Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

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I own and live in a two family house built in 1924. It's one step up from an English row house in that you have windows on all sides. These, and New England "triple-deckers" are pretty good. In Worcester MA you could buy an 1890/1900 triple-decker for $30k in the early 90s.. if only I was smart enough to buy one then.

These are wealth generators in that renters are paying your mortgage.

My grandparents lived in a Queens NY row house (until 1970s white flight). I have early memories of it, was a cool house. It had lots of fireplaces, varnished wooden gates, wall sconces and shared back courtyard. My parents lived in a 1950s single family house, but we gen xers rediscovered cities.

New houses around Boston are mass Lego block low rise apartments. They all are corporate owned, which means they are expensive, and the rent goes up automatically, but they sometimes have nice ammenaties.

SROs: I want to live the way Sherlock Holmes did. Mrs. Hudson cooked, cleaned, answered the door.. did people really live like this in late 19th century London? How much was the rent?

I was kinda shocked to see Worcester mentioned here in the top comment. I and some other students are currently paying $4350/mo for one of these triple deckers that you mentioned.

I really prefer the zoning laws and building style present in Hanoi. Our house is five stories tall, and some of our neighbors have houses with six stories. Although they are not very big per floor (they may only have 2.5 rooms per floor), they are very space efficient which allows for tons of amenities to be within walking distance.

I'm not sure what houses look like in Hanoi but if they are kind of like the 3-5 storey houses in some parts of East Asia those are not great designs. They’re like twenty feet wide and forty feet long with steep stairs connecting the floors. To me the layout is awful. It wouldn’t be bad for one off where the lot was oddly shaped but to have that as a default for attached homes isn’t great.

Twenty feet wide and fourty feet long is like 6x12 meters per floor.

That’s as big as my entire house, and we can fit 4 rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom in there.

2.5 rooms per floor would be the height of luxury.

Why do you say these are terrible?

I would say it because I've spent time on crutches, I have a parent in a wheelchair and another one that just wouldn't have the energy for a staircase much of the time, and staircases are a pain in the neck with small children and make it harder to move appliances and large items of furniture in and out. As a default form of housing, living across four floors is actively excluding many people with disabilities and massively reduces the ability of aging seniors to manage unassisted living.

These sound like complaints against any house with stairs. I think that disqualifies like 95% of all stock regardless.

I think we’d find that the number of people that need single floor apartments fairly closely follows the available supply.

If the first floor apartment had ramp access then wheelchairs could get in. Elevators are another option but somewhat expensive.

It seems like the solution to that would be to use multiple types of housing construction within the same city, and then people can choose one suitable to their situation. And to make other sensible choices like to put heavy appliances on the ground floor.

Yes. The comment you responded to earlier said "It wouldn’t be bad for one off where the lot was oddly shaped but to have that as a default for attached homes isn’t great."

And what I'm saying is the opposite. It's fine for it to be common as long as there are still enough single floor dwellings for the people who need them.

There should be all kinds of everything. A city should be a massively diverse cacophony of individual choices. That means that finding exactly what you want is going to exclude >90% of the properties -- but means that finding exactly what you want is going to be possible.

Like I mentioned, the layouts aren't great --unless-- it's one designed by a known architect then they can at least look nice from the outside, yet they are still constrained by the dimensions --which can be from 12-foot wide to about 20-foot, in most cases. Here[1] is a sample of stock that's about 30yo. in the background you can see the roofline of a newer design.

[1]https://imgur.com/a/pdHmByZ

For the whole house I hope...

It was $750 for a three bedroom near WPI in 1992. Ours had left over (disconnected) gas jet lighting, sliding wooden pocket doors for one of the living rooms and a separate entrance for one of the bedrooms (for maid I think). You could see where chimney for the original coal stove in the kitchen was. Also had a slate roof.

Fellow WPI grad, in 2012 I paid 275/person/month for an admittedly crappy apartment that I shared with 4 people, and later on 475/person/month for a room in a nicely renovated 3 story house right next to campus shared with 5-6 people. This one didn't have that many remnants except for an ironing board in the kitchen that plopped out of a wall closet, and a button next to the stairs indoors that said, ominously, "Sedgwick". It seemingly did nothing. We never figured out who or what Sedgwick was. We made sure to press it every so often, to "feed the Sedgwick" :-)

> I and some other students are currently paying $4350/mo for one of these triple deckers that you mentioned.

Because you're competing with Boston money. The fact that it's possible to live in Worcester and work in Boston (and the fact that Worcester is known for being nicer than New Bedford/Fall River and Fitchburg/Leominster) means there's tons of working professionals who are jacking up prices.

It is my understanding that boarding houses were not cheap. But I've mostly only read about them in fiction form the time period. If there's any truth to them, it seemed like to afford to live in a boarding house in the city proper you needed to be a single working professional.

I think people liked to live like that, just like they'd like to have fresh made meals and live in walking distance to everything now. But once you get married have kids, it gets too expensive. You're housing and feeding multiple people that aren't working. Also, people forget boarding houses usually came with a shared bathroom.

I think boarding houses were generally a combination of bachelors and widows (who presumably got the house when their husbands died), at least the combination as shown in Sherlock Holmes is, I think.

Boarding houses also came with all kinds of guest restrictions (particularly around the opposite sex). Restrictions that would never fly today.

Those restrictions are enforced quite healthily in hostels across the US at least.

Hostels are temporary housing.

In the US. Lots of longer stays in places I've stayed at in Australia or Asia. Mostly travelers or foreign workers, but there was a flophouse element, most notably a prostitute in melbourne who rented a private bunk and would sometimes entertain "guests".

Nicer boarding houses, yes. It scaled a long way down.

Also shocked to see Worcester, MA mentioned here!

Many of these triple-deckers are pretty great in the sense that they can house a lot of people - they are not so great in many other aspects.

The youngest triple decker in Worcester is ~100 years old and many of them catch on fire and burn really easily. Your mileage may vary depending on the landlord you get. One landlord I had owned 100+ properties in Worcester and barely had anyone working for him. He refused to hire more people, so many of the issues we brought up would not be addressed for a while. My current landlord is great and any issue we have gets addressed almost immediately.

That being said, the city is currently working on revitalizing triple-deckers: http://www.worcesterma.gov/announcements/city-announces-worc....

Triple-deckers have a certain quirky charm to them. My current apartment has closets that are the right depth, but for some reason are super-wide. Many other triple-deckers have split the living room in half so that there can be a bedroom - this means that the door to the bedroom are sliding doors that you close.

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