I hate living in my tiny house
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
> We need ... different housing tech that can lower construction costs
If you're paying ~$1,600 a month for a shoebox apartment, it's not because you need construction technology. It is a housing-policy problem.
You're right, they make "only" 7x as much.
US Median Income: $43,585 China M.I.: $6,180
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/median-income-by-...
In USD really. Unsurprisingly, people living in a large city in China are not dirt poor as you would expect.
China reports Shanghai as the highest income city with an average salary of 9,700 yuan/month.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201904/10/WS5cad86f7a3104842...
Also, plumbing incl waste, trash service, etc.
I suspect the organizations promoting the concept of Missing Middle housing aren't for bringing back SROs. One site used to describe "residential above commercial" as fitting the definition of Missing Middle housing, but they seem to have changed it to "live-work." This excludes the idea of small units, like SROs, above a rental office or other commercial space in a downtown area.
Maybe they did that to intentionally exclude SROs or maybe they aren't aware the change has this impact. Regardless of the logic, it suggests they aren't including SROs in their agenda.
Reintroducing SROs and boarding houses would be one way to provide genuinely affordable spaces for small households, such as single individuals, childless couples and single parents. I think we could even improve on what typically gets provided in our remaining SROs which tend to be in old buildings.
Because they're a bad idea, that had terrible consequences, and most reasonable people have vowed never to repeat that mistake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenement
It's not like building real housing costs that much more. Trying to downgrade housing to make it cheaper is by scrimping 50sqft here, or a bathroom over there, is like the textbook definition of "penny wise, pound foolish".
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Housing is expensive because land is monopolized, hyper-overinvested, and carries zero risk because of government-guaranteed bailouts. Housing in cities is expensive for the same reasons, plus the inherently higher costs of higher density in construction.
Housing is not expensive because an apartment is required to have running water, a functional toilet, and enough floorspace for a mattress. That's just simply not the issue.
I spent nearly six years homeless. I got off the street by moving into an SRO.
An SRO with access to electricity, heat, bathroom facilities etc beats the hell out of living in a tent, peeing in the bushes and living in fear of being rounded up by the police for being too poor for my existence to be legal.
I'm working on resolving my personal problems and raising my income. I still struggle to make ends meet every single month. I'm not a drug addict and I don't have a mental health diagnosis.
I do have two special needs sons who still live with me and I'm medically handicapped.
If you really want to outlaw poverty, you basically need to start applying the death sentence to anyone who has intractable personal problems, no matter the cause.
Beat up by your husband and no place else to go but a shelter? Oh, death penalty for you.
Gave birth to a child with an expensive genetic disorder? The baby needs to die so you can keep being a productive member of society.
Etc.
I don't think that works so well, personally. Our current system does a poor job of helping people find their way back to a middle class life once things go wrong somewhere and, so far, no one is quite yet proposing the death penalty for such problems. Which means people barred from having minimal housing become an increasing drag on the system because they have no immediate way out of their predicament.
That's not intended as hyperbole:
The average life expectancy in the homeless population is estimated between 42 and 52 years, compared to 78 years in the general population.
https://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/health.html
Our housing policies are killing people, just more slowly and with more plausible deniability than putting a bullet through their brain. And some do get murdered simply for being homeless. Four homeless individuals were murdered in their sleep in New York recently and three years ago someone was setting tents on fire in San Diego.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-york-crime/man-accuse...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/san-diego-police-looking-for-pers...
No, it really doesn't. My argument boils down to "poisoned/expired milk is never worth it, even if it would help reduce the price of milk".
> I spent nearly six years homeless. I got off the street by moving into an SRO.
I'm glad you found something that's better than nothing. I totally get how an SRO helped you out, and that you want to maintain that step for others. That's a good and admirable thing. But this is not an argument for SROs. It's an argument for more real apartments.
If you had not managed to land an SRO, but had instead found a coleman tent, and it had helped you out, should we provide free camping tents to the homeless? That's not a solution, it's a band-aid. SROs are obviously much much nicer than this, but ultimately are just a much nicer band-aid.
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We don't need to create "shittier" housing to get homeless people off the street. We don't need to revert back to tenements. The solution to homelessness is housing -- real housing -- the kind that meets all relevant local regulations. We can do this just as easily as SROs, for nearly the same price, there's zero reason not to build real housing for everyone. Including those with low income. Including those with no income.
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If your complaint is that no one is doing this housing (or not doing it properly), then I agree with you 100%. I personally believe housing is a fundamental human right, and that the government should be compelled to provide free housing to all citizens, automatically, by right of law. It should be systematically impossible for any citizen to ever be "homeless". (In the same way that's systematically impossible for a child to be "uneducated", since a public K-12 education is guaranteed for free to all citizens. In the same way that it's systemically impossible for almost any citizen to be "emergency-less", anyone can call 911 almost anywhere in the US, and be automatically connected to local emergency services, even if their cell phone isn't paid up, even if their provider is roaming, even if they borrowed it from a friend, even if they have no income at all, and so on)
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...
Missing Middle housing is being widely advocated for. It is also, to use your phrasing, "shittier housing." It is smaller and more dense.
Part of why we have such a big problem is because housing standards have steadily crept upwards for decades. In the 1950s, the average new home was about 1200 sqft and housed about 3.5 people. Today, the average new home is over 2400 sqft and houses about 2.5 people.
Our housing standards have gotten ridiculously inflated such that only rich people can afford them. The solution is absolutely to start setting some more reasonable standards for basic housing such that we stop actively pushing people out into the street.
Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percent correlated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-20/the-homel...
I'm not saying "Let's go back to grass huts with dirt floors and no plumbing." I'm saying that renting a room was a perfectly normal thing at one time and wasn't considered to be "slum" housing.
It was fairly normal for young people from even wealthy families. This tradition lives on and is preserved in the form of college dorm rooms and military barracks.
These are typically intended for people in their late teens to early twenties who are unmarried and childless. In both cases, it is normal for them to eat at a dining hall of some sort as a routine thing.
We cannot solve our current housing crisis by arguing that housing is a basic right and then setting such high standards that we can't afford it as a society.
I have six years of college. I have an incurable medical condition. I occasionally get a bit of money out of compassion from people who don't know me well, but charity is not enough to resolve my problems.
I'm not suggesting we need SROs everywhere. But I'm hardly the only person recognizing that we need to lower our crazy high standards somewhere. If I were, YIMBY would not be a movement and there wouldn't be resources promoting the idea of Missing Middle housing.
Our housing standards were shaped by the events surrounding the end of WW2 and American housing caters to an idea that a home designed for a nuclear family is the only acceptable housing. Meanwhile, people are delaying marriage, delaying having kids, having fewer kids, living longer after the kids grow up and move out, etc.
We have more families with three or fewer members than we had at the end of WW2 and we don't design housing for their needs. When I got divorced and my husband physically moved out, my sons and I had to start storing sodas in the fridge because the fridge was too large for our needs and if we didn't find some way to fill it up, milk would spoil.
I lived in Germany for a few years. Entire families have fridges the size of what are mostly found in college dorms in the US. You don't absolutely need a 20 cubic foot fridge to serve the needs of a household, but that's what we get, whether it works for us or not.
And in Japan, it's weird to have an oven. Americans who buy homes in Japan typically have to add an oven because that's just not standard over there. But they cook plenty and eat well and have world famous cuisine that has inspired restaurants and restaurant chains around the world.
No, no it's not. I'm not advocating for luxury housing, just housing that meets the minimum requirements by regulation and law. Missing middle is advocating for real legal housing -- the kind that have sinks and bathrooms and bedrooms and such. (And as you already mentioned, they generally don't advocate for "SRO/tenements", presumably for this same reason).
> housing standards have steadily crept upwards for decades
No, no they haven't. The average new construction sizes have crept way up, you are correct. The housing standards -- the minimum legal standards required by law have actually crept downward slightly over the past 10 years, in most areas.
> This tradition lives on and is preserved in the form of college dorm rooms and military barracks.
Yes, and it's bad there too? I don't need to get us off-track, but college dorm living is not healthy nor sustainable.
> we need to lower our crazy high standards somewhere
This is simply not true. There are no "crazy high standards". This is not a real thing that has ever existed.
In San Francisco (as one example), I'm arguing that every human (regardless of income) is entitled to 220sqft of living space and a functional bathroom, that every housing unit should at least meet the bare minimum requirements of a "studio apartment" under relevant local and state law.
This is not some crazy high standard that is impossible for society to afford. This is a stupidly-low requirement, that we could easily provide every single citizen in the US, with very little effort. And we should be very wary of any attempts to lower this already-stupidly-low requirement any further down, because lowering those standards will not help anyone in need, but will only be weaponized against everyone else.
Hell, personal functional sinks and bathrooms are so cheap and easy to provide, we give them away for free to every violent criminal in prison. Surely everyone's housing quality should at least surpass a jail cell, right?
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We don't need to revert to SROs / Tenements to house the homeless, we don't need to "lower" any "standards". The minimum regulations are perfectly fine and completely reasonable here. We just need to build these things via public funding, and give them to the people who want/need them.
We didn't "lower" our educational standards to teach school children. We didn't say "well, these regulations are too strict, I guess kids only need to learn to half-read and half-write". We just decided to offer real education to every child, automatically, and with no income restrictions or usage costs of any kind.
We could do the same exact thing with housing. We should do the same thing with housing.
My first room was the smallest room in the building with just a sink and fridge. I didn't feel I could make a hotplate or similar work in that space.
About two months ago, I moved to a larger room within the same building. I have a private bath and a George Foreman grill now. The fridge died like two days after we moved or something and I don't have the money to replace it.
But the thing is that I and my oldest son both have a serious genetic disorder. Since moving to a unit with a private bath, he has thrown up every single time he has cleaned the toilet.
We didn't want a toilet of our own at first. We didn't want to clean it. Management is responsible for cleaning the shared bathrooms in the building. But I am responsible for cleaning my private bath.
Toilets are not something that see so much use that every single individual needs their own personal toilet.
A large part of the increase in housing costs since the 1950s is due to rising standards and expectations.
In the 1950s, that 1200 sqft new house probably had a heater, but no air conditioning. It probably had a washing machine, but no dryer. Instead, there was a clothesline out back in the yard.
It probably was poorly insulated and had inferior electrical service compared to what we expect today. You didn't need a high electrical capacity and outlets everywhere. You had a radio and maybe a TV.
Home computers didn't exist. Microwaves didn't exist.
Etc etc etc.
A lot that we consider standard and the minimum today was not either at that time. And there are developed countries which generally treat their citizens better than we do here in the US that have smaller homes, smaller refrigerators, etc.
Europe has a lot of household stuff that exists precisely because they expect a high quality of life in spaces that are typically smaller than standard US homes.
I'm not sure why you are so adamant that SROs are wholly unacceptable. I've studied the history of US housing and I have some knowledge of how things get handled in other developed countries. I've also lived this problem space and I'm currently in an SRO.
So you aren't going to convince me that it's inherently evil to have dorm style rooms.
I don't really believe housing is a "right." I believe we need to do what works in practical terms and I don't think that framing is productive.
And lowering our crazy high standards that boil down to "We only build mansions in America" is something that must happen if we are to solve this.
I continue to research how to do that in a way that lowers the right standards because I'm absolutely not interested in creating slum conditions.
Anyway, thank you for speaking with me. But I'm not sure there's any real point in taking this discussion further.
Building a cheap home would be silly. The fees might be several times the construction cost. With the fees already so high, you might as well make the house fancy.
We've also added expensive required features. It seems the voters and/or lobbyists can't bear to see a person living without the latest fancy stuff. I mean things like arc fault interrupters and wired-in smoke detectors, and maybe even solar. That too adds to the minimum price, so you might as well build a bigger and fancier home for a modest extra percentage increase in cost.
You can see it in cars too, and in every other sort of product design. We've decided to put our cost of living out of reach of many people. I'm not saying it isn't nice to have airbags, 3-prong power cords, catalytic converters, and chainsaw brakes... but we're paying for it or failing to pay for it, making the country less competitive (need higher pay) and making people more likely to be homeless.
I spent over two years in Fresno which has housing costs more in line with the national average than is typical for most California cities. I still couldn't find housing that worked for me.
And that's partly because low end housing in Fresno is often a trailer in a trailer court. For health reasons, I'm unwilling to ever live in a trailer again.
I lived in a trailer for a few months in my twenties. It was horrible and I was deathly ill in it.
We no longer want SROs in the US and the reality is this means a lot of poor Americans are living in trailers which are such lousy housing that you have trouble financing them because their value goes down, not up, over time.
The widespread use of trailers is testimony that if you try to zone "affordable housing" out of existence because poor people shouldn't exist or something, it just slips through the cracks in the system and calls itself a vehicle or whatever to get around that.
In fact, the Tiny House movement probably goes back to some guy who literally put his tiny house on wheels and called it a "trailer" to get around housing regulations because it's not legal in most parts of the US to build a really small house.
And these rules go bad places on a regular basis. Apple Valley, California is full of mansions with crazy large yards because the town set some crazy large minimum lot size intended to "preserve the character" of the rural small town surrounded by farmland and not have it become suburban sprawl. It became suburban sprawl anyway, just on steroids.
The real way to preserve farmland is to create multifamily homes and set aside actual farmland. There are institutions that have studied this. A lot of well-meaning policies don't do what they were intended to do. They all too often do the exact opposite.
Policies have to be more than well intended. They gave to also be well researched and we'll designed.
The kind of political change that would allow SROs to be built where people want them is the same kind of political change that would allow more housing construction generally, it’s the same change that would remove parking minimums and floor space carve outs and kitchen appliance requirements.
So, if we can get that kind of political change and make sure good housing is affordably available to everyone, why compromise and build SROs?
If you generally agree with me, you can agree with whatever points you want to agree with, thank me for sharing a wealth of knowledge and stop there without going on to insist "Except this one detail, that I imagine is your entire goal, is completely and totally wrong and must be absolutely shot down for some damn reason."
I'm not talking about "SROs for everyone" or some nonsense.
I've studied this problem space for literally decades at this point. I'm writing at length because it interests me and I know a lot about it and I enjoy the somewhat rare opportunity to talk about it in depth.
But you are posting to...pretend to agree with me while insisting I'm wrong?
As long as they are code-compliant with regard to fire protection (sprinklers) and emergency egress, might as well make them legal. Let the market decide if the lower rent vs a small studio apartment with in-unit bath and stove is worth it. (I suspect in most cases, people would prefer to team up via craigslist or facebook and share a multi-bedroom apartment or townhouse rather than live the dorm life though. But PodShare seems to be getting customers...)
https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49...
There are also a few places without zoning regulations.
In the middle of a large, populous city --on land that is not part of a postsecondary institution-- you can't just build a dormitory on it.
You can rarely build anything over 2 stories on the coast in California. There's no political will for it, so nothing happens.
And construction on the coast is specifically restricted by law because that is the political will and has been for decades.
There absolutely are zoning restrictions that would prevent you from building a dormitory anywhere. Let me go buy a $10 million plot in La Jolla farms and try and put a dormitory on it. "Oh, but it's so close to UCSD", you might think... but the surrounding properties are all $20m+ single family homes (that's how it's zoned, after all) and the dorms would ruin the "community vibe".
That's another way of saying "a housing policy problem"
This response is a common issue we run into when discussing policy. When people do not understand that policy is the absolute bedrock foundation for any and all subsequent law or regulation, they tend to not be able to visualize how wide of a net “policy” is and what falls underneath it.
Example:
Policy simplified: No more than X number of multi-family homes allowed.
Regulations and zoning laws are second: We only have room for X, so we can have no more than X number of multi family homes in Y sq miles.
As you can see, a decision does not start as a law nor regulation, it is broad policy.
So with your claim that it’s a regulation issue, how would changing the inferior part of the policy ensure it promotes change from the bottom-up? It will not change the issues that are created as a result of the original base policy (i.e. X number of MFHs allowed).
All regulations and laws must have a basis which can help explain the what, how, and why of implementation to ensure it falls within the boundaries of the initial policy decision.
Good luck fighting the land owners. NIMBY is more organized and has huge political will.
I honestly don't know what can be done and worry this will always be a problem.
Back in 1962 my grandma had her house built on some undesirable empty hills, in the city but far from the action. There wasn't a tech industry. That house is in the geographic center of San Francisco and is now worth about $2,000,000. It's still on a lovely tree-lined street with plenty of available free parking.
You would take that from her and the other people who created the neighborhood you now covet. You would change it forever, adding all the charm of a trailer park or housing project. The free parking would be gone.
No. You go make your own desirable neighborhood in a different city.
You're trying to cheat by skipping a step. You don't want to wait half a century. You want that nice neighborhood now, without investing the time to create it.
Good for her. She could actually afford to own. This generation doesn't have the same luxury.
I hope Millennials and Gen-Z will be courteous enough to not defund social security and Medicare. They're growing pretty angry with student loans, cost of living, and inability to afford housing and retirement. They'll be looking for someone to blame when they're 40 and jaded.
> You would change it forever, adding all the charm of a trailer park or housing project. The free parking would be gone.
That's extreme. I was going to say apartment tower, which makes much more sense than single family dwellings with wasted space for parking cars.
> You're trying to cheat by skipping a step. You don't want to wait half a century. You want that nice neighborhood now, without investing the time to create it.
I own a half million dollar condo on the Atlanta Beltline. By all rights I should be a NIMBY too, but I empathize with those that are struggling and hope for densification and affordability. I didn't buy my place as an "investment" - I bought it because I love it and the neighborhood I live in. Lower house prices will mean lower property taxes, so it'd be a win-win. I want them to build more here.
Housing shouldn't be an investment you horde and keep from others because you've already got yours. Housing is an escape from constant shackles of rent-seeking. It should be accessible. People this generation don't even have that as a dream anymore...
> neighborhood you now covet
SF is a smelly and cold quagmire, and I only travel for business. It's a total monoculture without a thriving art or music scene. I've no interest in ever living there.
Tech either needs to pack up and leave, the law needs to enable denser building, or land owners need to see their values drop through steep, progressive taxation.
SF the city is extorting too much from business for not much in return - all of their employees are getting fleeced by the cost of housing. Businesses should shop elsewhere for a better run town that isn't controlled by rent seeking leeches preventing progress because they refuse to work hard and add new value.
I'm hoping tech leaves. My startup will be on the east coast.
She also didn't really get her home as an financial investment, and she is unlikely to personally benefit from the increase in value. There was no way to know she'd get lucky. She used the home to raise 7 kids and will probably die there. As you say, it was her "escape from constant shackles of rent-seeking".
It's not smelly on her street.
I also hope that tech moves elsewhere. It's insane to cram everything onto a tiny peninsula. I did go to an east coast start-up, and it worked out nicely. There's also that whole middle of the country. Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Wyoming are all fine places to live.
Probably good thing she didn't. You say the home is worth $2m today... Well if she invested $7397 in the S&P500 in 1962 it would be worth $2m today.
I'm going to guess she spent more than $7397 for the home and a lot more than $0 on taxes and upkeep. :) So if the home had been bought as an investment it wouldn't have been an amazing one.
I think it's important to point this out due to the other comments that seem to think that she's the recipient of some kind of astonishing windfall, she isn't.
The point the other commenters are making about Prop13 is a good one, however. Your central argument is essentially the problem Prop13 is intended to and actually does solve.
And bonus: You can inherit the property from her and preserve its tax level... so rising property values won't even force it out of your families ownership, not at least until you start running into estate taxes.
[Unfortunately, prop13 is also a lot stronger than what would be minimally required to solve the problem of property taxes pushing people out of their homes. E.g. some other states have similar rules but they only apply to a single residential property per person that they're required to live in, and as a result it causes a rather extreme burden shift onto newer residents including ones who opt to live in less expensive locations...]
There are plenty of reasons why nearby development can be a serious taking of an existing resident's property rights... but in California jacking up your property taxes is not one of those reasons.
Your point about parking is an actual argument that you could probably develop further. But I'm guessing that young able bodied posters who are used to living in an urban hellscape won't buy any argument that reliable nearby parking is a quality of life issue. :)
No need to wait. I'm 23 and I already feel jaded.
I can't comprehend why anyone would want to treat their primary residence as an investment. My mom bought a tiny apartment in an eastern European country 30 years ago for almost nothing that has appreciated and is now worth $35000. The problem? She wants to move and an actually desirable apartment costs twice as much. Two times almost nothing is still almost nothing. Two times $35000 is $70000 which is something she can't afford.
House appreciation ends up being a a net loss because it kills any potential exit strategy. Want to cash out? You will have to sell your house and then rent for obscene prices. Want to upgrade? Better houses appreciate faster than your low end house, so you have to cough up more money. Want to move to a different location that costs the same? Your taxes have appreciated too.
So the only way this investment strategy can pay off is if you want to move away from the place which is obviously what doesn't happen because people buy homes to stay there, not to move away in 30 years after their homes have appreciated.
And free parking? It's city-funded parking. The city owns the roads and maintains them. Long ago, density and car usage was low enough that the city had more than enough parking spots to go around. Now it's different. You have to drive around for a while to find an open spot. You pay in time instead of money. For many of us, that's not a worthwhile trade.
Also, I do wonder what the property taxes are on that $2,000,000 home. If the owner hasn't changed, it could be ridiculously low. In most states, the outcome of property taxes is that they encourage more economically efficient use of land. This is very important because land is a scarce resource in cities. Sadly, prop 13 has made this not the case in California.
My grandfather fought in the Vietnam war. About a decade after he retired, two new families moved into the houses next door to him: a Vietnamese family on his left and a Russian family on his right. This caused him great distress. Should he have been allowed to stop those families from living next to him? I don't think so, and I think building apartments in the neighborhood causes far less distress than that.
Wrong, because of:
> the outcome of property taxes is that they encourage more economically efficient use of land
County assessors routinely change the valuations of real property and the taxes you pay are proportionate to that valuation -- not what you paid for it. If she bought the place for $20,000, which is likely in 1962, then she likely cannot even afford the taxes on the property anymore and would be forced to leave.
Basically, the longer you own a house in California, the lower your effective property taxes are.
But your main point is correct: A more productive use of the land would be for grandma to sell her home to a developer who would then build apartments. Reassessing property taxes every few years is a great way to encourage such developments. Again, the end result isn't to take someone's home. It's to tax them commensurate with the value of the land (a scare resource in cities). If they don't think the taxes are worth it, they can sell their land (usually for millions of dollars) and move to a place where land isn't as expensive.
You can't just move a really old person without increasing the risk of death. She would lose her connections to church and family. She would lose the familiarity of her home, both inside and out. This would likely cause depression and might even cause confusion.
If we're going to be coveting land, what about the park? The land value of Golden Gate Park is immense. People wanting a park can go visit one where the land isn't as expensive.
So you're saying she can't afford it. She can't afford to support the city that she now finds herself the beneficiary of? Perhaps because not enough people are paying property taxes? If there was more housing to go around, there would be more people to share that responsibilty.
If she sells she'll be well compensated. She can move somewhere more affordable and have plenty of money left over to give her kids.
It's actually very hard to imagine that your grandma did those things either.
There exist plenty of nice tree-lined streets around the country with free parking. In hardly any of them do houses cost $2,000,000. I think the reason housing is so desirable/expensive has very little to do with your grandma's choices and more to do with historical and economic factors that individuals have little control over.
There are certainly trade offs to be made. Housing has already become unaffordable for middle class people growing up here (that don't inherit a house), and many lower income people already commute multiple hours each day. But solving this problem might involve some homeowners (with already huge financial windfalls), not exactly giving up their homes, but having to look at some buildings and/or people they don't like.
All that being said, strip malls in the south bay would probably make more sense for redevelopment than already-dense SF neighborhoods (and I've been to the area of SF you're talking about and can certainly acknowledge the charm).
The bigger problems I think have to do with building height restrictions and anything else that explicitly restricts the density of a city.
I can have my two kids share 100sqft room (10x10) but two 50sqft (5x10) rooms in the same space would make everyone happier and they're young enough that they don't need a big room.
Only to give you a data point, in my country (Italy) norms require (since the '70's):
1) at least 9 sqm for a bedroom (for 1 person, 12 sqm for a double), rooms below 9 sqm in size can only be "studios" or "storage" or similar (at least officially)
2) at least 28 sqm total size to have the dignity of "flat" for 1 person or 38 sqm for 2 people (i.e. anything below 28 sqm cannot be registered as living space unit and while you can of course have two people living in a 28 sqm it is not "legal" , more generally, to be "legal", you need 28 sqm for the first person and additional 10 sqm for each other person resident in the house)
3) 2.70 m height for any room where people may stay for long periods of time (i.e. exception made for corridors, closets and bathrooms that must anyway be 2.40 m)
4) at least one bathroom of at least 4 sqm for each unit
5) a window or similar that must be at least 1/8th of the surface of the room (again excluded corridors, closets, bathrooms) for light and ventilation
Then you have two doors, and the space those doors need. Two windows for emergency exits.
I agree that height restrictions are a much bigger contributor to the lack of housing, but preventing dorm-style living seems to have little utility aside from preventing poorer people from living in your area.
Edit: according to this article, the regulations used by 90 percent of US communities allow 70 sq ft. https://www.hunker.com/13711464/building-code-requirements-f...
They have in the past. They were tenements, projects etc. Most have been torn down and a vow made to never do this again.
Look at places like Hong Kong and other big Asian cities today, to see what high density living looks like. It can be good but often isn't.
I respect the folks who try out tiny houses. It’s hard for me to picture them having a happy time or if they do maybe when they accurately document their experiences I will have a better idea of what I really need, which might still be a 2500 sq. ft. McMansion, but maybe not.
https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49...
Many people don't want to cook or clean. Many people don't want or need a living room or a private bathroom. This does not necessarily imply that these people must live in horrid squalor.
FAR is the ratio of floor area to lot area; it's not about parking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floor_area_ratio
Parking minimums are certainly a problem, though, especially when they limit dense construction in places with excellent public transit.
If we're talking about the US, excellent public transit isn't really a thing. IMO, roughly 50% of Manhattan qualifies, and that's it.
Sure, most of the country doesn't have adequate transit. But some neighborhoods in most metros do. Cities should not be bound to parking minimums in those dense urban centers. If it turns out that transit is not good enough, then the market value of such housing will be appropriately low.
You mean, for example the Palo Alto Caltrain station? If you happen to work in another city center, that will suffice for your daily commute, but not much else. How do you get home from the casino at 2am? How do you get to your friend's house in the suburbs? How do you get to In-n-Out?
I'd consider this barely acceptable, far from excellent.
Employment is an excellent example of an activity which the government might want to facilitate with public transportation, and, as you point out, Caltrain is optimized for certain daily commutes. Late-night gambling-entertainment, on the other hand, belongs way down the list of priorities.
I lived there for several years and got out, and it’s really nice to be living somewhere I know I won’t spend half the year with a little voice in the back of my head suggesting suicide as the solution to every other problem because I am tragically low on sunlight and vitamin D even with a 2’ square sun lamp and lots of pills, and I see the symptoms of the same shit in the friend I’m talking about who ended up there after SF’s insane rents pushed him out.
Sure we admire their ingenuity and hard-work ethic and how they recovered the land from the sea but that same energy probably could have been applied with more productive results somewhere else. Look what the Mormons have done with Utah. Maybe the Dutch could have done something similar with Montana (or even Minnesota). I'm certain they would have done a better job with San Francisco than we've done.
But on a brighter note, trust me, there’s a lot of great places in the US! Many people from around the world immigrate to America to make it and I think those who are lucky enough to be able to stay in America due to citizenships (just cause you happened to be born on American soil) or via the Visa lottery should be grateful for the opportunities that they have.
It's not an issue of building out, or even necessarily of building up, but just allowing and/or encouraging more building and allowing some building to replace existing low-density housing.
I've lived an hour North of SF my entire life. I've seen how housing policies affects SF as well as where I live (which is also very expensive, but not quite to the same level). People don't like to allow too much change into a neighborhood because it changes the nature of the community. News flash, so does allowing housing prices to double or triple over a couple decades. The only difference is that the existing land owners get to capitalize on that, so it's not just about change, it's also about people controlling the flow of benefits of an area to maximize their own benefits.
1. There are some specialized types of jobs in the software industry where there are only a small handful of employers and where most of those employers are located in Silicon Valley. There are some areas in the software industry, such as web development and enterprise software, where there are plenty of jobs outside Silicon Valley and similar tech hubs. Plenty of businesses need custom applications, and the Microsoft software stack of Windows Server, SQL Server, .NET, Azure, and other products is commonly used outside of Silicon Valley, which seems to be focused on Linux. But suppose you work in the area of compilers, or you're an operating systems developer. The chances of moving to a place that isn't a tech hub and finding a compiler or operating systems development job is lower than finding a web development or Microsoft enterprise app development position. My line of work is in research in systems and AI, and it would be difficult for me to me to find similar work in most American metro areas outside of the Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, and New York, all of which (except for Austin) are expensive.
2. The Bay Area is famous for its acceptance of diverse cultures, lifestyles, and worldviews. The Bay Area's cosmopolitan atmosphere is one of my favorite aspects of living in the area. However, cosmopolitan urban areas in the United States tend to be expensive. New York, Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles are still expensive places, even if they are not as expensive as the Bay Area. An exception to the correlation between cosmopolitanism and expense is Sacramento, a very diverse place which by California standards is also still affordable despite rising housing prices. I would not mind living there, but it's a very long commute to Silicon Valley, and there are not many jobs in my subfield of systems and AI research in the Sacramento area. If I couldn't live in or near a diverse, cosmopolitan area, my next preference would be a tourist town with a nice, laid-back atmosphere, such as many of the towns on the Central Coast of California. But, once again, those areas lack the jobs I want.
But not all tech companies in Silicon Valley pay Facebook/Google levels of compensation. There are plenty of engineers in Silicon Valley who make low six-figure salaries (i.e., $100K-$150K) and who don't own five or six figures worth of stock. I fall in this category. While we can afford to rent apartments in Silicon Valley, buying a house within an hour commute from Silicon Valley in a safe neighborhood is definitely a stretch goal for us. If I want to buy at my current salary, it's either a 2-bedroom condo in South San Jose or in Alameda County, or it's a long commute from exurbs such as Tracy and Hollister.
Now, San Diego is much more affordable and would be a very appealing option for me since the housing prices are within reach, perhaps not in places like La Jolla, but in places a little further away like Oceanside and Escondido. I wouldn't mind relocating to either one of those places.
Salaries will become lower because there will be too much supply, as dev people will flock in. Conversations will become a lot less interesting because S/N ratio will decrease.
There will be less benefit from living in the Valley if you are one of the very best (if you make a salary in top 10% of the dev jobs, you are not concerned with the rents now, it is you who DRIVE the rents to where they are), and more benefit if you aren't so good.
VC will also have a much higher pool of founders to pick from. Non-funded founders are poor, many can't go to the Valley now, they will. VCs will get picky, and deals will become worse for everyone. Valley will just get watered down.
As for salaries the point of Silicon Valley as a selling point is to try to pay for quality - a fixed housing SV would still be more expensive than generic office in a generic town or outsourcing to cheaper still.
Also, it’s weird to say that with more people moving in it will lower the amount of competent people. That’s not necessarily true and there’s no evidence that the influx of people will affect the ratio of what it is now.
Being away from the valley has allowed me to recognize how odd most of the people there are and how much it’s affected my own thinking during my stay there. Elitist thinking like this runs rampant and when you move to other places you’ll see the people in the Bay Area aren’t all that elite after all.
1. specialized jobs. True, and you will miss out on some career options, as this is the center of the world for tech by far. But nowadays there are remote work possibilities in many areas and the lower cost of living as well as much lower taxes outside CA make up for higher salaries in the bay area (remote work jobs tend to pay a bit less).
2. "Diversity". Meh, you can find all the diversity/culture you need in any decently sized city. My closest friends have been from Eastern Europe/balkans and I find those guys wherever I go. Whatever you are into, you'll find it, but you just have to seek it out. It's like people who rave about being in a town with so many art galleries and symphonies, but they don't actually attend said galleries or symphonies. And most people can't tell the difference between the Santa Fe symphony and the SF Symphony, TBH. Sure, it's a step down, but you will get all the culture you need. In terms of tolerance, the bay area is not what I would call tolerant -- it's a pretty authoritarian place. Try wearing a MAGA hat to work and see how tolerant they are. I'm not talking about getting dirty looks, odds are good you will get physically assaulted. Having lived here for a while, I've seen the transition from a quirky place with a strong libertarian bent and that likes to experiment to one that is more of a monoculture constantly looking for something to be outraged about, and the overton window for what is tolerated is shrinking every day. Even a lot of the old style hippies which I used to hang out with have moved out, many heading to Portland or TX. Oddly, places like Palo Alto and Cupertino are much more tolerant of other worldviews. A good rule of thumb is that if you can find a neighborhood with a thriving pentecostal church, a presbyterian church, a catholic church, and a synagogue all in reasonable proximity, then you have truly discovered a place where there is diversity of opinions and worldviews. Also, if the state isn't deep blue or deep red, then there is some diversity of worldviews. Most people, however, only pretend to want that. What they want is to be surrounded by those who share their values, which is completely understandable. You can find that and lower cost of living in many places.
3. Don't overlook walkability and nice, old fashioned architecture. This is huge. It's the best thing San Francisco has going for it -- human scale architecture combined with density. That's the one thing you will miss the most. There are so many benefits from not needing a car, not only health benefits, but mental health benefits. Despite all the problems with homelessness in the city, which have gotten much worse over the years, there many nice walkable neighborhoods, as well as nice staircase hikes, viewspots. It's lovely.
In terms of places to look at, there are lots of nice places that, in my opinion, would provide much higher standards of living.
1. Miami/beach places in Florida.
2. Small towns on the east coast, like Asheville, Charleston, Charlottesville.
3. Washington DC is underrated, but also expensive and there are crime issues. But not as pricey as SF.
4. Chicago has low cost of living if you can put up with the cold. Crime issues tend to be isolated to bad neighborhoods so the headlines aren't as bad. One thing to be aware of is the horrible state finances in Illinois -- high income people are going to be soaked, so caveat emptor.
5. Although NY is expensive, Long Island is relatively inexpensive still.
6. The entire desert southwest is awesome -- New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, are all gorgeous states with wonderful cities. Take a look at Flagstaff, Arizona.
7. New Hampshire is underrated, if you can take the cold.
For walkability, which is key for me, one option is to find a small town -- those tend to be walkable. It needs to be not dead and close to a big town. Access to healthcare is a real issue in small towns, so you will end up driving to big towns to see your doctor.
DC the city is nice for the most part; crime and rough areas are concentrated mostly in South East DC. The DC suburbs are literally the overall richest counties (Loudoun VA, Fairfax VA, PGC Maryland, etc.). Lot of tech around there, in those 'burbs, but also expensive. To unlock the SF-FAANG level salaries around DC you need to do cleared work -- with all the headaches that security clearances imply.
Really liked Salt Lake City, Utah. Mormon presence is lower compared to other parts of the city and a beer isn't too expensive. Weather and people are nice.
Heard good things about Boise.
The risk is what happens when that job is done and you find yourself in the boonies with no meaningful tech work within hundreds of miles?
I was at Sun during the era when they made a big push to get people to give up their offices (save on real estate) and go remote, work from anywhere! It was so tempting to move to Hawaii and keep the silicon valley salary. I'm glad I didn't. I know many people who did. When Sun was over, they found themselves owning farmland in the middle of nowhere, no job and no possibility of getting one in the area.
My inability to not afford housing in the places that I want to live in are not an outcome based on “efficient markets”.
The cost of housing in major American cities is largely determined by whether they can build more housing to meet demand and lower costs. The new housing is blocked most often by people who already live there.
So now the question is how different groups with opposing interests might apply power to get their desired outcome.
I can’t live in Monte Carlo, for example, even though it looks quite lovely. And I accept that, because that’s how reality works.
He simply needs to take the personal responsibility to make it achievable vs capitulate to some strange reasoning of "it's not my fault I can't afford it, it's their fault because XYZ".
The question is whether the people who cook my food, do my laundry, plumb my home, deliver seltzer to my bodega, butcher chicken in my grocery store should be able to afford to live within a reasonable distance of my home. We can choose to build cities that make it nearly impossible for them to do so and for them to live in constant fear of homelessness (with many eventually sliding into it) or we can build ones where they can comfortably afford a modest home.
"We've got ours, everyone else can bugger off" is a political position subject to debate, not a property of the universe.
North America is vast and largely empty. This is a planning issue in that cities allow this sort of demand to grow unchecked.
Another factor is that the average wage in the area is around 12/13 dollars. For someone to be paid twice the average private sector wage for the area is quite significant. Especially when this is a small town and money that is paid for the librarian comes out of their budget and means an reallocation of resources from elsewhere.
Tl;dr I'm not saying that the librarian should not get a pay raise to 25 an hour. What I am saying is that just b/c people are skeptical about wages doesn't mean that it's a direct correlation with them hating on college graduates/ect.
Do they though? Not sure why you singled out the bay area, but populations in less populated, non-coastal regions do pretty poor all around.
* Not as well educated
* Lower incomes
* Less savings
* Higher chance of medical issues
* Drug issues
* Higher suicide rates
* Pockets of STD's spikes that happen every few years
I'll pay the extra $1000 a month to be surrounded by good food and constructive outlets.
In any case, you cite
> * Lower incomes
> * Less savings
in response to an article about a person who is miserable living in a garage. Is it strange to consider that some would rather be "worse" off living in a larger purpose-built dwelling somewhere else? Perhaps they can get paid on an SF pay scale and buy housing in cheaper markets?
> * Higher suicide rates
SF is literally building a suicide barrier on its iconic bridge.
TL;DR; It's okay that people want to live where they want to live. People thrive in different environments.
Chicago is on the longest contiguous coastline in the US; it isn't rural, it's also not non-coastal.
But that's not the grouping of cities commonly referred to as being "coastal." I obviously know that non-coastal != rural, but that equivalence is frequently used in American discourse. See also: "flyover country", etc.
Those are populous cities.
>in response to an article about a person who is miserable living in a garage.
Something something anecdotes.
HN is complete garbage holy shit.
In fact, if you pull up the 25 best places to live list that US news does, you’ll find that other than Santa Rosa and San Jose, nothing else in the Bay Area makes the list.
I hate being pedantic, but the US doesn't have 100 cities with 100k+ people, but I do get your overall point
edit: oops was wrong, somehow I was thinking 300 even though I read and typed 100. My mistake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
>>>* Pockets of STD's spikes that happen every few years
These seem like "those who live in glass houses should not throw bricks" positions to me. [1][2][3] And if you look at the STI maps by region, it's the poor Southeast states with the highest disease rates, not the Flyover Country interior (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Missouri, etc...)
[1]https://alt1053.radio.com/blogs/kcbs-radio/san-francisco-has...
[2]https://www.sfaf.org/resource-library/hiv-hep-c-statistics/
[3]https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/San-F...
It's actually kind of funny you devoted that much effort into making yourself feel right, while not even being able to negate what was said with any kind of substantial source.
This was so so easy to find, yet you somehow managed to accomplish not finding it. You then went through the effort of creating a post on HN pretending that this information didn't exist. Just to make some point because you got insufferably offended about data.
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/nchhstpatlas/maps.html
>These seem like "those who live in glass houses should not throw bricks" positions to me.
The level of disingenuous discourse allowed on this forum is silly.
Cities exist for reasons, and facilitating encounters and interactions between people (and organisations) is chief among these.
For some industries (viz: YCombinator, startups, and VC) there really aren't many options outside the SF-SJ corridor, NYC, Seattle, and Austin being among the few, though largely of vastly smaller scope.
There's also the matter of those who've grown up or raised families in the region who find that they either can no longer live their themselves or that their children must move elsewhere. Fair or not, this destroys relationships and community cohesion.
If everyone worked remotely then Californians could keep their insane housing policies and people in "fly over country" could get access to jobs. Everyone would get exactly what they want.
So either make it illegal for cities to have significantly more jobs than housing or give employees the right to work remotely. Of course both of these option haven't happened and I don't think they will ever happen.
I say that as an Australian, where despite reasonable laws and ample land, we have some of the most expensive real estate per income in the world.
The issue is banking and tax law, which should weigh heavily on real estate capital gains, heavily on speculation and heavily on empty lots or tenancies. But go easier on rental income and losses.
These same arguments about nimbyism and building just have the effect of dividing and conquering, while carefully avoiding scrutiny of the real issue.. finance.
Another Aussie here. Sure we have lots of land, but no water. Our limiting factor is potable freshwater. Our major rivers are dying, rainfall is becoming less predictable. Right now politicians are pushing to build more dams to fix the problem (for agriculture, not population) but that's only going to lead to more negative environmental impact.
Here in Australia we need more water recycling. It's energy intensive.
Australian land may technically be ample, but Australia has enormous problems incentivizing living in rural areas, to the point of granting work visas to unskilled laborers that can be renewed long enough to achieve permanent residency (Working Holiday Visa). The only requirement is youth.
Australia's urban population: 90%; Sydney & Melbourne metros: 40%
Much like California, the bulk of Australian economic opportunity centers around the major metros.
Your comments about banking and tax law are a non-sequitor. The same banking and tax laws apply in the entire country, but the expensive real estate is largely limited to the major metros. Australians would live in pleasant coastal towns such as Surfer's Paradise if there were enough jobs in those regions to support them. Or they would have stayed on the sheep stations in the interior to remain close to family.
Besides all that, low capital gains taxes and negative gearing created the investment class in housing. Ie. Those who have 3 or more investment properties as it is now so is a net gain to lose money on a poor rental investment. And banks feed off this investment, valuing properties within the metro areas at ever higher amounts, propped up by low capital gains taxes and negative gearing. It is a vicious cycle of capital speculation.
Even though for pure rental income from a property, regional areas have historically been better investments.
And btw surfers 1. Has the second highest growth in the country 2. Is anything but pleasant.
Thus perpetuating a housing problem that prevents them from moving anywhere else in the Bay Area because now it‘s unaffordable.
Also, remove height restrictions and build better transit.
Yeah, keep going
Dealing with garbage was a constant issue. It just seemed to build up quickly and there was no place to keep it in the apartment. In terms of our belongings, if we had anything more than what fit in our suitcases and day packs there would have been a major problem with storage as there was only some small closet space and cubbyholes underneath the stairs. I did almost no cooking because cheap food options were nearby but it occurred to me that if I had been frying stuff on the little range, the smells from cooking would have pervaded everything.
ETA: I realize that many people live in far more cramped conditions all over the world, often with many family members or shared accommodations, and generally have no options to move into bigger quarters. But in the United States at least, I see the "small house" movement romanticizing the idea of compact living quarters while glossing over the drawbacks.
Maybe this is an indictment of the 'takeaway generation' that seems the norm in places like the US, where it is often cheaper and more convenient to order take out, rather than cook from scratch?
If you burn milk or something else on the stove? Best leave the windows open and rent a hotel room to stay in for a few days!
The memory of being young, strapped for cash, but in college and having fun
The memory of being in your early career, struggling financially, but first exploring the world on your own (eg, for me, in Manhattan working my first job after college.)
The romanticized thought of being a writer in some European city having total artistic freedom.
There definitely isn't any one thing that Americans do or feel, but there are people that are really excited about tiny houses, or in the bay area, van life. Some people do it out of necessity, some people romanticize things associated as you say, but definitely some people romanticize the tiny living space lifestyle directly and aspire to it.
I am actively unhappy with the situation but am ultimately owned by some decisions I have made so here we are.
Many aspirations towards tiny houses i think are motivated by economics and fear or ignorance about what exists everywhere else.
Maybe I could buy an enormous house in the middle of nowhere and throw gatsbyesque parties to lure visiting friends from cities and have the best of both worlds.
My wife (then girlfriend) and I agreed never to live in one again. Just this morning, we were reminiscing about how we used to have to get our utensils, then eat on the utensil box I made to hold them because we didn't have counter space. We also recalled the brick wall had a brick sticking out just slightly too far that you couldn't open the oven. So we had to file down the brick.
Just... just no. Give me my 2600+ square feet house any day.
The real trick is not living somewhere where you need that kind of housing. Outside of a submarine, there really is little reason.
I live in rural Illinois, make close to an SF salary, enjoy my 5 min commute, and pay less than this guy for a five bedroom house.
Heating it, cooling it, filling it with stuff. Why bother?
I can bike/walk anywhere I need to go in town, have a $20 electric bill, am 90 minutes from the pacific and 90 minutes from the mountains. 80 miles of running trails 3 miles from my door. I’ll take that over some giant house in the middle of nowhere.
> Outside of a submarine, there really is little reason.
Because unless I missed it, I don’t see where you jumped to my defense.
When I was a kid, we didn't have anything like the monster SUVs of today. That's because an SUV in those days was basically the same as the now-mostly-discontinued mini-pickup trucks with a built in cap and two doors. There was nothing with seven seats and four doors and 300 hp and so on. So people weren't making conscious decisions not to buy that.
But thanks for the education on older homes and SUVs.
Agreed 1000 sq. ft. Is great for two. Living in SF I had a 750 sq. Ft. Apartment with three people and it felt fine.
Will probably have my kids help me plan, permit, and build an ADU in another year or two. Figure that’ll be a good summer project they’ll probably hate at the time, but appreciate down the road.
You are certainly a statistical outlier in multiple ways. Rural incomes rarely match their urban counterparts. Rural commute times are less than urban but hardly 5 minutes.
I have about the same deal. I'm in a low-density part of Florida, enjoying my 3-minute commute to a workplace across the road from the beach. I can afford my 12 kids. If I were willing to live in a 2-bedroom house on only 0.17 acres (for about $172,000), I could pole vault to work. I prefer my 0.39 acres of course. People wanting a dozen acres have to commute about 25 minutes.
Unless you live in a tiny studio apartment, income simply doesn't keep up with cost of living in the expensive areas. I don't know what income it would take to have acres of land in San Francisco, but it is something frightful that isn't generally being offered.
When I did have a full-time job, it was to a company in a business park. Nobody had a 3-minute commute there. I don't know if anyone who works in an office anywhere in Tampa Bay has a 3-minute commute. My mom lives in a genuinely rural part of Florida, and if I lived there, I'd either be working remotely -- giving me a zero minute commute, I guess -- or I'd be lucky if my commute was under an hour each way, because the chances of finding a tech job anywhere within a twenty-mile radius are pretty much zero.
To me, living somewhere is more than just the physical structure. My wife and I grew up in “tiny towns” and after we left, we swore we would never go back.
We love cities and are willing to live in a smaller home for a bigger city.
But I don't think a tiny shack, uh, house, should be called a "good option". It's an adequate option under limited circumstances. The problem is calling it a good option makes "we spent five years fighting for the right to our tiny shack" sound like a reasonable thing rather than one more absurd winkle in the development of this country's housing situation.
When I was a kid my parents had a Westfali and we'd take extended road trips. That was also great.
If you don't like it, just don't do it.
Tiny house is not a movement about affordability. It's an aesthetic movement. One mostly participated in by people of higher income.
I don't think tiny house is black-and-white 0% about affordability and 100% about aesthetics. To me it's basically a way for people who perceive themselves as middle class to live cheaply in housing that is a step above trailers, and it's caused by the very high rents in certain urban areas like Toronto, Seattle, and the bay area. You probably don't see a lot of millenials living in tiny houses in Des Moines, Iowa or Cincinnati, Ohio.
Also, not sure how familiar you are with the bay area housing issue, but a lot of it is due to lack of supply + zoning. The state of california recently passed legislation allowing some zoning requirements to be circumvented allowing people to build ADUs - accessory dwelling units - in their backyards, which constitute the vast majority of tiny houses in the bay area (again partly due to zoning... there are very few places in commuting distance of the jobs centers where you would be allowed to build just a tiny house, or a collection of tiny houses, on a plot of land).
Around here tiny houses are priced similarly to similar-sized studios, with some benefits and drawbacks of living in an ADU compared to a studio (detached, usually in quieter residentail areas, less amenities than an apartment building might have, often cheaper). Affordability is a huge part of why people live in ADUs over here
I think the same holds true for most of the US outside of major urban areas. When 1/2 acre costs $30,000 any house you build will cost more than the land.
Jokes aside, it’s interesting that the article doesn’t mention city zoning rules - aren’t those the main cause of such shortage?
What are the main reasons people want houses and how can we preserve them when stacking?
* Noise. If you want to create the house experience you need to be able to jump and stomp the floor in the middle of the night without bothering anyone. Need thick and advanced floors, walls and front doors (easy to forget the last).
* Garden. Probably would need artifical light, but might be possible.
* BBQ in the garden. Maybe not impossible but might take some engineering to get the smoke out.
* Parking. Just need to ensure it exists plentifully.
* Multiple floors. Idk if people care too much for this, but easy to handle if so.
Even a condo fails at this. The ownership is fake. You don't have permission to bore a hole in the roof, foundation, or exterior wall. You can't paint the building with Vantablack. You have to pay a condo association fee which could change in unpredictable ways.
Regular houses get much closer to the ideal, especially if rural or at least without a homeowner association. Some states even let older people defer property taxes until the property is sold.
Is this really a relevant issue, when you just need a decent place to live?
Want to run a machine shop in the garage? Go ahead! Want to change your own oil in your car? Nobody is stopping you. Don’t like the fact that anyone can simply walk in your front door on a whim and “inspect” things in your own home? Ownership provides all of those things and a lot more.
My family owns apartments in the Czech republic and nobody has rights to enter them, or physical means to do so. There is no 'landlord', the building and land is owned by the resident's association, where the "leader" is elected by resident's voting and paid a small salary. They manage repairs and bills.
If I suddenly found them in my house doing some random inspection and talking about 24h notice, police would be on the scene.
City and county laws, zoning restrictions, and the building permitting dept all restrict what you can do in a single family home often in ways an HOA would not. For instance in many areas parking on the grass, extending your driveway(so you are no longer on the grass), turning a garage into living space, putting in a permanent pool, building a deck, parking a boat or rv, are all often restricted or banned.
The main reason people want a home is to have a safe place to sleep and live. That by far trumps the concerns you listed.
I come from eastern europe, where apartment blocks are common and some are quite nice, and never understood the obsessions with houses so prevalent in Uk and US.
And we are in a thread about tiny house downgrades, if you realised.
Frankly is was glorious. I don’t understand why more apartment buildings aren’t like this. It can’t be that expensive to make a floor that doesn’t transmit sound.
Tiny homes sound terrible, but tiny home != ADU. There are a lot of more reasonably sized ADUs being built, and most of them should be much more pleasant to live in than this one.
https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2017/05/23/jumpstarting-the-marke...
In Santa Cruz county, ADUs inside the "utility zone" are limited to 10% for normal lot sizes up to a max of 640 sqft. Large lots can have an ADU up to 800 sqft.
Outside of the "utility zone" ADUs can be as large as 1200 sqft if your lot is greater than 1 acre.
That being said, once apartments get that small, a great floor plan is essential to having a functional, yet spacious small apartment. I have a walk in closet, two regular closets, a laundry closet (with stacked, in-unit washer and dryer), a standard bathroom, a full kitchen, a sectional couch, a media console, and a queen sized bed. I've never felt cramped in my apartment.
I've seen studio apartment listings with more space (in the ~500~600 sq. ft. range), but the floor plan is such that I wouldn't be able to fit what I currently have in there despite the additional ~0~100 sq. ft. of space due to a non-rectangular floor plan (trying to fit any piece of furniture in a non 90-degree corner will never go well).
By comparison of construction vs land. 50k gets you a nice prebuilt 750sf single wide that can be delivered just about anywhere. Which could be covered by ~300$ mortgage meanwhile that much smaller space is renting for 1,600+$/month. So, at best your reducing that 300$ a little while leaving the 1,300+$ land cost alone.
A good balance would be allowing multi family in many of these zones because what you say is very valid if you can stack up the housing. This is the sad thing about the Bay Area vs say NYC — the problem is a policy problem rather than some natural shortage.
I've been living alone (with dog) in a 540 sq ft garage conversion for 7 years and it's just about the perfect size for me. It has a small bedroom (queen bed), larger office, even larger LR, smallish kitchen and a bathroom (no tub). If I bothered to change antying, the kitchen could be slightly larger, the bathroom could use a tub, the laundry could be moved indoors (it's out on the covered deck) and the water heater could be moved indoors too. It's not well designed and space is not utilized well (bare walls could be shelves). But with a better design I think it would be completely satisfactory. I like having less to clean and less to heat, but I wouldn't attempt anything smaller.
I should add that my house has nothing to do with affordable dense city housing, it's on a farm in New Zealand, which has other buildings (garage, storage container, shearing shed).
This is still available:
https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2019/09/cheapest-...
I'm not really putting in any effort to evangelize and promote the idea, but the concept of a land value tax instead of regular property taxes seemed like a plausible solution to the problems people have with real estate markets. You tax something, you get less of it. We want people to develop and invest in building on land, but we don't want them to profit from the scarcity of the actual acreage. So why not tax the value of the land away, and leave the buildings on it alone?
On a side note, there are quite a lot of stories from places like Hong Kong on how to maximize space in their small apartments that could be applied to tiny homes to make them more livable. I've watched a lot of those shows on HGTV and have not seen any of those designs applied. A youtube channel called Living Big In A Tiny House https://www.youtube.com/user/livingbigtinyhouse has some interesting designs with some space saving techniques.
SF has a minimum of 2,500-4000sf [1], and San Jose has a minimum of 5,400sf! It's the same for much of the bay area, the SFH I live in occupies ~20% of the lot it sits on, which is pure insanity for one of the most expensive metros in the US. It is even more insane when you look at the giant lots of SFHs right next to Bart stations.
The necessity of being free to modify and tailor a living space to the occupant increases exponentially with the inverse of ft^2.
I live in a tiny space. It would drive me absolutely insane if there were a fold-out bed and other integrated amenities I wouldn't appreciate yet would be wasting precious space on. But since I own my place, whatever isn't working gets removed/changed and it's instead an iterative optimization process.
There are some serious advantages to having a small space. Heating/cooling systems are smaller, so cheaper to acquire, replace, and operate. Cleaning the place takes a few minutes. The lack of excess space significantly deters consumerism and hoarding. Maintenance and upgrades have much smaller multipliers, the number of windows, ft^2 of roofing material, exterior finishing, flooring, etc. It's all significantly lower cost in materials, less labor costs or less work/time if DIYing.
My property includes acres of buildable land, but I don't really feel all that compelled to increase the cost of ownership by building a larger home.
The main thing I'm contemplating right now is building a second minimalist tiny home on the property for visiting friends/airbnb, and maybe for me to live in when I'm doing invasive upgrades in the other one. I value that that's not a particularly costly proposition, to entirely gut and upgrade everything in my tiny home. It wouldn't even take that long. Go price some nice windows on menards.com, lowes.com, or homedepot.com and see how much it would cost when you have 10-20 to replace vs. 2-4. This is the kind of stuff typical single-family residential home owners take out home equity lines of credit to do. I'd do it for under ten grand, no loans necessary, nor did it require a mortgage to buy this place to start with.
For one months rent, you could move your stuff, and pay your first months rent in my apartment complex in Overland Park, KS.
Having moved to SF from “flyover country,” it’s astonishing to me how many people here are totally unaware of the rest of the country, and have never even visited anything outside of the Pacific Coast other than NYC or maybe DC. If you ask why they don’t move someplace in the Midwest, the answer is they consider it to be a nearly mythological place that they only vaguely know exists and are, frankly, terrified of. It’s bizarre how common that is.
...but places like DC are practically Kansas from the point of view of living costs relative to SF. So SF to Kansas is the wrong comparison in my opinion. Plenty of other coastal metro areas.
NYC and SF are about the easiest places for foreigners to integrate. Residents of those cities might not have been to Kansas, but lots of them have been to or come from Latin American or Asian countries--so definitely not provincial, but in fact multicultural.
"Provincial" in the sense of being preoccupied with themselves and not knowing much and caring less about the rest of the country.
Admittedly, both metros are more outward looking towards other countries. The elite New York Times readers consider themselves members of a community of international cities like London, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo, etc. That's not true of the average reader of the Daily News or New York Post.
I know that I couldn't afford a house where I am now (without a large down payment and mortgage repayments that were an unresponsible portion of my income) even if I just bought an empty plot of land.
"I live in a trailer on my parents backyard" doesn't quite have the same ring to it as "I built my own house at 19 you lazy bastard".
Similarly, most towns and counties are subdivided such that tiny plots aren’t available.
There is a growing movement to allow ADUs in urban spaces, but it’s far from universal. If memory serves, Arlington VA (next to DC) allows an ADU within the main house (converted basement) with some fairly strict limits. No ADU in the back yard.
There are nice trailer parks with new or maintained and addons porches. But there are also trailer parks where maintenance, but particularly septic and sewage were ignored
They’re also photographed as cabins in lush environments - not wedges behind an Eichler off University Ave in Palo Alto.
I think it's probably similar for a lot of people; feeling that a smaller house is just right for them.
It's probable that the "tiny" part is a lot more reactionary to big suburban castles, and I'd posit that those into the tiny house fad are likely more interested in houses that are more compact/dense, than an actual tiny house.
Admittedly, my family of three lives in 1800 sq feet and we probably have at least 200 sq feet that only gets used a handful of days a year. I wouldn't want to go smaller than about 1300 sq feet for our family though.
Tiny houses aren't for everybody, but they definitely meet the needs of a group of people. For instance myself, I live alone, have no pets, don't entertain parties, am really organized, and don't own a lot of stuff so a tiny home is completely within my comfort. Not to mention that if I lived in a normal sized apartment then it would look like I'm either in the process of moving in or moving out due to how little stuff I own. Even if the price per square foot increases, I simply don't need the extra space so why pay for it. It's like saying I should get a large pack of eggs for a better deal, even though I only need a small pack because the rest will go bad before I eat them. It just don't make sense in my situation, as well it's the case for many others.
Given that, I could not live in many tiny homes advertised on TV/instagram/YouTube, they're simply inefficient in terms of lifestyle. They've turned it into a competition for who can live in the smallest place possible which is plain stupid and you end up with a bunch of idiots designs that require you to somehow pack up your bed every day, or have no kitchen countertop, or no table. These aren't what I would consider normal tiny homes, they're on the extreme end of the spectrum.
You don't need to give up a normal lifestyle to have a "tiny home", only the people that want to "show off" do. These are the same type of people as those hipsters that carry around a typewriter to "show off" how hipster they are.
I too have gone through such a phase after college, 12-14 years ago. I worked in the Sacramento area, I was single and had little belongings. The smallest/cheapest places I lived in were 1) living in the living room of my friend's 1-bedroom apartment, for $300/mo (he was paying $800/mo before I joined, so I shared 3/8 of it, and it wasn't like he was even using the living room at all before I moved in), and later 2) living in the living room of an apartment with random housemates (found on FB, at my college town Davis) for $250/mo. (Not counting the times when I had been somewhat homeless for a couple of months and stayed in a different friend's apartment every week with a sleeping bag, sleeping on their room's floor, when I was working a very low pay job)
Of course finding similarly priced apartments is impossible (even in 2006~07), I honestly doubt I would even be able to find a 150 sq ft apartment for that price. I would however gladly take living with roommates/housemates -- especially over a 150 sq ft apartment to myself -- considering the toll on mental health etc. like you said. I actually quite enjoyed my living conditions at the time (taking over the living room at my friend's place and random housemates' place). Even with random housemates, it's nice to have someone to say hi to when they walk in and out (inevitably walking past where I'd be sleeping or using my computer, when they walk to the front door).
Also, living in an apartment with roommates is probably cheaper than living in an ADU by yourself (depending on area); in my area it is about 20% cheaper. You can end up with a larger shared area with a normal sized kitchen and living room. Living in an ADU is really paying a premium for privacy and other benefits of living by yourself.
* Lots of progressive tech with SF ties
* Municipal Fiber Internet - gigabit speeds!
* startups!
* rock climbing!
https://www.inc.com/peter-cohan/how-chattanooga-created-18b-...
Move to Knoxville, TN
* Fastest super computer in the world
* Oak Ridge National Lab
https://www.wired.com/story/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-bre...
The problem is that they seem to be used as a way to avoid discussing the fact that land, not buildings, are what is causing all the housing affordability issues.
We desperately need to ramp up taxes on land in order to reduce inequality and speculation, and encourage density.
Nobody made land, so nobody deserves the right to use it to exploit other people.
Unfortunately, hundreds of years of political supremacy by landed gentry is largely still in place and hard to dismantle.
Speculation is what pays for housing.
Plenty of other ways to fund it.
IMO, it shouldn't be profitable to be a landlord, at least not to the extent it is today, unless you are providing services well above and beyond.
In the real world, public housing works perfectly well. For instance, more than 80% of singaporeans live in public housing, and the system is considered a success: https://theconversation.com/a-century-of-public-housing-less...
I did, it ain't pretty.
Yes, yes, go on! You are so close!
> I’d rather live in a really bad tiny house than a government project.
You know there are successful government housing areas, right? That are well maintained, below market rate, and generally liked by their residents. Even in the United States, where the government has historically done everything they can to undermine public housing there are still places where they are doing well.
Not all public housing is giant projects either. There's plenty of smaller housing that's government owned.
Yes, when the policy makers decide to neglect the housing units, particularly the large mega-projects, there are problems. There's a long history of trying to crack down on the poor for being poor. Making sure they are as poor as they seem, double and triple checking lest they get slightly more than minimum in social services.
Other models:
* Community Land Trust -- A group of people gets together and buys lots and sells them (or manages them) for less than market rate with the rider that anyone you sell the lot to must also be sold for less than market rate. [1] They typically serve those who make less money, and are often single family homes.
* Housing Coop/Cohousing -- A group of people invests in building a community on a larger plot of land, often with smaller individual units but a larger community space. Because the cohousing group owns the entire plot, they have much more control over making the lots affordable. [2]
[1] In Seattle: http://www.homesteadclt.org/ [2] Near Seattle: http://winslowcohousing.org/
There wouldn't be any political opposition to multi-family dwellings if it wasn't so profitable to hog land.
Land suitable for high rise dwellings should have a heavy ongoing land tax applied so that owners actively want to get rid of it or redevelop it with more dwellings to spread the tax burden.
Many would convert existing structures if possible to another structure type.
Land value will drop to a level where rent is affordable. No matter what the owner will rent out the unit for costs (including taxes) + profit.
For instance, owners of a single family home on a given piece of land would pay five times as much as 5 apartments on that land, because each apartment would only pay 20% each.
Because the land isn't zoned to allow high density construction.
Here's an idea - get a roommate. For twice what you would pay for this "tiny house" ($1600), you can get a spacious 1500+ sq ft 2 bedroom apartment, even a house with a yard if you are okay with living slightly farther away from downtown.
I finally realized moving further away doesn't help from overall costs. In SF I wasn't owning a car. When I moved away from SF, car became a necessity. If you add the cost of car ownership, it made up for the difference in the rent. And of course not to mention the drop in quality of life due to 1h+ drive on busy 101/280 each day.
Millions of people live in smaller places and are perfectly happy about it. It does look like her house is wasn't built to properly optimize for the space though (the toilet unit could be much better, having a sink, toilets, and a shower in the same tiny space with a very clean looking bathroom is a solved problem).
The rent price seems fairly high, but it seems to be aligned with local salaries and the (perceived?) quality of life the bay area has to offer.
As the rent price per square foot gets higher with smaller spaces, those tiny houses are probably more profitable than larger apartments or houses, so we might see more of those as landlords realize, and then maybe renters will get used to it like in Tokyo and Hong Kong?
I'm not surprised that the psychological effects of this are any different than staying in prison.
I've been in this living-in-small-home position, and half the depression was just happening looking at the birds flying away from trees to wherever they want from small room I was living in.
Get out, the world is big.
Don’t need much more than that. I lived in one for about 450 usd... I paid extra for the small balcony.
But I guess most people in san fransisco would not want to live in such “cramped” spaces. Either that, or more likely there isn’t anyone willing to build such a place.
https://www.cnews.fr/france/2015-04-28/paris-un-habitant-vit...
I think of it like a stomach stapling:
For some people, it makes all the difference to their quality of life.
For others, it's a solution to the wrong problem, and therefore not a solution at all. Maybe even something that compounds their existing problems.
Anecdotally, most of these folks seem to move out of their tiny place in about a year or two because they're simply tired of not being able to do crazy things like stand up or stretch their arms out.
I remember one series of increasingly distressing videos where a guy was financially tied up in some tiny property, got married, then started having kids. By the time they were finally able to unload the property on somebody else they had an infant sleeping in a closet and the husband was sleeping in a tent so their older daughter could sleep inside with their mother.
I'm really not sure what problem the "Tiny House Movement" is trying to solve even if some of the solutions are kind of interesting. The variety of small living accommodations in Asian Cities seems far more interesting to me to be honest, because they're solving real problems of affordability, shelter and so on.
Some of the tiniest places seem to be relatively shame-free dorm-like affairs in South Korea and Japan intended for people studying for various exams, but also used by a fair number of semi-permanent residents who lack the means to stay elsewhere. These places are cheap, maybe around $300-400 per month, but have tradeoffs like shared washrooms and kitchens.
1 - https://youtu.be/kBPyN3LE65g
2 - https://youtu.be/0YWRPWDqzVg
3 - https://youtu.be/979a8b0lP2M
4 - https://youtu.be/q0zZfpe2v1g
There's also the flip-side, various levels of poverty (like #1 above) result in sometimes intense living conditions:
5 - https://youtu.be/hLrFyjGZ9NU
First world problems.
Frey argues that in some cases even small ADUs can make
sense; a quarter of Americans live alone, and don’t
necessarily need much room, especially as many cities work
to improve public space and there are an increasing number
of places to spend time away from home.