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Comment by ahoka | Hacker News Reader

Do people really want to live in such slave dwellings? These futuristic minihomes keep popping up in media, but is this really the solution? The people I know who live in small apartments cannot even afford new furniture. I used to live in 25m2 and the last thing I wanted was these automatons.

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Based on my UK experiences, people want to live in nice houses, but they will live in whatever they can afford based on how much money the bank is willing to lend them for a mortgage; doesn't matter how badly made or small.

there are nearly 8 billion of us and we'll cross 9 plenty soon. industrialization, modernization, and globalization have already been driving people into cities for decades. going forward on top of that droughts, famines, hurricanes, floods, etc will increasingly drive climate refugees into cities.

we are already in a "housing crisis" that will only escalate rapidly as pressure from the net-influx of people moving in compresses living space. this is what ikea is talking about in the first minute of this video (which at one point was the link): https://ikea.today/ikea-explores-future-living-for-the-many/

your mental framework of "why would I, a wealthy person who can afford more, want this?" is basically a mistake of making it about you. its not.

> we are already in a "housing crisis"

The places with a "housing crisis" are uber-wealthy neighborhoods or cities like SF or London, the crisis is not caused by incoming refugees but by high salaries, and yeah, it's rich people who live in those tiny spaces. Comparatively, poor people live in more affordable neighborhoods.

https://www.citymetric.com/skylines/mapping-uk-s-housing-wea...

In Stockholm and other cities in Europe, people are more than happy to live in tiny apartments around 30sqm that look like the one in the video. Examples in the best areas of Stockholm downtown: https://www.hemnet.se/bostader?location_ids%5B%5D=925970&loc...

until there is 0 risk of a fire on apartment X spreading to apartment Y, I don’t think I could rest easy in an apartment with all of my stuff.

Also the rental of storage space is booming. Pelican Storage seems to be the biggest operators in this area (at least in EU).

Modern building standards make it extremely likely a fire cannot pass between units (you can never realistically entirely remove it - people occassionally do things like hang sheets off balconies or store tanks of fuel etc). This is before we talk about how many fires are put out by fire brigades before they've fully destroyed a single unit.

Honestly - the risk of a fire in your own apartment is drastically higher than the risk of it being engulfed in a fire caused outside of it.

Are they more than happy? Or just settling?

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