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Comment by ponector | Hacker News Reader

But actual data says opposite. Amount of housing is growing while household size shrinking.

>>US-wide, homes built in the last 6 years are 74% larger than those built in the 1910s, an increase of a little over 1,000 square feet. The average new home in America, be it condo or house, now spreads over 2,430 square feet. It is also important to note that, parallel to the rise in living space, households have been getting smaller over the same period. In 2015, the average number of people in a household is 2.58, compared to 4.54 in 1910. This means that today the average individual living in a newly built home in the US enjoys 211% more living space than their grandparents did, 957 square feet in total

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Data doesn't say anything. You need to interpret it correctly. For example, any time you see 'average', you should probably run away quickly, because it is almost certainly full of monsters.

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...

just some quick things that jumped out at me:

- of homes actually built, hides that there's a lot of demand for smaller starter homes or housing in cities

- the average household can get smaller if there's a bimodal distribution, ie poorer households growing in size. or people not having kids because they don't have and can't feasibly afford a spare bedroom.

- "the average individual living in a newly built home" im leaving this one as an exercise for the reader

Does this control for short-term rentals? I could totally see us building more 3 bedroom Airbnb flats while simultaneously moving families into smaller apartments.

This has long been a suspicion of mine; I've wondered what the actual ratio of housing square footage per person in the US is. I see the wealthy building palatial 3rd homes that are occupied a few weeks a year and wonder if that's a big enough demographic to have any noticeable affect on the national market. Seems wasteful regardless.

There is an inundation of foreign nationals holding in various camps and temporary housing that are fueling inflation (gov’t money printing, aka fraud) and will drive price increases soon as they start being interleaved into society.

The other side of the equation is also that the same inundation of foreign nationals into the system will drive down wages.

We are all riding the dragon. We shall see how it unravels.

Yeah, this is annoying. Even the 55 and older neighborhood that was built a few miles from me recently, the smallest is about 2K sqft. What the heck??

Surely the math must make sense to someone.

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