number of fire deaths per capita for a developed country, because of attitudes and because saunas are common. Almost all fire deaths happened in the unit where the fire started. Unusually deadly home fires almost always happened in single-family homes. I couldn't find any reports of fires where a second stairwell accessible from the same corridor would have prevented deaths. There were some fires where a second exit from the unit (to a different corridor) would have helped, because the fire started near the exit and people couldn't get out. This only applies to mid-rise and low-rise buildings. There are very few residential high-rises in Finland.
    • wolverine876 3y ago
      > Almost all fire deaths happened in the unit where the fire started. That could be because of effective fire codes. > I couldn't find any reports of fires where a second stairwell accessible from the same corridor would have prevented deaths. Meaning, you couldn't find anything either way, or in what you found, the second stairwell wouldn't have helped?
• detourdog 3y ago
  What makes it even more complicated is that in Massachusetts and I assume other states in Union use the International Building Code to dictate building codes. This means that new construction and significant renovation all fall under the international building codes. I think that the USA doesn't have the existing family sized apartment stock that the market might current be demanding. The other countries by having larger existing stock means more housing available at lower safety standards. The final type of zoning that could effect is the style and use type zoning. I personally think that the style and use type zoning has a small part in our housing availability.
  • scythe 3y ago
    >International Building Code As I've explained before, it's the World Series of building codes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39050267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39050267
    • detourdog 3y ago
      I see what you are saying a number of "national" building codes exist. I imagine in one sense these codes open up one's products to national markets when demonstrated to be compliant. On the other hand they can also be used as alignment tools to see measure compliance of various markets. I have noticed a number of modular and manufactured builders will now build to any code standard.