Live small, be happy? The next new big thing
bbc.com
bbc.com
The article hit the nail on the head pointing out, repeatedly, that this wasn't a choice so much as something that had been forced upon these people who were simply making do with what they could. And yet it comes up with the wrong conclusion and title.
Space isn't conserved, it's increase is being opposed.
Size is relative. There are definitely cultural factors that influence what we consider small or large. For example, London has the London Housing Design guide which recommends a one bedroom flat for two people to be a minimum of 50 square metres. I don't think that’s palatial or excessive. It's still less than what many other European countries recommend (it’s 20% less than what Germany recommends which is 60 square metres for a one bed flat for two people [1])
In the article, it states that UK developer Pocket Living are building 38 square metre one-bed flats. 38 square metres is fine for one person, but not for two people in my opinion. These apartments may have high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows, but they are usually single-aspect and narrow in length (with the windows at the narrow end) in order to fit as many units into the available plot of land.
I'm not a fan of this micro apartment trend. Housing lasts for decades and future generations will have to take over and live in this micro-housing stock. Is this the housing legacy we should leave future generations?
[1] The Case for Space report (PDF) from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) published in September 2011: http://www.architecture.com/files/ribaholdings/policyandinte...
Italy - where I live - has a lot of old housing stock. Some of it is very old. When something isn't right for the inhabitants, they modify it. Adding plumbing, combining apartments, adding or removing walls... you can do quite a few things.
This is an excerpt from the last national housing space standard published in the UK in 1961 (the national space standards were scrapped in the 1980s by the Conservative government). This report was written over 60 years ago, and yet what is says is still relevant today (at least in the UK)
"…a good house or flat can never be be made out of premises which are too small...additional space is also an important long-term investment, for if a house or flat is large enough it can usually be brought up-to-date as it gets older; but if there is not enough space the improvements can be impossible, or at least unduly expensive. Homes are being built at the present time which not only are too small to provide adequately for family life but also are too small to hold the possessions in which so much of the new affluence is expressed...Such places cannot be expected to meet the needs of their occupiers today, still less hold their value in the long term."
(From a government report called Homes for Today and Tomorrow, published in the UK in 1961)
Quite often in modern steel-frame construction the only real constraint is the external walls and the support pillars. You can knock down all the plasterboard walls and turn it into an open-plan office if you want.
You're right about old buildings, brick houses and external walls. I think in the UK the property industry sneaks round the Parker-Morris standards by expressing things only in terms of number of rooms, never total floor area.
The space itself being extremely expensive is - in some cases - possibly a symptom of people not being able to build enough.
You can live in a house for the same price as a small appartement if you accept to go outside of your city's downtown.
Two, if a substantial portion of that commute doubles as your daily exercise, and you can enjoy it and improve your health. (Usually this means a bicycle, which brings along certain weather-related implications to its practicality. Think it works better in Silicon Valley with its mild mild climate and utterly predictable rain.)
[1]: and this is completely forgetting the time involved.
I can get a 1BR flat around the corner for 15K GBP or a 1BR flat 1.5 hours away via metro for 10K GBP + 3K GBP travel costs.
3 hours commuting daily for 2K GBP saved? Not even minimum wage.
(Driving is impossible, by the way. Parking costs would be 20GBP a day or more. A motorcycle could possibly work.)
I actually think that commuting is broken as a concept, at least considering cost savings. It's likely easier for me to find a way to stuff in an extra hour of work, freelance or whatever, and do that instead of commuting.
Reminds me of post by anon about how there will be no "collapse".[0]
There will be no "collapse" the way some of these people think of it. It's not going to be like the movie "Dawn of the Dead" or whatever where one day suddenly shit hits the fan and prices skyrocket and everyone begins to riot and the SS comes marching down the street to kill everyone. There will be no "happening". It's far more insidious than that. Read the poem "The Hollow Men" by TS ELiot and you'll understand.
You'll just notice that every day simple things will become a little more expensive. Everyone's homes and apartments will start to get smaller. your work hours will get longer, but your pay will decrease. You'll see family and friends less, and find that in time you care less about them. Every day you'll find yourself lowering your standards for everything: work, food, relationships, etc. Job security will no longer exist as a concept. You'll notice houses and apartments shrinking. People will start hanging on clothing longer and longer. Less people will get married, even less will have children. People will engross themselves in technological distractions and fantasy while never truly experiencing the real world.
Whatever dream people used to have about what their lives were going to be will become for them a distant memory. The only thing left for them will be the reality of their debt and their poverty. And every minute of every day they will be told: "You are stupid, ugly and weak, but together we are free, prosperous and safe."
That is the collapse. The reduction of the American man into a feudal serf, incapable of feeling love or hate, incapable of seeing the pitiful nature of his situation for what it is or recognizing his own self worth.
Ha, try living in The Netherlands!
I live in 24sq meters in a reasonable large city, my brother lives in 8sq meters in Amsterdam. We pay about the same and really, given how much the city offers neither of us complains. We both have a 5-10 minute commute by bike.
I have all the stuff I need and very little of the stuff that I don't need. We both live pretty close to a park, I can rent a place in a coworking space for 100 euros/month (including unlimited good coffee!) and given that I do things outside of the house most evenings anyway this works out perfect.
I couldn't imagine sharing my place with someone else but then again a friend of mine is living together with his GF on 28sq meters and they rarely complain about lack of space.
Let put some perspective around this. That could be 2 metres wide and 4 metres long. Did he rent a bedroom and share a living area with others?
He has been living in Amsterdam for almost two years now, if you're young, don't want to spend a lot of money and you want to live in "de ring" (the inner city) it's your only option.
It's perfectly livable though!
Instead, it is 3 people living in ~40 sq M.
I did the same thing when I first moveD to Boston. I got a bedroom in a four bedroom one bath townhouse, and the rent was quite reasonable split four ways. The shared kitchen and bath were not a problem, and I had plenty of space for one person with just a bed, desk, and dresser.
Now I pay more than that entire place for a 60 sq M place for my wife and me, that is only a 15 minute bike ride from work.
When I worked CBD jobs I always made the trade off of living space to commute time. Years later you forget your small place but the hours of commuting in packed trains leaves a tear in your soul.
It takes a real commitment to anti-hoarding and ruthless effiency to live in a small place.
(144sq meter house, living on my own, 7 minutes to work, yeah I even drive cause why not, 10 minutes from work to gym, another 10 home, total travel = ~30 minutes per day).
TLDR: Health benefits of cycling are believed to significantly outweigh health risks on average.
Driving is just infinitely more convenient if the roads you're using are not congested.
However, in reality, I just moved from a 1600 sq foot house to a 3200 sq foot house. Commute is 40 minutes, best-case, each way in and out of West Houston.
Your lifestyle, great as it is for a single guy working hard, is going to hit a brick wall if you meet a woman who wants children, a big house, to live in a good school district etc.
Well, generally they don't go to the gym, they eat microwave meals or have their partner cook, and read on the train.
My current commute is just under 1h each way, but that includes 20 minutes of walking, and as such feels fairly leisurely. Long ago it was 1h45 each way, on the underground; that was gruelling.
But the spectre of "foreign buyers" does help the real estate industry by adding pressure to increase bids. I'm not suggesting there's a conspiracy, just that it's a narrative many actors independently have a monetary incentive to push.
Big cities are a trap. Thousands of shops and theaters, sure, but how many does a person need? Try a smaller 'big city', of 100,000 or so people, and things get much, much better.
In fact, this did happen. I looked over this area one year - all the houses were < $100,000 which I could swing. Moved a year later - all the houses were > $100,000 which was harder. I asked the agent what had happened. She said "All those people from California moved in" which was ironic since I was moving from CA myself.
I think the tight packing thing can work if with some downsides.
1. The couple of weeks before you make your move, where you sort what you need and what you don't need, so you can get rid of the latter.
2. A few weeks/months after you move, when you realize you only use 25% of what you kept and purge once again.
After that, it's really quite pleasant. The biggest change is spending more time out of the house in public spaces, since you no longer have the space to maintain separated individual little worlds in your home.
My living room is a quarter full of shipping supplies for selling my things on eBay, and I am getting sick of it. It's not even that I want the money, but that I don't want to just toss things in the landfill.
How do you fit furniture into a garbage chute?
The correct way to get rid of any garbage that I can't fit into the garbage chute is to take it to the dump (which is a bit tricky without a car).
The opposite happens too, when you realize that you actually need a tool or an adapter that you just gave away, and they're actually quite expensive!!
But small is good for students or bachelors indeed, because as he said he's not often home, and he doesn't need to have separate rooms to isolate himself from family members and get some "alone" time.
When you get kids, that's a different story.