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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

People get much larger houses today because they can afford much larger houses. This comes from both increased prosperity and having fewer kids.

1950s: The average new home sold for $82,098. It had 983 square feet of floor space and a household size of 3.37 people, or 292 square feet per person.

2010s: The average new home ($292,700) offers 924 square feet per person (2.59 people per household, 2,392 total square feet) — three times the space afforded in the 1950s.

https://compasscaliforniablog.com/have-american-homes-change...

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Around here, they're building bigger houses, but also on much smaller plots without gardens or dogs or tree-houses or places for kids to play outdoors.

I suspect it's the same in a lot of places.

Maybe these square-foot-per-person calculations should also include square feet of land.

If you are going to do that, other play grounds should also be counted: the forests and fields which used to be nearby, the per-child space in nearby parks, etc.

All these are places children used to go unsupervised, but now mostly don't.

Most people today don’t want a large back yard.

It’s like an outdoor pool, there’s definitely a market but adding a pool can lower your property’s value. Land doesn’t decrease the value of a property, but it can dramatically lower the number of buyers.

If this is true, it is so insanely contrary to the opinion of literally every single person I have ever met. Everyone wants a yard. Most people want a sizeable yard for their dogs or kids, or to drink beer and have campfires.

I grew up in rural midwest USA. maybe opinions are different elsewhere, but your comment is a bit baffling. Ive never in my life heard someone say "that house would be perfect if it just came with less land"

I know several people who decided to get smaller yards or were happy to move into apartment complexes without them.

We both are dealing with biased samples. A childhood friend who is very into the outdoors moved to a rural area and got 14 acres, everyone else moved to an apartment or a house with under an acre. This stuff shows up on migration patterns, and well there’s a reason the Rural Midwest USA is a small percentage of the US population.

So, I agree many people do want a large yard, but revealed preferences suggest it’s a minority opinion.

Revealed preferences are only as revealing as the market is competitive. In monopolies, is it not revealed that the populace prefers to be price-gouged? In a market as regulated as housing and with deep ties to policy (and industrial structures that I have heard about which I do not understand), it's difficult to not be sceptical of revealed preferences as a sole convincing explanation.

What you’re describing may impact housing developments etc, but I don’t think many markets are more competitive than used homes.

Despite its rarity a 3 acre lot is rarely worth 3x what a 1 acre lot would be, unless it can be subdivided.

$82,098 in 1955, adjusted for inflation, was worth $727,502.05[1]. So homes were actually much more expensive back then.

[1] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=82098&year1=19...

I wish I new how that article got to 80k for a house in 1955.. I couldn't find a link to trust "interactive visualisation" they're citing and Google didn't help me either.

I wasn't born then, so no personal experience and everything I could find pointed more towards 5-10k, i.e. this advertisement

https://i.redd.it/75sc90f58qsa1.jpg

That'd be safely below 100k, inflation adjusted... Actually, maybe that 80k is already inflation adjusted? The number is pretty close

No, they already adjusted for inflation.

In nominal dollars, a home in 1955 would be under $10k

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

That can't be right, it must already be an inflation-adjusted number. My parents bought their most recent house in ~1970 for $30K, and that was a bit above the median for the area.

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