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Comment by jkingsbery | Hacker News Reader

I can't say I've done a full study on this, but at least anecdotally, the claim of this article seems over-blown. I'm a software engineer for a large tech company (i.e., I make pretty good money), and I live in a relatively well off part of the US (New Jersey, in the New York suburbs). When I was looking for a house, most houses in our price range had either 1 full bathroom or 1 full bathroom and 1 half bathroom. So even in a pretty well-off situation, it's not automatically the case that you live in a huge house with lots of bath rooms.

To the extent that the claim that American houses have so many bathrooms is true, I'm not sure you can think about American real estate in such a homogenized fashion to assume it is universally true. I think it applies in certain particular circumstances, but is not universal.

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Northeastern suburbs tend to be much older than suburbs in the rest of the country...

Your anecdote seems hardly enough to refute the article. How much do you know about newer suburban developments outside Atlanta, or Dallas, or Phoenix?

Counter to that, I live in the DC suburbs, where housing tends to be from the mid-1970s or newer. The house I grew up in was a "standard" colonial (1800swft 4 and a door) with 2.5 bathrooms and 4 bedrooms. The first home I owned was similar. My current townhome is 3 beds with 2.5 baths.

In all cases, we could have done without 1 of the full baths, or the half-bath, without problem. The extra was purely convenience (but appreciated growing up with a sister who could take some time getting ready).

NJ is the most population-dense state in the U.S., so that (and its being really old, and comparatively expensive) might have something to do with your experience.

> NJ is the most population-dense state in the U.S., so that (and its being really old, and comparatively expensive) might have something to do with your experience.

Yeah, a house built in the eighties or the nineties is pretty new in Journal Square of Jersey City. However, the city (Manhattan mostly) has it worse. I saw an ad for a tiny room that explicitly said no access to kitchen or the bathroom. I don't think it is even lawful to say that.

Imagine someone living in that room comes across this article...

How old were those homes? The article is talking about homes built more recently.

I also live in NJ..In my experience, 3+ bedroom houses here will have at least 2 bathrooms, unless they were built before the 80s.

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