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Comment by profgubler | Hacker News Reader

Is it me or are these things insanely expensive. Maybe if you live in the bay area this is cheap, but I live in Indiana and in some places you could by a house way bigger than one of these for the same price. And that includes the price of a 1/8 to 1/4 acre lot.

The other problem is where do you put it? I am not going to live in my parents back yard.

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Yeah, from the post title here and the opening of the article, I thought this going to be alternative housing on a budget, but instead it was more vanity guest house for the stuffwhitepeoplelike.com set.

While I mostly agree, in their defense, the material/feature quality is significantly higher than your average home. LED lighting, high efficiency appliances, radiant heat, and solar aren't cheap features... nor are they easy to find in houses of comparable price.

Also it's hard to compare the price of something made for the British housing market to prices here in America. It could be the case that housing in general is just much more expensive there.

That said, it does seem way too expensive for the average case, although it might be worth it to me if I could stick it on a green roof somewhere.

Actually these are astonishingly cheap compared to a poor quality house in the UK. My parents bought an ex-rental unit to renovate at ~£100,000; it was single story (in the UK basements are virtually non-existent outside of cities) semi-detached and probably hung around 1,000 square feet of floor space. It was quite literally the cheapest house on the market in the area and it had nicotine stained walls, ceilings that seeped tar, had plumbing, gas and electrical problems. Not to mention one of the clauses for sale was that my parents dispose of all the junk in the house, which not only included bedrooms crammed full, but also a garage and a shed.

If you can get property in the UK and get the rights to put one of these sheds on, you'll probably save yourself anywhere between £25,000 and £100,000 on your lower end priced home.

The large versions of these homes are a quarter of the size of that apartment. It is only like 258 square feet.

Not only did we build a whole 1600 f^2 house for only $168k here in DC, there were severe limitations to how big, or how small you could make your house just about everywhere we looked. There were no lots available where local government would allow less than 1000 f^2.

Yeah, I thought the same thing. If you're living in a car, you probably can't afford to drop the British equivalent of $50k on a house - especially one that doesn't come with land.

I'm sure there could be al sorts of interesting applications for this if it was cheap or if it was relatively easy to transport . Teenagers, parents, renters, students, vacation homes, tourist flats.

But I don't see why this is better/different from having a unit or cabin built by a builder. You can do this even in the bay area. The only difference is they call it a shed.

Yes. I've seen duplexes in my town selling for only a bit more than this, which is a really good deal considering that you could offset your mortgage by renting out the other half. At least in my area the housing markets are down but the rental market is going strong so if you exploit this gap you can end up offsetting your housing costs.

The median home price in Detroit was only $7500 a couple of months ago:

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2009/jan/29/nation/chi-de...

I looked at these houses, many of them were not livable. You had places that the insides were gutted.

They're from the UK, so I should think that you Indianans could make similar blueprints, and produce these for under half the retail price.

Exactly my problem with this. I would be find buying one of these, but the price needs to be cheaper.

Yeah, I thought the same thing. If you're living in a car, you probably can't afford to drop the British equivalent of $50k on a house - especially one that doesn't come with land.

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