Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivanche | Hacker News Reader

Well this had to happen once. You can't increase home sizes indefinitely and expect them to stay affordable. I'm sure that a lot more families could afford 900 sqft homes/apartments.

View on HN

I have started to see more cheaper builds pop up in my area and it totally makes sense. I suspect we will see a shift or at least some segment of builders starting to build these smaller less expensive homes.

1500sqft seems like a pretty obtainable size for the average American.

Why is that? Why cannot dwellings become higher value and decrease in cost?

The market will always just prefer even more value and costs will rise? Somehow we’ve reached a weird equilibrium since the market still hasn’t crashed (yet). In contrast, Japan goes for relatively cheap structures since they will be torn down in 20-30 years, it definitely makes renovations easier when you just raise and build a new house.

Prices and sizes are completely unrelated.

Yes, seriously. Come check the 600 sqft, 80+ year old shitboxes in Los Angeles that sell for 800K+.

Does a 2,500 square foot new house in the same neighborhood typically cost more or less than the 600 square foot 80 year old one?

Almost no one builds new houses in Los Angeles, outside those in the wealthiest of neighborhoods, so I couldn’t tell you.

> Prices and sizes are completely unrelated.

Evidence please. Very cou ter intuitive

For starters, prices are highly dependent on the area where homes are built, e.g. I could afford a significantly larger house if I moved 20Km away from where I am now.

Square footage price is thus set in accordance with the local market. The obvious issue here is then that someone has enough buying power to ransack the market, leaving most individual buyers behind.

If you were to build two or three homes in the place of a current one, that issue would remain.

Isn't this just moving the goalposts? Yeah, you could buy even cheaper and bigger home if you'd move to rural Afghanistan, what a surprise. Ceteris paribus, bigger size == bigger (total) price, there's no way around it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com