Comment by tibbon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tibbon | Hacker News Reader

I'm remembering how weird of a place (Boston) I'm living in.

> This is the New American Home for 2018. It’s a sprawling monstrosity of more than 10,690 feet (the lot encompasses 65,340 square feet).

Even properties that Red Sox players are living in west of the city are rarely over 6,000sq/ft. When I see a listing for a home over 3,000sq/ft here it's a rarity.

~1200-2400 sq/ft homes are pretty average in the Boston/Cambridge area. Many condos are more in the 800-1600 sq/ft range, and it's also not uncommon to find 1200sq/ft houses.

I guess that being said, almost everything here is 100 years old. I'm personally against a condo for myself because I'm just too damn loud (drums and guitar), and I'm sure to piss off most neighbors with that. If it wasn't for that hobby, I'd be totally happy with a condo.

I just checked, and there is one property for sale in Boston-proper (which includes JP and Dorchester) over 9,000 sq/ft for sale right now, and it's a 15k sq/ft estate for nearly 4mm.

In my experience houses greater than 6k sq ft are useful for one of a couple scenarios: either you have >5 residents (parents, grandparents, kids, live-in help) and need lots of bedrooms/extra space, or you're throwing frequent social events and need your home to function as an event venue.

I briefly lived in an 8.5k sq ft house with two other people and on many mornings I felt like Jack Nicholson in the Shining. Never again.

You can easily fit >5 people in 3500 sqft -- that's enough for 4 large bedrooms upstairs and a whole living unit in basement, with a large main floor for "entertaining".

> You can easily fit >5 people in 3500 sqft

I used to live with my two brothers (so three people total) in a 860 sqft apartment and we never had problems with stepping on each other's toes.

In Brookline there are 3, they range from 9.5 to 38 million dollars: https://www.redfin.com/city/29676/MA/Brookline/filter/proper...

$4,000,000 / 15,000ft^2 = $267 / 1ft^2

That's actually a steal (unit price wise) in the Boston/Cambridge market right now.

he said 9k sqft, 15k sqft "estate" whatever that means. At 9k it's $444/sqft.

Very large houses never have high price per square foot because the utility of housing space scales logarithmically not linearly.

The price curve starts flattening just above the median sized house for a given area.

Not only that, but the construction costs are cheaper per square foot for larger houses. Much of the cost of a house is in the kitchen and bathrooms. But bigger houses almost always still only have one kitchen, even if it is a lot fancier, and the number of bathrooms doesn't go up linearly. Bigger houses just have bigger rooms mainly, and also extra rooms that are empty and don't cost much to build ("bonus rooms", dens, etc.).

However, the operational (heating, AC) and maintenance costs of a large house do scale more directly with it's size, especially for jobs that involve the whole structure, like re-roofing, re-siding, etc. So in the end they end up being far more expensive to live in.

Siding costs do not go up linearly with interior volume. This is basic geometry which I shouldn't have to explain on this forum.

Operational and maintenance costs are a different factor; we were talking about house price, and I went into construction cost. Operations costs are different, and consumers are pretty infamous for only looking at initial costs and not thinking about operational/maintenance costs. This is especially true with cars: people look only at the purchase price and don't think about how much gas costs, so they buy a giant SUV even though it gets 50% worse fuel economy, and then they complain about how much it costs to refuel.

> Siding costs do not go up linearly with interior volume. This is basic geometry which I shouldn't have to explain on this forum.

Of course it doesn't scale linearly with volume, it scales linearly with exterior surface area, which itself scales with square footage, which was the base metric I used, not volume. The shape that minimizes the surface area to volume ratio is a sphere, which most houses are not.

No, but the circumference of a rectangle does not scale linearly with the area of that rectangle. The area increases quadratically with the circumference.

The point is that bigger houses are more expensive to operate and maintain, all else equal.

Yes, they are, and that's why I responded by pointing out that consumers generally don't think about that factor, they only think about initial costs.

It's hard to blame consumers if they are buying the average sized homes for their area that are still huge in operational and maintenance costs.

In most newer SFH developments, house size is usually dictated by exclusionary zoning (i.e minimum lot and house sizes) and developer business priorities, not by what is financially prudent for buyers. And as your SUV example illustrates, bigger sells better.

Choosing not to buy in to that usually requires relocating to an area that values efficiency over size, and those are often very expensive areas, since they are few and far between.

The consumers are always at fault, as they're the ones with the purchasing power, and the voting power.

>And as your SUV example illustrates, bigger sells better.

There's no such thing as "vehicle zoning"; if consumers wanted to buy smaller vehicles, they're out there on the market. No one's forcing them to buy and drive huge SUVs.

>In most newer SFH developments, house size is usually dictated by exclusionary zoning (i.e minimum lot and house sizes) and developer business priorities, not by what is financially prudent for buyers.

This is controlled by the local government, which is controlled by the voters, who are the consumers.

They don't have these problems in Japan, because they don't have exclusionary zoning. If you own the lot, you can build whatever the heck you want on it, and the neighbors have no power to stop you.

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