Tiny flats taking over Latin America
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Living in a high cost of living city (where the opportunity is), when you can't actually afford basic minimum housing, but manage to swing something anyway, often means a lot of sacrifices of what should be basics. And your finances are probably still getting strained, despite the sacrifices.
There've been times that converting a van or class B RV, and shifting it to a new city parking spot every night, seemed safer and more stable than bottom-end city apartment situations. I sympathize with and admire the Bay Area dotcom workers who managed to do something like that, in a recent HN post.
That said, we're seeing things here like new micro-apartment developments being pitched to relatively affluent new grads, at ridiculously high prices for what you get, with some lifestyle story. That seems more an investment ROI solution for the developer, not a housing and social justice solution.
I could (and intermittently have) afford to live in my own but the social benefits of roommates were worth it.
In a way, it helped since it pushed me to pick up side projects and learn new, marketable skills. But man, if I had access to a clean, affordable room + kitchen, I would have had a far happier and more social time in my 20s.
It's not nice but - stabbies and fires aside, that was unusual - dealing with difficult people is part of life and you learn some useful skills.
The other side is you do meet really, really good people. That IMO outweighs the bad.
Basically, if you are the owner of a slum, it seems like it should make economic sense to sell the land to someone else as the value of the land would be higher than the value of the slum.
Why is the market not resulting in what I described?
I house sat for some friends in my early twenties for a year. Two story house, pool, big yard. I never once used the yard or pool. My relationship to them were that they were maintenance expenses. Most rooms in the house went completely unused. Hell, the rooms I did use were inconveniently large, increased the area I needed to clean.
The only thing I preferred about it over my previous and current places of living was lack of housemates. Unfortunately the premium you pay, at least here, to go from 1 to 0 housemates is doubling your rent. In fact last time I was looking, there were more two/three bedroom houses than studio apartments within the "as cheap as I can get while still living alone" criteria I was searching.
I'd love for cheap micro-apartments to become widespread.
Personally, as someone who owns a property development company in Latin America, I can't ever see this becoming a major trend. If it is in fact becoming popular and not a one-off architectural/engineering/artistic effort, then it's really just exploitation and profit maximization and not something that is culturally wanted or a consequence of the local economies.
I’ve lived six to a room in Dublin city centre and had my own room in a house an hour from it and I’d pick the first over the second again if I was single and budget constrained. Closet apartments/SROs/dorms/flophouses would be superior again but if building housing is illegal it won’t be built and the poor will be unable to live in areas reserved for the middle and upper classes.
So instead of expanding outwards, the cities just became a lot denser, and economics forced up the price up of the land because the land potential is so high.
What it takes is a gutsy mayor to implement policies such as requiring at least 1m side setback on houses and 3m for apartments, having caps on the floor-space ratio to 50% instead of 98%, not allowing subdivisions on lands that have less than 15m frontage or 600m2 total area etc. This would basically see the housing market crash - lots of people will lose lots of money. But its a necessary evil.
The other angle to this is welfare being given based on the area you live in. Instead of housing support (in the form of tax and utility cost concessions) being distributed based on someone's personal financial situation, the means-test is based on the land classification that the property is built on. The land classification doesn't change whether the house is old or new, or if you build an apartment block on it. Which basically forces higher density in areas with better tax and utility cost concessions - aka poorer areas. In Colombia, this means that buying land in the highest-class areas costs as much - or in many cases less - than middle-class areas. This also introduced an almost caste-like system where people would only hang out from people from their own classification and would look down on people in lower classifications.
I appreciate shared-housing is a thing in Dublin (it is in Sydney too, and I have similar feelings to you about it) but the situation in many parts of Latin America exists for somewhat different reasons.
What you propose is a giant subsidy to middle class life at the expense of poor people. This would take land that currently houses poor people and make that illegal. It also bans building a house with a courtyard on a lot below a certain size. This wouldn’t help poor people. It would just force them to commute to their work from further away.
The housing support system described is particularly stupid but housing support doesn’t generally help anyway. The money just ends up in property holder’s or landowners’ pockets, whether in increased land prices or higher rental prices. The only way to decrease prices is by increasing supply, whether of land or housing.
The "poor" people are extremely poor to the point that you cannot comprehend. And they have to stay there and live there for their entire lives because the current system forces them to. It is impossible for them to move out because of how unaffordable the cities are and how heavily the system is rigged against them. They have nothing. These people are already commuting long distances and already live in unregulated, unmarked ghettos. Here[0] is a photo of one of those places I took back in March so you understand the extent of it.
The only people who "lose" here are the current land owners of legal properties. Renters will end up with lower rent because housing will rapidly devalue to a tenth of its original value - every single house will stop being the foreign investment opportunity that it currently is.
> This would take land that currently houses poor people and make that illegal.
Clearly it's not retroactively applied. Town planning and zoning almost never is.
> It also bans building a house with a courtyard on a lot below a certain size.
I mean, I guess? But it also forces properties to have back and front yards, as well as side access, instead of being 100% concrete built wall-to-wall through to the footpath.
> This wouldn’t help poor people. It would just force them to commute to their work from further away.
I'm not sure how it would do anything else other than help poor(er) people and allow them to start living inside expanding cities rather than living on the extreme outskirts.
Shanty towns looked just like this in quickly growing American and European cities 100–150 years ago. And look like this today throughout Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, ...
People living in those conditions are not permanently poor and hopeless. They are upwardly mobile (albeit from a very low baseline, often as rural peasants forced off their land by lack of rural economic opportunity), with neighborhoods improving rapidly, and generally quite a dynamic economy.
Come back and take another photo of precisely the same spot in 25 years and you will see something dramatically different: decently constructed permanent structures; proper plumbing, electricity, sanitation, roads; real city services; and in general an integrated normal city neighborhood as the city keeps pushing outward.
Many of the kids growing up in those shanty-towns today will be small-business owners, and plenty of their kids will be highly educated white-collar professionals.
Observers who try to interpret poor neighborhoods with middle class standards end up so focused on the apparent discomfort involved that they can’t see the parts that are ingenious, fascinating, hopeful, and rapidly improving.
For example, take a look at Villa 31, a slum near Buenos Aires's downtown, in 1935 [1], around the time it first appeared, and now [2]. After almost a century, the precarious buildings are just getting higher, and more densely populated. Several attempts where made to relocate the people along the years, but having a high percentage of the population being illegal immigrants, it becomes highly unpopular to just give those people a new apartment, while there's a housing deficit. Lately, there's been more efforts in providing them a housing solution, because a judicial ruling forced the government to do it. But even then, there's no sign of the population in the slum being reduced (probably because they are replaced by newcomers, mostly illegal immigrants, that need a "first place to live" close to the downtown).
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Villa_De...
[2] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_31#/media/Archivo:Villam...
Presumably the great-grandchildren of residents from the 1930s are not still “illegal immigrants”.
> probably because they are replaced by newcomers
Oh... so this is not actually the same people living there. Well what happened to the families who lived in this place 25, 50, or 80 years ago?
The low economic areas grow very fast due to an influx of more poor people, but they don't develop much over time. If anything they tend to degrade due to extremely poor service delivery etc.
There are people living 12 to a room on the first floor of my apartment block, probably 24 to an apartment. In Shanghai good construction jobs have dorms on site, bad ones they sleep on the floor or on the street in summer. I have a reasonable idea of what poverty looks like in middle income countries.
> And they have to stay there and live there for their entire lives because the current system forces them to.
No, it doesn’t. It constrains their choices, all of which may be terrible but it doesn’t force them to. They’re where they are because either they or their parents moved to the city because the city was better. Making building densely illegal forces them to live far from where they work. People choose some combination of price, density and location. Removing choices rarely makes people more free.
> It is impossible for them to move out because of how unaffordable the cities are and how heavily the system is rigged against them.
If the cities are that bad why don’t they move to the country? Unskilled agricultural labour doesn’t pay much but starvation is not common in Latin America outside Venezuela.
> They have nothing. These people are already commuting long distances and already live in unregulated, unmarked ghettos.
And if planning laws made building densely illegal they’d still live there but there’d be no prospect of moving closer to where they work. Sprawl would have been legislated in place of density. The middle class would have nice places to live where there could have been housing for those less fortunate.
> The only people who "lose" here are the current land owners of legal properties. Renters will end up with lower rent because housing will rapidly devalue to a tenth of its original value - every single house will stop being the foreign investment opportunity that it currently is.
If there is demand it will be supplied or it won’t. If it’s not supplied the people who don’t get it will be those with least resources. If 100,000 people demand housing and there’s only legal housing for 50,000 the other half will go unhoused or live somewhere illegally. Restricting supply will not change this.
How can not building housing possibly help the poor? How can building less housing possibly help the poor? How can forcing people to live far from where they want to live help them?
But then, if the land was so much more expensive in the city, people would just move to the outskirts where land is so much cheaper. Land is always going to be more valuable in the middle of a city so it makes sense to make best use of it.
What you suggest is a recipe for urban sprawl.
Can you give a couple of examples of the towns that have such legislation and low housing prices, despite having strong demand to live there?
I would use something like this for sure in other countries, like London.
Instead of having to go into town every day, go in Monday and come out Friday.
This is the definition of renting a bedroom, not an apartment.
That's quite broad definition of middle-class. I could understand the middle-class buyers, not so much the dwellers.
Perhaps, disintegration of middle-class is a root cause for people considering such living standards as 'convenient'. Effectively,you live in a tight dorm.
There has been some middle class disintegration too, but it is much slower and smaller.
Either there's a high degree of consolidation on the real estate market, such that the properties are in hands of large conglomerates (maybe foreign). Or the middle class effectively has low buying power, which again asks to reconsider its middle definition.
Clearly there's some serious disbalance at play. Small square footage offerings are not a solution, rather it's another way to further increase a unit-price.
Most "middle class" owners bought in before prices came up; real-estate, like everything, is priced at the margin
The very small amount that sells is usually brought by rich people making unsound decisions (like betting they'll never have a month without a job on the next 30 years). People have been moving away from those centers and leaving housing there empty.
so, uh, I didn't go to school, so maybe I'm missing something, but I thought that dorms were usually shared bedrooms or something; personally, I think there's a huge difference between having a small private space and having no private space, and most of the problem with living in a dorm is having no private space.
That's where this sort of thing comes in. A lot of the single people I know in silicon valley, even a lot of the high earners, rent rooms in houses; houses that are designed for families. The thing is, if you are an introvert, you'd be better off with something built in a more hotel-like way, with more private area per common area, and with more bathrooms. (oh my, with more bathrooms.)
If you are building for me, you have a water closet with toilet and shower, and then a sink, but no real kitchen. I eat out or at work anyhow; a desktop convection oven is overkill for my kitchen needs.
I mean, I think at this point we're around/above the size of the bedroom most people rent around here? I mean, at that size, I want a murphy bed, but even without, this is a size a lot of people live with right now.
Sure, I'd prefer some place bigger... but if you sell me 10m^2 in the bay area, say, for a quarter million dollars? I'd vastly prefer that to the really big place that a quarter million gets me in the midwest.
Preferences vary.
I thought that dorms were usually
shared bedrooms or something;
Here in the UK, rooms in 'halls of residence' are almost always single occupancy. There's access to a shared kitchen, and toilets may be shared or en suite depending on price.
An apartment, smaller than the hotel room (typical 4x6m) is not a proper living place, whether it's meant for single guy or a small family. I like the approach in one country, where all the apartments must fit certain size, e.g. 80sqm for a family with 2 kids. Even, for low-income income families, they still have to get at least 50sqm, government will subsidize.
Why?
I would choose to move to smaller than 4x6m apartment, even though I can easily afford much larger size. Why? simply because I don't need the extra space. If I can save couple hundred bucks a month then I'm all for it.
The problem is those apartments is not available in my area, no one is building it. To me its the fault of the incompetence government and its regulation.
Build more housing is the better solution, like Tokyo, but better for it to be possible for a new grad to live in a shoebox in Manhattan if they want to than not to have the choice at all.
> Less-profitable than hypothetically possible (in a totally unregulated market/resources) does not necessarily mean unprofitable
This is true but the less profitable it is the less investment there will be. Less investment in housing either means less housing or worse housing.
> nor does it necessarily mean less-profitable than investment options elsewhere.
This is not. Whether within a domestic market or internationally there are a plethora of options for where to invest money, from equities and bonds to venture capital to commercial and presidential real estate. If you artificially reduce the profitability of residential real estate you’ll get less of it unless you subsidise it. That’s just the government paying money to solve a problem the government created.
This is, unfortunately, naive.
The city will use its power to serve the interests of those who hold power in the city, while of course saying it's for the common good.
Typically, those in power do want higher housing prices, and thus promote a housing shortage.
The only solution is to not give the city that power.
I don't get that, wouldn't a housing shortage bring the prices up?
Disagree that dense building is the deciding factor in a 10x difference. The home prices being higher than other metro areas reflects the strength of the Bay Area job market. There are plenty of markets less expensive than Palo Alto, some of them allowing more construction and having good jobs, but there is no metro area in the United States 10x cheaper than Palo Alto with the same access to a job market of the same caliber.
Example: Seattle is cheaper, builds more and is a tech hub. But it's not 10x cheaper, maybe within 2x last I checked a long time ago. To get a 10x difference you need to sacrifice on another metric, and go to a place with a less booming economy and fewer jobs.
If you want to see what building dense can do don’t look at Seattle. Look at New York City. Brooklyn isn’t Manhattan dense but it’s more affordable. But NYC’s entire metro area is comparatively dense in the US. People commute from Jersey City in under an hour. If all of NYC was zoned to allow the level of density you see in Manhattan prices wouldn’t drop as much as you’d naively expect because there’d be even more economic activity but they’d drop plenty. Tokyo has increased ~50% in population over the past thirty years and land and rent prices have been pretty much flat. That’s what allowing dense building makes possible.
This is obvious, but it's also obvious that, with respect, few people want to live in Boise and if they did, and could make Palo Alto money, housing would become much more expensive.
> Look at New York City.
A very expensive place, not 10x cheaper than Palo Alto and not Boise. Nothing you said is news to me or refutes the point.
Yes, these differences can be big, and housing policy affects the number. But you can't say it's the reason a non job center city is cheap, or claim that the factor is 10x.
Thanks for pointing it out. I fixed it. But I can understand if no one is that impressed by my Deep Thoughts regardless...
I’ve lived six to a room for months in Dublin City centre and I’ve had my own spacious room an hour’s travel from it. As a single man I preferred the first which is why I moved from the suburbs. Living far from where your life is a pain.
Wouldn’t better mass transit fix part of the problem?
Adding transit might help, but not as much as adding housing.
If you have a three hour commute and they put in better transit, now you have a two hour commute. But your rent goes up because you're closer to better transit, so you either have to pay more (which you can't afford) or move to somewhere with a 2.5 hour commute at your original rent (and pay moving costs). And there is no feasible transit you can add to make the housing which is 150 miles from the jobs have a reasonable commute.
The only thing for it is more housing near the jobs.
The very first line of the article makes me believe that people don’t live 150 miles away. Maybe 30-50 miles and you’re driving 10-15 miles an hour?