8 ms·

In the 1950s, average size of new homes was about 1200 square feet. In 2000, it was more than 2400 square feet and held one less person (iirc: 4.5 VS 3.5 people

In the 1950s, average size of new homes was about 1200 square feet. In 2000, it was more than 2400 square feet and held one less person (iirc: 4.5 VS 3.5 people). We are building 1950s suburban homes on steroids in a post-baby-boom world where average household size has shrunk. There are a lot of problems with this.

zbrozek 3y ago
You build the biggest thing you can within a parcel because there is plenty of demand at the top of the market. Want more, smaller homes? Reduce or eliminate minimum lot sizes, setbacks, constraints on number of units, and process required towards entitlement. What is legal is what gets built. Not enough is legal, and not enough is built as a result.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  > You build the biggest thing you can within a parcel because there is plenty of demand at the top of the market. I know many people who have built many homes and I don't know a single one who thought that way or built a house that reflects it. While impacted by practical needs to a degree, preferred home size is just a fashion that changes over time and amounts to personal taste. The 3500sf McMansion of yesterday becomes the "who would want to maintain and heat all that?!" of tomorrow, the cramped matchbox of yesterday becomes the Eco Friendly Tiny Home of tomorrow, etc People build for the intersection of they want to budget and either: what they want to live in, or what their near-term anticipated buyer is assumed to want in light of current trends.
  - vkou 3y ago
    People building their own homes are outliers. Most homes are built by cookie-cutter block developments, and they make the most money by: 1. Minimizing the size of their lots. 2. Maximizing the size of the homes on the lots. They subdivide as much as they are allowed to, and build as big as they are allowed to. If the houses in your city are too big, it's because the smallest allowed lot size is. If we ever caught up with the housing shortage, and there was a glut of housing on the market, maybe developers would start to build smaller, but we aren't there, and we won't be there for the next ~30 years.
    - swatcoder 3y ago
      Again: I know builders. The size of the home is not a structural rule of the building industry, and is not universal or permanent. Just like any business, it's something builders decide based on who their market is and what they think they'll buy. The described strategy might be what you're seeing in your area and might be the only thing that makes sense to your own tastes, but there are plenty of cities and counties where the pressing demand from buyers is for other things. In trend-leading communities, demand has been growing for years for denser housing with immediate access to retail and commerce; for efficient homes with low utility costs or green considerations; for small houses, condos, and townhouses that are well-appointed but accessibly priced and low-maintenance, etc and this is what builders have been building when they've been able to get cleared to build at all.
      - giantg2 3y ago
        On a national level, the trends are that home size is increasing and lot size is decreasing. Sure there will be some local variances, and it is driven by what the market will support, but it's still the general trend.
      - zbrozek 3y ago
        Builders build bespoke one off things for crazy people. Developers build bulk housing to try and make a profit, and they maximize FAR.
        ben_w 3y ago
        The options are not limited to {"bespoke custom house", "one size for all"}. These ones from this builder vary from 80-320 square metres (~10 square feet per square meter): https://www.heinzvonheiden.de/hausfinder https://www.heinzvonheiden.de/hausfinder It would be hilarious if the famously choice-filled capitalist USA has a building industry limited to Cold War DDR "commie block" identikit construction.
        aidenn0 3y ago
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    The trend in Seattle at least is to take one SFH policy and build three town homes on it that don’t share walls but have the minimum buffers between them and the property line. People don’t really build homes at all, developers do, and they want to maximize the earnings they can get on an expensive plot of land.
    - OJFord 3y ago
      Fwiw, that's my non-American impression of North American suburban homes everywhere (as far as I've seen, largely TV/film of course) - y'all say scathing things about terraced houses in Europe, but then your own seem for the most part detached only as a technicality. (And probably it is mostly about making legal and construction matters easier? No party wall; if you want to tear it down and put a new one up you can do so without disturbing the neighbours' property, etc.)
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        We have townhomes that share walls as well. My wife wasn’t a fan although I loved one place like that. It’s mostly preference going on.
        OJFord 3y ago
        I know, it just seems like preference is much stronger against them / there are fewer of them in NA. Maybe because if you build your houses with a timber frame you need an air gap not to heat the neighbours? Also I suppose the cost saving of constructing like that is a lot less than with brick or even breeze blocks.
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        I would say 25% of the townhomes here in Ballard are row homes that share walls, the rest are townhomes with footpath sized spacing between them. It isn’t a matter of heat here in Seattle, heat pumps are efficient and insulation between homes is pretty good. Besides cost savings, you can fit more in if you don’t have those foot paths between, but the market isn’t into it.
  - danielheath 3y ago
    "Who would want to heat all that" is very much dependent on the available energy subsidies.
    - throwaway14356 3y ago
      I lived in a 3x2.5 meter room one time. There are obvious drawbacks but it had a surprising amount of advantages too. Using all available space leaves very little air to heat. Where would you get oxygen in a normal house? It's not like my heater can keep up if I open the windows.
  - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
    3500sf houses (my home is not a McMansion) are not likely to become unfashionable. They sell for insane amounts of money because they are so desirable - even old ones and all the maintenance issues that come along with them. We should be meeting the demand of what people want.
  - simonsarris 3y ago
    > preferred home size is just a fashion It's been a linear and monotonic increase for over 100 years
- Spivak 3y ago
  I worry about the unintended consequences of a plan like this because you might inadvertently break the cycle of the average neighborhood getting more desirable over time. And as much as it's silly that our entire financial system depends on the spice flowing it's where we're at. Having lots of square footage and (relatively speaking) spacious lots means that neighborhoods can grow to be roughly as nice as the residents have money.
- giantg2 3y ago
  "Not enough is legal, and not enough is built as a result." It's a preferences and distribution problem. There are plenty of places with vacancies or where it is legal and practical to build. The problem is people don't want to live there or it has too few jobs. If the market works the way it should, then people should shift out of the tighter areas and into the looser areas, reaching something closer to an equilibrium. The problem is many of the companies that had easy money and extreme growth concentrated it one region and skewed the market. Most of the US does not have a housing issue as nationally housing units exceed "households". We could accommodate everyone, but it's largely a distribution and preferences issue. https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/are-there-more-homes-people-united-states https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/are-there-more-homes-people...
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    > then people should shift out of the tighter areas and into the looser areas, reaching something closer to an equilibrium thats if infrastructure(roads, airports, hospitals, grid, etc) will appear there
    - giantg2 3y ago
      There are plenty of places with infrastructure that also have available land within about an hour or so from an airport. Many of those places have decent hospitals with great hospitals (for specialists) a reasonable drive away. Those decent hospitals would likely get better if they had employed patients to reduce the percentage of their patients on Medicare and Medicaid (both low reimbursing).
  - bsder 3y ago
    > If the market works the way it should, then people should shift out of the tighter areas and into the looser areas, reaching something closer to an equilibrium. The problem is that households require two wage earners. Consequently, it is very difficult for a family to move since both earners have to find better jobs simultaneously. One of the reasons to stay in the overpriced areas is that when one person loses a job, they can get another job without uprooting the whole family.
- miguelazo 3y ago
  Oh god, spare us the YIMBY talking points. Just like this article completely ignores how many vacant homes there are, how many have been converted to short term rentals, etc. There are plenty of luxury condos and McMansions being built, not because “that’s what’s legal”, but because that’s where the fattest margins are and we live in a neoliberal nightmare.
  - jnwatson 3y ago
    The article specifically calls out home vacancy rates. We're at an all time low in cities.
    - cudgy 3y ago
      What cities? How do you define vacancy? Is a 2nd home vacant? Is an airbnb vacant? How were these vacancies counted and who collects the data? Can you compare vacancy rates from the past to the present? Did they use same methodology to collect vacancy rates?
      - miguelazo 3y ago
        Exactly! I live in a major city and there are vacancies everywhere. It’s especially frustrating to see how many houses that sell sit empty for like a year or more before the speculators manage to flip them into a short term rental or whatever.
- geodel 3y ago
  So why enough housing is not getting build in Europe, surely they don't have crazy american rules but still facing severe housing shortages all over.
  - thanksgiving 3y ago
    Where would you build them? You’d need to first “seed” new neighborhoods with subway stations “in the middle of nowhere”…
    - all2 3y ago
      As soon as you announce a new subway station the vultures descend and prices will ratchet up as speculators by land and sit in it, waiting for the hither bidder.
      - bostonvaulter2 3y ago
        One part of the answer to that is a land value tax. That way the “vultures” won’t be able to simply sit on the property waiting for it to appreciate before selling it.
      - thanksgiving 3y ago
        That means the demand is very high and we need to build even more subway stations until the “vultures” can’t arbitrage the market anymore.
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        Crazy that you are being downvoted for applying the principles of supply and demand.
        all2 3y ago
        If I think through this; 1. Price varies based on desirability of a location. 2. Desirability varies based on many factors, including proximity to a city center or major business concerns, cost of living, crime rate, etc. 3. To optimize desirability until there is more desirable space than those who desire it would require optimizing the variables that contribute to desirability. 4. The potential result is desirable, ie proximity to jobs or cultural center, low crime, low cost of living, etc. A number of variables contribute to each of these, and those would require optimization as well. 4a. There will be a point of diminishing returns, where builders will exit a market when there are not enough buyers at high enough prices to make a profit. As soon as there is a hint of profit, the vultures will appear. 5. In order to prevent real estate speculation, we could impose a few laws: first, make lending at a profit illegal for all non productive enterprises; second, levy a land value tax that hurts enough that it makes owning non productive commercial property untenable to own; third, allow only individuals to own residential real estate, ie, eliminate the rental market entirely and levy use taxes for vacant homes (your real estate must be your home of record and must be your residence for some minimum percentage of time every year). This would destroy the real estate market entirely, and I don't think that would be a bad thing.
willcipriano 3y ago
Finished basements. The house in 1950 had a unfinished basement and was listed at 1200 sq ft. They finished the basement and later sold it as 2400. The difference is a couple pallets of drywall.
- thatfrenchguy 3y ago
  No basements in western states :)
  - makeitshine 3y ago
    I've lived in Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Colorado and I've seen and lived in plenty of places with basements.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      On flat land, basements are a function of home (and land) price. In places where the frost line is not very deep, a basement is a luxury. One of the most expensive parts of the house is laying the foundation, and not building a basement is far cheaper than building a basement. If the frost line is lower, then a basement is very little extra cost since you are digging deeper and laying more concrete anyway. If you are building on a hill, then making a 3 story house is also very little extra cost.
  - cafard 3y ago
    My family lived from 1969 through 2006 in a house in Colorado with a basement. My stepmother--who grew up in a region with cooler summers--ight have perished of heat exhaustion but for the basement. What anyone in particular had outside our neighborhood, I can't say; but I think that basements were not unusual in Denver.
  - o11c 3y ago
    3/6 of the houses I spent a lot of time in as a kid had finished basements. Anecdotally, finished basements are practically required if there is any sort of hill, which fairly common in the west, whereas they're likely to be absent for houses built on the floodplain.
thefourthchime 3y ago
We live in a wildly different world now. Cars, shopping centers, everything is bigger. Is that bad? Depends on your viewpoint. As far as I can tell, people are buying what they like so the customer is happy. There are side effects we don't like, but I can see attempting to solve that could have its side effects. Eventually, the market works this out. We got sick of sprawl some people moved back to the cities. Houses are too big? Some people live in much smaller homes closer to the city or even tiny homes.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  The market isn't allowed to work it out because of single family zoning
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
refurb 3y ago
4.5 people in a 1200 sq ft house is packed. I'd argue we are simply purchasing larger homes because that's what people want?
- pas 3y ago
  that's 111 m² usable space right? and 4.5 people .. meaning parents and 3 kids, well, yeah, that's not super big, but everyone can have their own room (let's say 10+ m² so that's half of the house, and you still have around 50 m² for a living/dining room with kitchen, bathrooms, etc.) it sounds lovely to my European ears :)
BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
We don’t live in the 1950’s anymore. When you and your spouse are working from home and have 2+ teenagers 1200 ain’t gonna cut it. Insisting on horrible conditions to raise a family in the modern world is not going to encourage people to have children.
- bojan 3y ago
  Whatever we are doing now is also not encouraging people to have children. I'm sure many young people would rather choose a 1200 sqft home than no home at all, which is currently the case. Your example of two teenagers is only relevant for 6 years of a family's lifetime. Why should we optimise for those 6 years?
  - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
    My spouse and I chose to have kids because we could provide for them and house them in nice conditions. I would support making that a reality for more people. There are new suburbs that are slowly coming online where I live, just a little further out than what's currently available, and more of that would be great. And we don't need to be "optimizing" like you're talking about. "Well it's only 6 years of our life, not a big deal for everyone to suffer that long!" Good lord. Just build the houses people want. And clearly some of them want the SQFT - we can meet that demand.
    - bojan 3y ago
      How is living in a 1200 sqft "suffering"? My spouse and I also went for the kids when we were financially stable, and now we live in a 1500 sqft home, and I don't see why would we need a bigger one. We both work from home, the kids have their own rooms, we even have a tiny guest room. What would I do with a 2400 sqft one? Cleaning and maintaining thus one is already a lot of work. In a situation where there is a housing crisis all over the West, building bigger houses, except for a niche market that does exist, just doesn't make sense.
      - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
mindslight 3y ago
IMO the tiny 1950's boxes were the start of the problem. "Everybody gets a house", yet it made for an extreme pressure for kids to gtfo as soon as possible rather than living in the bedroom across the hall from your parents (assuming the parents even allow that). My grandparents had a bona fide two family house, two stories with the common "balloon" construction from the (earlier) period. Looking at how its use changed through the years, it allowed for great flexibility. Lots of bedrooms for kids, somewhat private space as they got into their teenage+ years. Then after most moved out and settled down on their own, one stayed in the upstairs apartment with their husband and own kid, and helped out grandma while grandma helped watch the next generation. Then when grandma passed, the house passed to a different brother, who lived in one apartment and rented out the second. Now modern humongous homes are trying to recreate some of that flexibility, but not doing a great job at it. They're still focused on a singular living space where everyone has to interact with each other. This is often due to zoning regulations directly aimed at preventing people from creating full second living spaces that would be possible to rent on the open market - when it's exactly that independence that allows scaling how much house you're actually using.

zbrozek 3y ago

You build the biggest thing you can within a parcel because there is plenty of demand at the top of the market. Want more, smaller homes? Reduce or eliminate minimum lot sizes, setbacks, constraints on number of units, and process required towards entitlement. What is legal is what gets built. Not enough is legal, and not enough is built as a result.

swatcoder 3y ago
> You build the biggest thing you can within a parcel because there is plenty of demand at the top of the market. I know many people who have built many homes and I don't know a single one who thought that way or built a house that reflects it. While impacted by practical needs to a degree, preferred home size is just a fashion that changes over time and amounts to personal taste. The 3500sf McMansion of yesterday becomes the "who would want to maintain and heat all that?!" of tomorrow, the cramped matchbox of yesterday becomes the Eco Friendly Tiny Home of tomorrow, etc People build for the intersection of they want to budget and either: what they want to live in, or what their near-term anticipated buyer is assumed to want in light of current trends.
- vkou 3y ago
  People building their own homes are outliers. Most homes are built by cookie-cutter block developments, and they make the most money by: 1. Minimizing the size of their lots. 2. Maximizing the size of the homes on the lots. They subdivide as much as they are allowed to, and build as big as they are allowed to. If the houses in your city are too big, it's because the smallest allowed lot size is. If we ever caught up with the housing shortage, and there was a glut of housing on the market, maybe developers would start to build smaller, but we aren't there, and we won't be there for the next ~30 years.
  - swatcoder 3y ago
    Again: I know builders. The size of the home is not a structural rule of the building industry, and is not universal or permanent. Just like any business, it's something builders decide based on who their market is and what they think they'll buy. The described strategy might be what you're seeing in your area and might be the only thing that makes sense to your own tastes, but there are plenty of cities and counties where the pressing demand from buyers is for other things. In trend-leading communities, demand has been growing for years for denser housing with immediate access to retail and commerce; for efficient homes with low utility costs or green considerations; for small houses, condos, and townhouses that are well-appointed but accessibly priced and low-maintenance, etc and this is what builders have been building when they've been able to get cleared to build at all.
    - giantg2 3y ago
      On a national level, the trends are that home size is increasing and lot size is decreasing. Sure there will be some local variances, and it is driven by what the market will support, but it's still the general trend.
    - zbrozek 3y ago
      Builders build bespoke one off things for crazy people. Developers build bulk housing to try and make a profit, and they maximize FAR.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        The options are not limited to {"bespoke custom house", "one size for all"}. These ones from this builder vary from 80-320 square metres (~10 square feet per square meter): https://www.heinzvonheiden.de/hausfinder https://www.heinzvonheiden.de/hausfinder It would be hilarious if the famously choice-filled capitalist USA has a building industry limited to Cold War DDR "commie block" identikit construction.
        aidenn0 3y ago
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  The trend in Seattle at least is to take one SFH policy and build three town homes on it that don’t share walls but have the minimum buffers between them and the property line. People don’t really build homes at all, developers do, and they want to maximize the earnings they can get on an expensive plot of land.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    Fwiw, that's my non-American impression of North American suburban homes everywhere (as far as I've seen, largely TV/film of course) - y'all say scathing things about terraced houses in Europe, but then your own seem for the most part detached only as a technicality. (And probably it is mostly about making legal and construction matters easier? No party wall; if you want to tear it down and put a new one up you can do so without disturbing the neighbours' property, etc.)
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      We have townhomes that share walls as well. My wife wasn’t a fan although I loved one place like that. It’s mostly preference going on.
      - OJFord 3y ago
        I know, it just seems like preference is much stronger against them / there are fewer of them in NA. Maybe because if you build your houses with a timber frame you need an air gap not to heat the neighbours? Also I suppose the cost saving of constructing like that is a lot less than with brick or even breeze blocks.
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        I would say 25% of the townhomes here in Ballard are row homes that share walls, the rest are townhomes with footpath sized spacing between them. It isn’t a matter of heat here in Seattle, heat pumps are efficient and insulation between homes is pretty good. Besides cost savings, you can fit more in if you don’t have those foot paths between, but the market isn’t into it.
- danielheath 3y ago
  "Who would want to heat all that" is very much dependent on the available energy subsidies.
  - throwaway14356 3y ago
    I lived in a 3x2.5 meter room one time. There are obvious drawbacks but it had a surprising amount of advantages too. Using all available space leaves very little air to heat. Where would you get oxygen in a normal house? It's not like my heater can keep up if I open the windows.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  3500sf houses (my home is not a McMansion) are not likely to become unfashionable. They sell for insane amounts of money because they are so desirable - even old ones and all the maintenance issues that come along with them. We should be meeting the demand of what people want.
- simonsarris 3y ago
  > preferred home size is just a fashion It's been a linear and monotonic increase for over 100 years
Spivak 3y ago
I worry about the unintended consequences of a plan like this because you might inadvertently break the cycle of the average neighborhood getting more desirable over time. And as much as it's silly that our entire financial system depends on the spice flowing it's where we're at. Having lots of square footage and (relatively speaking) spacious lots means that neighborhoods can grow to be roughly as nice as the residents have money.
giantg2 3y ago
"Not enough is legal, and not enough is built as a result." It's a preferences and distribution problem. There are plenty of places with vacancies or where it is legal and practical to build. The problem is people don't want to live there or it has too few jobs. If the market works the way it should, then people should shift out of the tighter areas and into the looser areas, reaching something closer to an equilibrium. The problem is many of the companies that had easy money and extreme growth concentrated it one region and skewed the market. Most of the US does not have a housing issue as nationally housing units exceed "households". We could accommodate everyone, but it's largely a distribution and preferences issue. https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/are-there-more-homes-people-united-states https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/are-there-more-homes-people...
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > then people should shift out of the tighter areas and into the looser areas, reaching something closer to an equilibrium thats if infrastructure(roads, airports, hospitals, grid, etc) will appear there
  - giantg2 3y ago
    There are plenty of places with infrastructure that also have available land within about an hour or so from an airport. Many of those places have decent hospitals with great hospitals (for specialists) a reasonable drive away. Those decent hospitals would likely get better if they had employed patients to reduce the percentage of their patients on Medicare and Medicaid (both low reimbursing).
- bsder 3y ago
  > If the market works the way it should, then people should shift out of the tighter areas and into the looser areas, reaching something closer to an equilibrium. The problem is that households require two wage earners. Consequently, it is very difficult for a family to move since both earners have to find better jobs simultaneously. One of the reasons to stay in the overpriced areas is that when one person loses a job, they can get another job without uprooting the whole family.
miguelazo 3y ago
Oh god, spare us the YIMBY talking points. Just like this article completely ignores how many vacant homes there are, how many have been converted to short term rentals, etc. There are plenty of luxury condos and McMansions being built, not because “that’s what’s legal”, but because that’s where the fattest margins are and we live in a neoliberal nightmare.
- jnwatson 3y ago
  The article specifically calls out home vacancy rates. We're at an all time low in cities.
  - cudgy 3y ago
    What cities? How do you define vacancy? Is a 2nd home vacant? Is an airbnb vacant? How were these vacancies counted and who collects the data? Can you compare vacancy rates from the past to the present? Did they use same methodology to collect vacancy rates?
    - miguelazo 3y ago
      Exactly! I live in a major city and there are vacancies everywhere. It’s especially frustrating to see how many houses that sell sit empty for like a year or more before the speculators manage to flip them into a short term rental or whatever.
geodel 3y ago
So why enough housing is not getting build in Europe, surely they don't have crazy american rules but still facing severe housing shortages all over.
- thanksgiving 3y ago
  Where would you build them? You’d need to first “seed” new neighborhoods with subway stations “in the middle of nowhere”…
  - all2 3y ago
    As soon as you announce a new subway station the vultures descend and prices will ratchet up as speculators by land and sit in it, waiting for the hither bidder.
    - bostonvaulter2 3y ago
      One part of the answer to that is a land value tax. That way the “vultures” won’t be able to simply sit on the property waiting for it to appreciate before selling it.
    - thanksgiving 3y ago
      That means the demand is very high and we need to build even more subway stations until the “vultures” can’t arbitrage the market anymore.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        Crazy that you are being downvoted for applying the principles of supply and demand.
      - all2 3y ago
        If I think through this; 1. Price varies based on desirability of a location. 2. Desirability varies based on many factors, including proximity to a city center or major business concerns, cost of living, crime rate, etc. 3. To optimize desirability until there is more desirable space than those who desire it would require optimizing the variables that contribute to desirability. 4. The potential result is desirable, ie proximity to jobs or cultural center, low crime, low cost of living, etc. A number of variables contribute to each of these, and those would require optimization as well. 4a. There will be a point of diminishing returns, where builders will exit a market when there are not enough buyers at high enough prices to make a profit. As soon as there is a hint of profit, the vultures will appear. 5. In order to prevent real estate speculation, we could impose a few laws: first, make lending at a profit illegal for all non productive enterprises; second, levy a land value tax that hurts enough that it makes owning non productive commercial property untenable to own; third, allow only individuals to own residential real estate, ie, eliminate the rental market entirely and levy use taxes for vacant homes (your real estate must be your home of record and must be your residence for some minimum percentage of time every year). This would destroy the real estate market entirely, and I don't think that would be a bad thing.

willcipriano 3y ago

Finished basements. The house in 1950 had a unfinished basement and was listed at 1200 sq ft. They finished the basement and later sold it as 2400. The difference is a couple pallets of drywall.

thatfrenchguy 3y ago
No basements in western states :)
- makeitshine 3y ago
  I've lived in Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Colorado and I've seen and lived in plenty of places with basements.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    On flat land, basements are a function of home (and land) price. In places where the frost line is not very deep, a basement is a luxury. One of the most expensive parts of the house is laying the foundation, and not building a basement is far cheaper than building a basement. If the frost line is lower, then a basement is very little extra cost since you are digging deeper and laying more concrete anyway. If you are building on a hill, then making a 3 story house is also very little extra cost.
- cafard 3y ago
  My family lived from 1969 through 2006 in a house in Colorado with a basement. My stepmother--who grew up in a region with cooler summers--ight have perished of heat exhaustion but for the basement. What anyone in particular had outside our neighborhood, I can't say; but I think that basements were not unusual in Denver.
- o11c 3y ago
  3/6 of the houses I spent a lot of time in as a kid had finished basements. Anecdotally, finished basements are practically required if there is any sort of hill, which fairly common in the west, whereas they're likely to be absent for houses built on the floodplain.

thefourthchime 3y ago

We live in a wildly different world now. Cars, shopping centers, everything is bigger. Is that bad? Depends on your viewpoint. As far as I can tell, people are buying what they like so the customer is happy. There are side effects we don't like, but I can see attempting to solve that could have its side effects. Eventually, the market works this out. We got sick of sprawl some people moved back to the cities. Houses are too big? Some people live in much smaller homes closer to the city or even tiny homes.

hackerlight 3y ago
The market isn't allowed to work it out because of single family zoning

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

refurb 3y ago

4.5 people in a 1200 sq ft house is packed. I'd argue we are simply purchasing larger homes because that's what people want?

pas 3y ago
that's 111 m² usable space right? and 4.5 people .. meaning parents and 3 kids, well, yeah, that's not super big, but everyone can have their own room (let's say 10+ m² so that's half of the house, and you still have around 50 m² for a living/dining room with kitchen, bathrooms, etc.) it sounds lovely to my European ears :)

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago

We don’t live in the 1950’s anymore. When you and your spouse are working from home and have 2+ teenagers 1200 ain’t gonna cut it. Insisting on horrible conditions to raise a family in the modern world is not going to encourage people to have children.

bojan 3y ago
Whatever we are doing now is also not encouraging people to have children. I'm sure many young people would rather choose a 1200 sqft home than no home at all, which is currently the case. Your example of two teenagers is only relevant for 6 years of a family's lifetime. Why should we optimise for those 6 years?
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  My spouse and I chose to have kids because we could provide for them and house them in nice conditions. I would support making that a reality for more people. There are new suburbs that are slowly coming online where I live, just a little further out than what's currently available, and more of that would be great. And we don't need to be "optimizing" like you're talking about. "Well it's only 6 years of our life, not a big deal for everyone to suffer that long!" Good lord. Just build the houses people want. And clearly some of them want the SQFT - we can meet that demand.
  - bojan 3y ago
    How is living in a 1200 sqft "suffering"? My spouse and I also went for the kids when we were financially stable, and now we live in a 1500 sqft home, and I don't see why would we need a bigger one. We both work from home, the kids have their own rooms, we even have a tiny guest room. What would I do with a 2400 sqft one? Cleaning and maintaining thus one is already a lot of work. In a situation where there is a housing crisis all over the West, building bigger houses, except for a niche market that does exist, just doesn't make sense.
    - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago

mindslight 3y ago

IMO the tiny 1950's boxes were the start of the problem. "Everybody gets a house", yet it made for an extreme pressure for kids to gtfo as soon as possible rather than living in the bedroom across the hall from your parents (assuming the parents even allow that). My grandparents had a bona fide two family house, two stories with the common "balloon" construction from the (earlier) period. Looking at how its use changed through the years, it allowed for great flexibility. Lots of bedrooms for kids, somewhat private space as they got into their teenage+ years. Then after most moved out and settled down on their own, one stayed in the upstairs apartment with their husband and own kid, and helped out grandma while grandma helped watch the next generation. Then when grandma passed, the house passed to a different brother, who lived in one apartment and rented out the second. Now modern humongous homes are trying to recreate some of that flexibility, but not doing a great job at it. They're still focused on a singular living space where everyone has to interact with each other. This is often due to zoning regulations directly aimed at preventing people from creating full second living spaces that would be possible to rent on the open market - when it's exactly that independence that allows scaling how much house you're actually using.