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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 mi

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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
        In the US, price per square foot is an important metric for appraisal. If the appraiser puts too low a price on the house, the buyer can't get a loan. Therefore if you are building in the US to sell the house, then you will maximize the square feet to maximize the appraised value. In addition, it is relatively rare in the US for an individual owner to commission a custom house to be built. Particularly in the more populated areas, it is more overhead to build one house vs several houses, so people buying new houses are typically buying a new house in a development with mostly cosmetic differences as their only choices.
        lotsofpulp 2y ago
        The number of buyers able to obtain a loan increases if the home’s price is lower. Increasing a home’s price reduces the number of potential buyers. The reason to build a more expensive home is to be able to sell for a higher price. But if the population of buyers in a location cannot afford to pay more, then a builder would be stupid to build the most expensive home they can, because insufficient people will be able to afford it. Hence smaller (cheaper) homes get built in some places, and bigger homes in other places.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    In my view, it's also the aspect ratio of the lots. Most suburban lots are fairly close to square. That leaves wide side yards that are just wasted space. Who ever really does anything in their side yard? Lots should be narrower. You could get more houses on a block, and they'd could all still have a usable front and back yard. In fact I'd allow them to be built closer to the street, because nobody really uses their front yard either. A nice backyard is something most people would use and enjoy.
    - uhohspaghetti 2y ago
      Replying to you from a typical suburban home (3k sf 4 bed, 3 bath with an office and a bonus room). It’s about 10 feet from the sidewalk at its closest point. It’s about 8 feet from each of the property’s sides. The back yard is very nice (about 6k sf, with nice outdoor living spaces, room for kids and dogs to run around, and good views). This seems fairly common for newer construction in the Seattle suburbs.
    - cdchn 2y ago
      Wide side yards are moats to keep you away from your neighbors. This is widely seen as a feature, not a bug.
      - jeffreygoesto 2y ago
        "Not meeting your neighbors" works even better in a high rise, and that is tightly packed. :)
        cdchn 2y ago
        Not really, when you can hear every breath they take through the walls.
      - xnx 2y ago
        For noise reasons and to prevent spread of fire
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    If there was a glut of housing developers would quickly exist the business or go bankrupt. It’s either feast or famine for them, and the 2008 crash is why it took so long to ramp back up a decade later (talent pipeline for people who build homes stalled big time).
- seanmcdirmid 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  "Who would want to heat all that" is very much dependent on the available energy subsidies.
  - throwaway14356 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  > preferred home size is just a fashion It's been a linear and monotonic increase for over 100 years
Spivak 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  The article specifically calls out home vacancy rates. We're at an all time low in cities.
  - cudgy 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  Where would you build them? You’d need to first “seed” new neighborhoods with subway stations “in the middle of nowhere”…
  - all2 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
        Crazy that you are being downvoted for applying the principles of supply and demand.
      - all2 2y 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.

swatcoder 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
        In the US, price per square foot is an important metric for appraisal. If the appraiser puts too low a price on the house, the buyer can't get a loan. Therefore if you are building in the US to sell the house, then you will maximize the square feet to maximize the appraised value. In addition, it is relatively rare in the US for an individual owner to commission a custom house to be built. Particularly in the more populated areas, it is more overhead to build one house vs several houses, so people buying new houses are typically buying a new house in a development with mostly cosmetic differences as their only choices.
        lotsofpulp 2y ago
        The number of buyers able to obtain a loan increases if the home’s price is lower. Increasing a home’s price reduces the number of potential buyers. The reason to build a more expensive home is to be able to sell for a higher price. But if the population of buyers in a location cannot afford to pay more, then a builder would be stupid to build the most expensive home they can, because insufficient people will be able to afford it. Hence smaller (cheaper) homes get built in some places, and bigger homes in other places.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  In my view, it's also the aspect ratio of the lots. Most suburban lots are fairly close to square. That leaves wide side yards that are just wasted space. Who ever really does anything in their side yard? Lots should be narrower. You could get more houses on a block, and they'd could all still have a usable front and back yard. In fact I'd allow them to be built closer to the street, because nobody really uses their front yard either. A nice backyard is something most people would use and enjoy.
  - uhohspaghetti 2y ago
    Replying to you from a typical suburban home (3k sf 4 bed, 3 bath with an office and a bonus room). It’s about 10 feet from the sidewalk at its closest point. It’s about 8 feet from each of the property’s sides. The back yard is very nice (about 6k sf, with nice outdoor living spaces, room for kids and dogs to run around, and good views). This seems fairly common for newer construction in the Seattle suburbs.
  - cdchn 2y ago
    Wide side yards are moats to keep you away from your neighbors. This is widely seen as a feature, not a bug.
    - jeffreygoesto 2y ago
      "Not meeting your neighbors" works even better in a high rise, and that is tightly packed. :)
      - cdchn 2y ago
        Not really, when you can hear every breath they take through the walls.
    - xnx 2y ago
      For noise reasons and to prevent spread of fire
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  If there was a glut of housing developers would quickly exist the business or go bankrupt. It’s either feast or famine for them, and the 2008 crash is why it took so long to ramp back up a decade later (talent pipeline for people who build homes stalled big time).
seanmcdirmid 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
"Who would want to heat all that" is very much dependent on the available energy subsidies.
- throwaway14356 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
> preferred home size is just a fashion It's been a linear and monotonic increase for over 100 years

Spivak 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
The article specifically calls out home vacancy rates. We're at an all time low in cities.
- cudgy 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
Where would you build them? You’d need to first “seed” new neighborhoods with subway stations “in the middle of nowhere”…
- all2 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
      Crazy that you are being downvoted for applying the principles of supply and demand.
    - all2 2y 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.