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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

In most places, suburbs are not the problem. There is plenty of land open for sprawl and with modern telecommute technologies, there's no need to clog up the roadways with traffic. TinyVillages looks like a well-meaning concept but it neglects the key reasons suburbs exist: people really like having a lot of space to themselves. Things that ignore what people actually want usually don't do well.

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You are ignoring the big issue of over-priced urban centers. In cities people live in apartments happily. So not everyone needs a large home.

There is plenty of room for suburban sprawl, but many cities desperately need an alternative to large houses and suburbs. I have provided it. You and others are not able to recognize it because it is actually a novel idea.

Some people may live in apartments happily forever, but most humans intend to pair off and reproduce at some point or another. Units like this may be suited to the types of people who already live in dorms, but on top of the fact that people prefer to have a lot of space, they're not a good solution to the type of housing that's needed to accommodate most human families over the long term. That means the populations that rent will be transient, making it even less desirable as no real sense of continuity or community history will exist there. Now there are 3 big factors working against it: it's too small to start with, it won't accommodate people as they form families, and because of 1 and 2, it will have a high turnover rate, which makes for disinterested and fatigued neighbors. It doesn't work.

As many other commenters in this thread have indicated, this is not a new idea by any means. There are many examples of tiny units and condensed urban spaces all over the world, and they're not popular.

Some 3 person families will be fine living in a 512 square foot home. That's not too uncommon globally. For a family we could also have double or triple sized units if that's what people want.

The units I portrayed are nothing like dorms and they are not apartments, so you probably didn't actually read it. Anyway it really doesn't matter what you think. Since this whole concept is in fact a new idea, it will be quite hard to market and easy for the average person such as yourself to dismiss.

I think you need to work on taking criticism on your project. No matter how right you may or may not be, dismissing the average Joe and claiming that he's just too simple to grasp the concept is only going to keep things difficult for you. If you want to be successful, your average customer is going to be an average person, and you'll have to meet that person where they're at, not yell at them for being too dumb to understand your brand new concept. Doing that is a stereotypical sign of severe self-delusion.

If your site cannot explain the concept in an approachable way, saying "you're just too dumb to get it" isn't going to help. If you find that you have to say this to someone, it means that YOU'RE the person with the communication problem, not them. This is a very important principle to understand as you seek to gain traction for your concept. Instead of blaming people for their opinions, understand that this is a real, organic impression of the project and that it's likely representative of what at least some random segment of the population is going to think. You'd be wise to note the concerns and work toward addressing them.

I didn't read the full page word for word, no, but I did spend a good 3-4 minutes skimming it, and I watched the embedded video, which is much more than most people who come across a random website do. Please find a good mentor who can help you take criticism without being dismissive of a potential customer who is providing feedback.

You didn't take enough time to really understand it as evidenced by your comments. You were dismissive and disrespectful, and have continued that in all of your comments.

You were never a potential customer.

People are locally rational about preferences, but are horrid at global optimization. That's the root of every social problem.

Unfortunately, having wise thought leaders globally optimize people has a terrible track record.

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