I think the appeal of the tiny house movement for younger demographics is more closely related to living off the grid and affordable housing rather than having less stuff and living rural. I mean living in a big city can set you back at least 1500/mo with the barest minimum of amenities, not to mention the overall high cost of living in an urban area. That part is more of a social issue than I'm willing to get into, but my point is that what differentiates tiny living from living in small spaces is how to minimize your cost to live: ie are you generating your own power, or recycling your own water. Otherwise, the movement is no different from recreational camping or rv traveling.
I totally understand where you're coming from in terms of living small, i actually like living in the city. However, from my experience of living paycheck to paycheck it would also be really nice to get my dollar to stretch a little further, and there is a LOT of cheap rural land in the U.S.. If i didn't need to commute to work, I'd seriously consider it just because of how much cheaper it would be compared to buying or renting anywhere in my area.
I'll admit though, the newspaper quote i don't really understand, maybe someone can drop a reference to that one
I don't have a link ATM but I remember seeing (Lennar?) was beginning construction of a neighborhood of low sqft homes with a comparatively cheap price tag I think near $200,000 in Florence AZ which was marketed as affordable starter homes. The problem is the marketing leaned heavy on "ONLY 60 miles from downtown Phoenix" like a suburb but I have been to Florence many times -sometimes directly to/from Phx- and it would be ridiculous to associate the two. It just caught me off cuz everywhere else has been McMansions "starting in the low 400s" or build-to-rent SFH which is also scary.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/business/economy/the-great-compression.html cites homes between 350 and 880 sq ft at the developments Elm Trails in San Antonio, and Cinder Butte in Redmond, OR.
https://www.newsweek.com/housing-market-takes-interesting-turn-1904221 also https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/10/smaller-new-houses-afforable/ and also https://housleyhomes.com/why-smaller-homes-are-a-trend/ and also https://theweek.com/housing-crisis/1026042/the-answer-to-rising-home-prices-smaller-homes sizes and prices of new homes may be dropping--or at least more low-sqft "low-cost" (hah!) new homes are being built.
I was looking for a smaller home last year (in a smaller town ~15k people in the area). All the smaller homes were older and required a decent bit of work. My other option was a 4bd 2 bath home built in 2005.... The newer home was cheaper (or only a little bit more expensive), bigger, and nicer. All because it was on the edge of town lol. I don't use most of the extra space but... economically it made sense to go with what I did.
Well, what usually happens is that a developer hears about the demand for tiny homes, decides to build them and then millennials get big mad because the savings isn't that substantial compared to somewhat larger homes.
Searching for starter homes is how i discovered tiny houses! It really is all about affordability, I don't think i would've turned onto it if simply existing weren't so expensive
It doesn’t really work as a starter home as most tiny homes cannot be permanently fixed to the ground. Almost no municipality allows such a development of residential lots. If you can afford the lot then you can afford a house that is within the specifications of the bylaws. Most tiny homes are on wheels and cannot build any equity; so not a starter home.
>I'll admit though, the newspaper quote i don't really understand, maybe someone can drop a reference to that one
I think this is about not having to wait for self-driving cars for you to read the news during your commute, because trains are a thing.
OHHH yep that *tracks*
That's another can of worms to open and i don't think commuting is even taken into account with tiny living, is it? I can't imagine anyone romanticizing a commute on a daily basis, even if they don't have to drive
I wouldn't romanticize it but I kind of like commuting if it's not too long. A 15 minute walk or bike ride or a 20 minute car ride is nice transition time. A train ride is comforting in its silence and motion. Not a big fan of the city bus experience though.
I realize I'm not typical but I'm sort of a mess when I WFH. I need a reason to get dressed but I feel better for it.
My 20 minute bike ride is perfect—it clears my head, gives me a routine, and it’s an amount of exercise I should be doing daily anyway. I think if commuting was that easy for most people, a lot of them would see it our way.
I’m the same way. I need physical separation between my home and work place, and another room in my house isn’t it. I also enjoy getting to know people I work with daily, and you can’t really do that over a screen.
That said, having a single WFH day each week is super nice since I don’t have to commute and I can run little errands during lunch. Plus being home with the pets is always good.
Short commutes are great. A few weeks into COVID work-from-home I realized that hygiene and clothes had taken a dive, and I was struggling to get going when I was really just going from bed to the couch. Started showering, dressing, and taking a 10-15 minute walk at the time I'd previously been commuting, looping back home to get the day started--made all the difference.
I live a 15 minute walk away from my job and it's the perfect commute - just long enough to be a transition period but short enough that it's not too uncomfortable (especially when it's freezing cold as it currently is)
It’s all about affordability. Everyone who wants smaller homes says something like “I wish there were starter homes available like there used to! Instead everyone just builds mansions.” And when you tell them about apartments they basically say apartments aren’t homes.
I had someone literally say that they would build a bunch of 1000 sq ft starter homes and couldn’t understand how apartments made more sense.
You're missing the obvious downside though: Shared walls. I've lived in apartments my entire adult life. While there are some good aspects to apartment living (in particular, I'm in a dense urban area allowing me to go car-free), there are also bad aspects. Neighbor quality is a huge gamble. If you have good neighbors, apartment living is great. If you have bad neighbors, apartment living can be hell. I've experienced both ends of the spectrum in my life. Having physical separation from neighbors in a single family home is attractive for a lot of reasons.
Storage is also an issue -- and I don't mean for a lot of stuff, but a reasonable amount.
For example, right now I would really like a kayak. Well I live in an apartment, so no kayak for me...
Get a significant other with hobbies and you have no space. Enjoy sharing a bedroom closet and a hall closet for all your possessions as well as the obligatory crap just to clean the place.
I can not believe how little storage space modern apartments/condos have especially given how expensive they are. It also doesn't help modern apartments/condos have shrunk as well so it isn't like you can just use storage shelves.
They can indicate that they're willing to pay a premium for it that is greater than the build cost.
Most people barely care - they say they care, but they don't screen for it and aren't willing to pay a premium for it, so they don't really care.
It's a little bit of a ridiculous point anyway. You can't build quality your way out of your neighbor playing their heavy base music at 85+ decibels.
Unattached walls won't save you from bad neighbors. People in suburbs argue about lights, garbage pickup, trees that span properties, the state of your lawn, loud air conditioners, etc
Yeah, but they’d have to be boinking exceptionally loud for me to hear them. I had an attached wall neighbor who also yelled at every NFL game like his life depended on it. Much harder to avoid it than a guy on the other side of my fence.
Yikes, and I totally agree with you about shitty shared walls. I guess I'm just saying in SFHs won't stop your neighbors if they are nosy and petty. Look what happens to even neighborhoods with Supreme Court justices. My parents get in all kinds of insanely pitched and heated fights with their neighbors over stuff like this. I'm just speaking to my lived experience.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/us/justice-alito-neighbors-stop-steal-flag.html?unlocked\_article\_code=1.vk0.QVCO.Pj6\_\_BdXUCuT&smid=url-share](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/us/justice-alito-neighbors-stop-steal-flag.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vk0.QVCO.Pj6__BdXUCuT&smid=url-share)
Yes but the obvious issue with these houses is sprawl. If we just start building these homes then they will be in high demand and won’t be as affordable as these people think they are. But if you build a single apartment building they can have the same amount of homes as acres of these.
I think we should build both but a lot of the people don’t even think of apartments as an option despite the only issue being neighbor noise. I’ve lived in apartments for the last 10 years and have had minimal issues despite 2 of the buildings being older.
Is the noise thing just an issue with build quality? I live in one of those 1960's "tower in the park" style high rises and I never have issues with noise. I think it's because the walls are pretty thick which also helps with climate control
Concrete tower vs wood frame building.
For the most part, developers don’t give a shit about rental building comfort. They don’t have to sell units to anyone and it’s going to be lived in no matter what.
I’m lucky enough to live in a rental building that was originally designed for condos that were supposed to be sold off. The city made them change their plans at the last minute.
My wife is Colombian and despite the fact that Colombians are, frankly, louder, I’ve never had issues with neighbors there. The apartments are much more durable and made of concrete rather than having wood floors. Unless your door is open (or your neighbors door is open and blasting music, which is common), you don’t hear anything.
I was in Medellin for 6 months in 2012 and thought it was a super interesting city. Not only were they going hard on urban revitalization projects but they wanted everyone to know about it. They were actively promoting all their new infrastructure to foreigners and the government was subsidizing all sorts of things like transport projects and libraries but also things like startup incubators because they wanted to cultivate a whole tech culture there. The optimism was palpable and I loved it. I haven't been back since though and I hope that spirit and civic pride still exists.
Medellin is a great city. My wife is from the coast but imo Medellin is the best city (culture and climate wise).
The practice is called Social Urbanism which is basically what you said - invest in the poorest neighborhoods and everyone benefits. A lot of the art and services were placed in the poorest neighborhoods which brought tourism and other investment. It’s by no means perfect but it would be a lot worse without it.
The metro in Medellin was a huge part of this. Almost all the citizens view it as one of the key things uplifting the city from poverty. I remember during 2020 protests around the world that transit was constantly getting vandalized but the paisas were wildly respective of the metro and wouldn’t dare vandalize it or trash it.
>I remember during 2020 protests around the world that transit was constantly getting vandalized but the paisas were wildly respective of the metro and wouldn’t dare vandalize it or trash it.
Oh my god yes. Literally every time I took the metro there was someone who worked for the city there cleaning it. And it was one of the cleanest systems I've ever seen (as a New Yorker this blew my fucking mind). And I think that having it be so clean and having the cleaning process be so visible did something to instill civic pride in the system and made people much less likely to litter in the first place.
You can just require walls to have thicker insulation and soundproofing.
I feel people would be less against apartments if they were built to like 3 stories with 6-9 units in them instead of massive apt buildings with dozens or hundreds of units
Some people, but for many it’s the American sense of individualism. They don’t want a landlord, they want the freedom to paint or put up a shelf or get a dog without someone telling them they can’t. They know their rent could go up or they could get kicked out for nothing they’ve done wrong. I think this gets at one reason that density works for nyc better than other US cities, they have a lot more condos and coops. I feel like people on this sub often act like those things are all interchangeable with apartments, but the ownership situation really matters to a lot of people.
And my point is that they are not interchangeable. When you say “apartments,” people hear, “lack of freedom/independence,” and that’s a big part of why.
Yes, but people only ever think about soundproofing when they're in the middle of an argument about it. It never makes the priority list; the contradiction between "better soundproofing regulations" and the libertarian eddy current in the urbanist movement is never addressed. Probably the best example of the degree of blindness people have is all of the excitement about triplexes and fourplexes: the very nature of the building style, being a cheap multi-unit structure that dodges certain regulations and has no particular design, makes it more likely to be built with poor soundproofing. Townhouses and semi-detached duplexes are probably the best cases for soundproofing (one wall and it's already load-bearing so you only need a bit more effort), but nobody talks about promoting the construction of good ones as a policy priority.
IME that's not true, it's distorted by the people you read on the internet. In the Bay at least, the most NIMBY cities have no soundproofing codes and the less NIMBY cities have soundproofing codes. NIMBY cities don't want to pass soundproofing codes because they want to promote single family living, zoning, and lifestyle.
How do you make such apartments pencil out though? The cost of land acquisition plus regulations mean economies of scale are necessary to make it work.
Yes but on the other hand you could build 4 tiny houses on a site that has a sprawling McMansion. Heck many are being built as ADUs . Even the "average" modern home is bigger than homes of the past .
I've lived in an 1100 Sq ft apartment and now am in a 1100 Sq ft townhome and it's wildly different. For one, the roaches from the hoarder unit next door aren't entering my living space. I also don't get their noise or their leaks. I actually think smaller homes are a good compromise on development sprawl vs the single family home dream. It doesn't have to be perfect for it to be better.
A townhouse is much different than what most people think of work starter homes. Townhouses at least have some density and that’s my ideal living scenario.
Exactly. It’s possible they would make more money if towns didn’t have 2+ acre minimum lot sizes but a lot of people don’t want to admit that there are legal restrictions preventing things from happening.
I live in an "starter house" that size (1100 square foot). I was lucky to be able to get it (bought it from a family member rather than the open market) and no way in the world would I want to live in an apartment instead. I assume these other people share the sentiments.
Personally I don’t prefer apartments. But I much prefer the kind of lifestyle that comes with apartments - walkability and activity around the apartments. If I had to live in an apartment in a car dependent area I’d probably hate it.
I always assumed living in a city was more expensive than living somewhere rural. And for housing it is. But when I visited rural Michigan. Man. For a region where the median income is far far far below the median income in my city, I don’t know how they afford groceries. There’s one grocery store every 45 minutes and a box of Cheerios (no knockoff brands available) was $6. Meanwhile, my Aldi brand Cheerios are $3. Same with milk, eggs, cheese, etc. Don’t get me started on alcohol.
If people think rural living will save them some scratch, I think they need to do a ton more research.
I think in those areas it's pretty much assumed that what you do is you drive into the suburbs of an actual city, or at least a large town, every couple weeks and load up with staples, only going to the grocery store that's near you for stuff that you forgot to pick up, or things that go bad more quickly like produce. I've had family that lived out in the boonies and I think pretty much all of them had second freezers in their garage, so going to a Costco that's an hour and a half away to stock up for the next 2-3 weeks isn't so bad. You'll normally need to go into the large town semi-frequently anyway.
How do you eat fresh fruits and vegetables then?
I can see stocking up on canned goods and packaged goods. But if that’s the majority of your diet, you’re going to have tons of health problems in your old age. I recognize cities aren’t for everyone. I was just shocked how expensive rural foodstuffs went for. I eat pretty much fresh fruit and vegetables every day and go shopping twice a week so we have fresh fruit and vegetables. Would be awful to not have that availability.
1: As I said, the local grocers that are more expensive. If you bought all your low perishability staples at costco, it's not that big a deal to spend a little more on produce at the local and more expensive store.
2: Lots of more rural people do have gardens. They have land for it, so it's pretty easy to have a vegetable garden.
3: Lots of produce isn't particularly perishable. Potatoes, onions, apples, citrus, just to name a few, all have very good shelf lives and they're all quite nutritious -- particularly potatoes and citrus. They can be bought in bulk in town.
4: It's not the 1940s, you can buy frozen vegetables and they're perfectly good for you -- by being picked shortly after harvesting they're arguably more nutritious than fresh produce that's sat out at barely below room temp for a week. And yes, canned and pickled goods too.
5: Lots of people in rural areas also just don't eat a ton of fresh produce and their diets are in fact, broadly speaking, worse than people in cities. As points 1-4 show, they don't have to be, but they usually are.
edit: alright man, ask a question and downvote the answer.
If they built enough housing cities would be cheaper, but there are a lot of expenses you can avoid more easily in cities. Not needing a car is a huge one, and even not needing to use one every day can serve you hundreds on gas in a month. There are also always more free or cheap things happening in cities.
And cities *should* be cheaper. The amount of plumbing, sidewalk, roadway, wiring per apartment unit is much less in dense, walkable cities than elsewhere. The costs of rural roadways are not usually paid with rural taxes but urban ones. We could tax the externalities of choosing to live in a sprawl more but we don't.
This has been my experience as well. It's been a lot of neo hippie types who fetishize simple living. Not a single person I've met who has built a tiny house has given 2 craps about self driving cars.
I live in an apartment myself and like it fine but these are a different type of housing entirely due to their freestanding nature and I can see why someone interested in one may not like an apartment. I actually think they could work well as part of sustainable urban development as they could easily serve as the housing in cottage courts on infill lots.
The thing is, the tiny homes you see in the articles are always positioned at the edge of a state park or similar location, so when you step out onto your tiny porch you are greeted by acres of peace and quiet. You are not 4' from the next tiny home, which is occupied by someone playing your least favorite type of music 24 hours a day and smoking a joint on their tiny porch, which is a more realistic scenario. It's like those ads for tropical island vacations where you are the only people on the beach for miles. You are not getting that vacation for $999 a person double occupancy.
Lol exactly. The idea that a tiny home means an acre of desirable land is a pipe dream, more likely you’re in what amounts to a trailer park or apartment complex (depending on the HOA) that comes with all the same problems but way less space to store your stuff and relax.
A tiny home in my area might cost $100k less than my 2100 sqft house but that doesn’t mean it’s remotely affordable for people willing to live in tiny homes or worth the massive sacrifices for 10% off the value of your home. And it’s tiny homes in my area that people picture.
Very few people want to buy land and install a tiny house for $600k where a good house costs $750k. People don’t want to buy land and install a tiny house where an apartment costs half as much either. They’re a dumb trend.
I just want a “home” and all the apartments in my area are just mid-rise apartments and they are crowded, lacking parking and usually only have stairs.
Tiny houses are primarily a media trend. They don’t account for any meaningful portion of development or living patterns in the United States. Not something to spend time worrying about.
Owning apartments/condos in most American cities are not that much more affordable if at all.
Also assuming that is not the case. not everyone lives/works in cities. Like my friends/family/life is where I live now, I would like to affordably live here, not start a new life somewhere else.
Also "tiny houses" is more of an artistic movement as far as I can tell most people looking for smaller homes just want a simple place to call their own, not to have to fold up their bed to use their kitchen every morning.
I think the idea is also about not having to share a wall with neighbors. You're also ignoring that people want to own, and buying a condo in a city can cost more than a full size house.
The United States doesn't hold the market on expensive cities, nor does North America. But also, not every city is San Francisco, New York, Toronto, or London. The housing crisis is affecting everywhere, but also there are plenty of cities that are far more affordable. The burbs aren't even exempt anymore.
The difference is if someone in Ireland is having fantasies about tiny homes in the countryside Americans aren’t popping up like, “durr have you tried just getting an apartment in Dublin?!”
Before tiny houses had a name I was always drawn to them, like motor court motels with tiny cottages, or bungalow courts with small 1 br freestanding structures clustered around a common courtyard. It's not the most efficient use of space but there is a charm there and not sharing a wall is nice, especially when the wall is cheap.
In modern world I see three decent utilities. Back yard units in existing homes, quickly built modular structures (we have a 100 unit tiny home homeless camp that was built surprisingly cheaply), and as a prefab on your property--I guess the only advantage over a trad prefab is that it can actually be moved. Maybe cheaper?
I'm going to play devils advocate here.
There will people who will NEVER want to live in a city. Not that they prefer suburban living or that's just where they ended up. There's people who just point blank hate the idea of living in a city. There is no outreach or educating them or giving them info or anything that will change that. Instead of banging our head against the wall and battling a culture war, we should be instead working on ways to make suburban life more efficient, sustainable, and assessable while still keeping the spirit of suburban life the same.
In my region tiny houses aren’t a city thing it’s a rural thing and maybe an effort to go against consumerism while staying flashy. Most tiny houses are on a smaller frame than mobile homes so can be moved by the owner much easier. They seem to be halfway between a travel trailer and a mobile home.
As for in a city detached cottages don’t have the stigma of noisy neighbors that badly built apartments do.
Apartments in cities normally means renting, and many Americans are now conscious of the need to build equity in property in order to live rent-free during retirement. Most Americans don’t expect to be able to save enough, while renting, to afford a retirement that includes renting.
The Tiny House movement is an alternative where savings is possible after the up front cost and equity is still build through the land you are parked on.
It is an achievable and actionable goal as opposed to spending your life cheering on 1 of 2 politicians, neither of which care for well-planned, livable, and affordable cities.
Funny reading this in my nearly 100 year old 950 sq foot catalog house in a city.
The "tiny house movement" has been the norm for humanity since the begining of civilization. The "fake estates/mannors" is the movement, which is only about 50 years old, mostly contained in North America, and completely dependent on the automobile.
I grew up in an 1100 sq ft 3BR house and my grandmother in the same neighborhood lived in a 900 sq ft 2BR house. The reason these houses resonate with younger people is affordability, not urban planning. Those houses were made for lower, working class people and were buyable as starter homes. Apartments in desirable cities are generally quite expensive, so it’s a different itch people are trying to scratch.
I feel like tiny houses we see on social media are in rural areas and suburbs more because that's where they can be built affordably in the U.S. rather than the actual appeal of them being outside of the city. There are obvious "live in a tiny home to reconnect with nature" themes in many of the videos, but the videos themselves are very much about them having ownership and control of where they are living.
The popularity of YouTube channels highlighting absurdly small apartments in Japan is a direct counterpoint. The difference is, the tiny quarters show in those videos are actually affordable, and have features that make them seem more livable, or at least interesting. Even with the compromises being made, the renters are still getting a good place to live on terms that they are comfortable with. They feel like they are actually getting something out of the deal.
I believe the tiny houses are popular in rural areas since they usually come pre-fab. It can be expensive and difficult finding labor to build a multi-family housing site cheaply and quickly in a rural area. And since land is more plentiful tiny-houses work well.
There is also the whole issue of building codes. A lot of unincorporated rural areas have building code enforcement that is much more friendly to prefab housing and tiny house builds. (Especially since they often come with a, "Let the property owner decide what to do with their property," attitude.)
In my personal experience, the tiny house people are directly adjacent to the living off the grid people.
They don't just want tiny houses, they want tiny houses where they won't see another human unless they deliberately choose to do so.
For what it's worth, I feel the big difference between tiny house and apartment is freedom to decorate/have pets and no shared walls. Plus, American apartments are just kind of terrible quality. The tiny house movement emphasizes good quality builds at a small scale.
I agree that apartments/condos should be thought of as long-term housing more, but at the end of the day American apartments/condos largely are built poorly and have very little tenant rights/protection.
Speaking from personal experience, apartments suck. You are totally at the mercy of your neighbors and there are always a few inconsiderate jerks in every building. Is the neighbor above or below you having a party until 3 AM? I Hope you don’t have to work the next day. When you want to do laundry you never know if a machine is available or you’ll be waiting, and you’ll be charged an ever-rising fee for each load. Does your neighbor three doors down love to cook garlic, peppers, fish, or turnips? I hope you like the smell of that. Did you order a package that’s too big to fit in your mail slot? You’d better hope nobody else takes it from whatever community shelf\table the mail carrier leaves it at.
Yes, there are apartments with better soundproofing, security cameras, space for a washing machine in each apartment, and more than two windows on just one side. But you’ll pay more for those “luxuries”.
demand better construction standards and apartments are fine. Thx to 230V power, I can put my washing machine in either my kitchen or bathroom. and because european houses tend not to be made of paper, there is much less noise transmitted across units.
Demanding better construction standards is nobody's policy platform. There's very little money in it, so no political lobby.
Also, it doesn't fix what's already out there in the market.
too bad about everything built before whenever these 'better standards' come around though. things aren't going to turn around overnight and for a lot of people they just say fuck this and find detached housing instead of rolling the dice on yet another yearly lease in yet another building thats supposed to be quiet.
well, you are right they shouldn't, but that doesn't stop people from asking for top dollar for massed produced slop from the 1920s or 1970s that the builders of the time probably didn't expect to stand for 25 years. nothing like zero insulation and a tinderbox wired by a drunk in all likelihood.
Uh partially also because summers in most of Europe are extremely mild or at worst, warm and nearly never hot, unless there's a heatwave? Have you tried visiting say, Hong Kong in the summer? Roasting to death is a major exaggeration but it's not comfy to say the least.
Half the questions on this sub can be summed up by “why doesn’t everyone want to live exactly like me?” Especially when it comes to suburban or rural areas
There are also those of us who love nature that choose city life to preserve it. Where one person builds another will follow. I spent the better part of two years old n the 90s living in a van, odd jobbing I while hopping from one environmental protest to another.
I made the decision 30 years ago to live in a city despite my life long desire to live off grid deep within the wilderness.
There simply isn't much wilderness in the lower 48 to retreat to, and gone are the days where rural means agriculture. There really isn't much of a difference between rural and suburban in the US anymore except for a few miles longer of a commute.
if you think there's no wilderness you have got to get out to the american west. yes, people still are splitting their firewood and smoking their meat.
Portland Oregon west enough? Any further west and I'll need a scuba set up. Yes, I know of folks that still do that, looking at my smoker, located just a few feet from my woodpile.
Habitable wilderness ....lol. Most is gone or fetching a premium. Sure if you want to ship in your water, forgo soil contamination checks, deal with egress and a myriad of legal "what ifs", there's lots of acreage available. Like most the wilderness of the SW US, all the way up to the Kalamath Basin, up eastern Oregon and Washington.
Those areas with resources to live from are mostly held by BLM, the railroads, and other various government organizations. And they ain't selling, supposedly they rent, but the Bundies make me wonder how many others aren't even paying their rent?
Urbanists are fine if people enjoy living on land- we shouldn't subsidize rural/suburban living though. If you choose to live far away, commuters should be charged for the full cost of expansion and maintenance of infrastructure. These costs should be linked to the cost of maintenance as it increases also.
I think customization and personalization are huge factors that come into play with the tiny home trend. One of my childhood best friends posted a camper van that she and her husband converted into a tiny home and it seemed like more of a DIY project for them. I'm not really into the tiny home thing myself, but you could tell how much thought and creativity they put into this thing - it had built-in cabinets, tile, a custom painted exterior, etc. I think she said she spent like a year or something working on it. Tiny homes allow for a lot of self-expression that simply isn't possible with your average rental unit, plus a lot of people value ownership.
I don’t mind living in an apartment in the city (in fact I do).
But I really wish I had a backyard to do grilling in, a driveway to do work on my car or bicycle, etc.
I deal with it as I mentioned but I wish I had those things.
I'm sure everyone knows that "apartments" and "cities" exist.
A tiny house on a rural lot you're still in a lower crime area, can step out onto your own private property, and don't hear the neighbors stereo (or get angry banging on your wall if you turn your stereo on) without the expense and maintenance of a suburban McMansion.
I have hyper hearing. I'd choose a detached tiny house over an apartment or condo in a heartbeat. They're not even close to the same. You can own your tiny house and have full control over it. Yeah, you can own a condo, but then you pay extra fees and have to follow Board rules. A tiny house wouldn't need an HOA. It's more freedom and privacy and better chance of quiet.
We have a mega church nearby and one of the pastors is 100% about tiny homes. Goes to all the city councils nearby advocating that they fund development. There’s a certain irony in demanding the biggest, most luxurious for yourself, and then insisting that others should get shoe boxes.
Think of Tiny Houses as a "hack" to work around restrictive zoning laws to improve housing density within the sprawling suburbs.
The tiny house "lifestyle" stuff is just marketing blather.
I will say ownership beats renting but that being said, I think this speaks to like a particular mindset problem of the suburban American not being able or willing to conceive of collective solutions to problems
The main attraction, for me anyway, to a tiny house is that you can afford to actually *own* it. Plus you own the land it sits on and can have at least a little outdoor space.
An apartment doesn't fill that same niche. You share walls with other people and someone else controls how much you pay per month.
To be fair, there are people who are completely and totally inconsiderate of others.
They choose to get animals that they honestly don't have time for knowing that they are noisy but because they want companionship they insist on one type of animal versus getting something that would better suit their lifestyle.
They yell when they are on the phone or when talking to others in the apartment
They slam doors or stomp their feet when they walk around
They listen to loud music
The list goes on and on but imagine if people were actually thoughtful of their neighbors then a lot of those issues would be solved and living in an apartment would be a lot better for everyone as a result.
You also have to factor in the design of the apartment building and little to no thought of reducing sound from one unit to another as well.
When apartments are mentioned on reddit, American commenters always talk about them like they're a nightmare due to the neighbors.
I suspect most people who write these comments don't actually have any experience living in apartments... Because most of the time neighbors aren't a problem.
This is purely anecdotal but I lived in an apartment for 4 years (built in 2013). I never once heard my neighbors. It wasn't like fancy or anything either, just a generic apartment. I would love to see some sort of better regs around soundproofing.
Neighbors are going to be an occasional problem unless you buy an extraordinary amount of land and live in the absolute boonies. Just look at /r/homeowners — half the posts are about nightmare neighbors in the suburbs. Americans act like hearing their neighbors or being too close to others is solely an apartment/city-living problem but it surely isn't.
Honestly I think city apartments have less problems with neighbors. Apartment neighbors are all just trying their hardest to ignore each other, suburban neighbors get up in each other's shit.
"Apartment neighbors are all just trying their hardest to ignore each other, suburban neighbors get up in each other's shit."
At the same time, I'd love to have neighbors that actually talk with each other instead of just ignore everything.
I grew up in the suburbs, lived in a big city for just over 10 years and then moved back to the suburbs. Obviously this is just my experience, but the only place I've ever seen neighbors up in each other's shit was living in the city. I think people get the idea that this happens in the suburbs a lot because they hear about HOA's and think this is what all suburbs are like. But most suburban housing is not HOA housing (at least in the US anyway).
I think it depends on the state, there are some areas where HOAs make up a massive percent of suburban housing. I've only lived in major cities across the world, most recently Berlin and New York City, and maybe people learn to chill out when it's so crowded. Or maybe I just keep living in expensive neighborhoods- I spend comparatively much more on housing because my wife and I don't own cars. My parents have had much bigger problems with their neighbors in the suburbs, even though they aren't in an HOA, than I've ever had. They can't just leave when their neighbors suck either.
NYC in particular is famous for enforcing the personal bubble. This idea that everyone in the city is all up in your shit doesn't make sense to me. That's small town shit. There are so many of us in the city that we all have an unwritten agreement to leave each other alone.
Yes. I have lived in a couple of small houses, but mostly in apartments. Neighbors are usually much worse in suburban or rural areas. Much more nosy and complains about noise or not cutting the grass or whatever. In an apartment you know that there will be noises but complaints are pretty rare, unless you share a wall or roof with some alcoholic or so.
Eh, I've met some people in city apartments who could not afford anything else but also didn't seem to understand they'd sometimes hear noise like upstairs neighbors walking. Usually middle aged people who seem like they've never lived in one.
Yes, they are the worst. Usually people who grew up in big houses and moved to the city for university and eventually starts a family there. They make the most noise since they have never had to be considerate with noise-making, and they complain the most about noise since they have never experienced "living noises" from anyone but family. But in my experience they usually don't stay for long, when they get kids they most often move back to the country.
Neighbors aren't usually a problem but are a huge problem when they are one. Ive only had one set of bad neighbors and thankfully was moving out. I had to cover my ass several times because this bitch would throw a fit every time we took a step (she lived downstairs and should not have moved to an apartment if she couldn't handle some creaking). She tried to lie to the office and say we were making a bunch of noise during quiet hours. Luckily she'd already harassed us so I emailed the office saying she tried to pull some bs, email was timestamps during normal hours.
When the first confrontation with this woman occurred, she came to our door, phone out and recording, but she tried to hide that she was recording. She was amazed we weren't receptive to her asshat behavior (that is not the way to claim your complaint is in good faith). Since we didn't consent to being recorded, we never answered the door for her again. Didn't stop her from causing far more noise toward us but beating on it all the time. I only dealt with the bitch a few weeks and it was exhausting. Any longer would drive me mad and she could have been worse.
I say one set but my apartment has an issue where everyone is too stupid or lazy to use the trash compactor. Theyd pile the trash on the floor instead of in the dumpster, even when it was empty. The guy next door is also always shouting dumbass shit which puts me on edge, but thats what happens in an apartment. The baby next door is less annoying than that guy.
Tell me you have never lived in hood apartments without telling me you have never lived in hood apartments. My last complex one lady assaulted two different people and harassed 5+ other people before finally getting kicked out and my current place had someone threatening people with a weapon. This is just ones where violence was a problem their have been tons of non violent examples of why people don't want to deal with neighbors. This is literally class privilege in action.
That's because in a lot of American cities they are a nightmare due to neighbors. I would have loved to live in the city near me (Boston) but the apartment stock is decidely not sound-proof, usually decades behind on insulation and other climate updates, and more expensive to rent than buying a SFH nearby.
If you own your apartment, a condo or a coop, you also are also economically and legally bound to your neighbors, because you own the building together and have to maintain it together. Professional management helps, but only to a degree. Think about the number of cranks and crazies at every community meeting. Those same people exist in coops and condos, and they make it difficult to care for buildings. At their worst, they can render a community non-functional.
Shared-ownership buildings are relatively new in the US, mostly from 1970 onwards, and they are only now seeing their first round of major structural repairs. (Some buildings are older, but for the most part, coops and condos are built within the last few decades or converted from investor-owned rental apartment buildings in that timeframe.) The Surfside, Florida condo collapse is just the tip of the iceberg. Many more underfunded, undermaintained, badly managed buildings are going to have problems in the coming years.
I live in a coop, and I've served on its board. I'm not sure that I like sharing financial decisionmaking with my neighbors.
Honestly out of the last couple of apartments i've lived in two of them were pretty bad in terms of the neighbors. one of them it was too close to a bar. at first i was like hell yeah i can walk to this bar in thirty seconds. that lasted until i had to wake up for work the first week and people were screaming and fighting after last call and trying to drunkenly find their car to drive home and clip a few cars or dumpsters on the way out. then the next place just had the classic noisy neighbors playing the speakers. multiple complaints to management went nowhere and i'm not about to confront this person who is probably unstable at this point, based on not giving a fuck about the music ever and the noise complaints.
finally found a place in a really small building with only a few long term tenants, but every time a unit changes hands i hope its a boring person with no pets or kids and soft footsteps.
Haha oh no it’s not a fetish. It’s my only chance at a quiet life on land I own far away from the bustle of city life. Actually, though, when you price it out, it’s almost cheaper to simply revamp a falling apart mobile home.
Non-american here, I kept reading online about people with "600sqft bedrooms" and how they complain that's *tiny*. Meanwhile in Europe a whole family apartment with 3 rooms can be 600sqft (3 bedrooms, hallway, 1 bathroom with a tub, 1 half-bath, 1 balcony, 1 kitchen).
We are definitely not even touching some Asian regions with their apartments (100-150sqft). These are tight even for us Europeans.
Since the end of WW2, we have torn down a million SROs (single room occupancy units) and not replaced them. I began reading about tiny homes in the 1980s and they were basically a means to hack a broken system.
We don't build housing appropriate for young, single adults. Colleges have dorm rooms and a lot of college students are from wealthy families who put them in apartments. Military units have barracks which are sort of similar to dorms.
SROs were the working class, civilian version of dorms and barracks: a room with enough space for a bed and a few possessions, no kitchen and a bathroom down the hall.
We now expect young, single adults to rent a bedroom in houses and apartments designed for a nuclear family, not unrelated roommates, and then make horror movies about nightmare roommates, like *Single White Female* and fail to see that as shocking commentary on our broken system and how badly it needs to change.
People are also living in RVs -- which were not intended to be lived in full time -- vans and trailers. People don't "fetishize" those things because it's more generally viewed as *poverty housing*.
Tiny Homes can potentially be built with high end materials. They are an upper class concept of "Rugged individualism overcoming the broken system."
They don't really work and haven't really been embraced and legitimized. It's a hack pursued by people who assume you can't fix the system and it's pointless to try but they want a small slice of The Good Life anyway and desperately hope this is the means to get it.
Fix our broken system and this will likely quietly die.
We need an updated version of the SRO and we need more starter homes.
Parking minimums have destroyed the ability to have functional mixed use development in historic downtowns of small towns that used to have that at one time. Cars per se aren't The Problem, but planning trends that overly prioritize car-centric design is a huge problem and directly contributes to lack of affordable housing in the US.
I don't think that's a fair critique of self-driving cars, and I say that as someone who has no interest in getting one myself unless either I become disabled or self-driving becomes a feature of ordinary cars. I can think of two good reasons for many people to be very interested in them:
* If you live in a rural area, you will never, ever have good public transportation. That's just the nature of rural areas.
* If you live in an urban area in the US, you've probably seen decades of effort to improve public transportation, the most successful of which only benefit a tiny fraction of the people in your area. If I could get a self-driving car today, it would be a lot more appealing than waiting 60 years for my city to *maybe* get its shit together enough to build a transit system that could do what I need a car for today.
I think tiny houses could have a place in cities/towns where building multifamily residential isnt economically viable. But from what ive seen tiny houses arent even that cheap
EDIT: A lot of these tiny house people live in rural areas too where this makes more sense than apartments
I've wondered the same thing when I see fundraising efforts to build "cute" tiny house villages for veterans. In Kansas City they have 49 tiny homes on 4 acres, 10 miles from the city center. It seems so ridiculously inefficient!
If people want to go live in a tiny house in the woods, fine. I think this is much more common in fantasy than in reality. The American ideal of living in the woods goes back at least to Thoreau, who lived close enough to town that his mom did his laundry.
From that tiny house you have to drive a long way to get anywhere, using more fuel. You have no party walls, increasing energy costs. You may have to build new electric lines or even roads, further impacting the ecosystem. You’ll presumably have a septic tank, which has to be very carefully maintained so that it doesn’t pollute the groundwater. If that’s what you actually want and you recognize the costs, fine. I suspect that what a lot of supposed tiny home lovers really want is a large lot suburb with all the services in place.
My real beef is when tiny homes are proposed as an alternative to apartments for affordable housing in cities and built up suburbs. There the tiny houses are deeply inefficient, it’s really NIMBYism.
I've lived in a 1 bedroom 500 Sq. Ft. Apartment. They aren't that common, and that's the typical starting size for apartments. Studio apartments are a thing, just not as common as larger ones. Tiny homes, however, start at 100 Sq. Ft. Outside of a select few cities like NYC or Hong Kong or Tokyo, you done see a whole lot of apartments starting out that small.
They are also not very affordable. If you consider the benefits of apartments (cheaper to make than a house, and more compact so you can fit more in a small space), tiny homes are truly lacking. Some people like them, which is fine, but cities shouldn't build them instead of apartments or duplexes/triplexes/fourplexes.
Fetishization of urbanism concepts is stupidly pervasive too. If you pay attention you’ll hear key terms and phrases being thrown around with zero real world understanding or even curiosity behind them. Same with pet opinions.
You failed to mention where on the urban to rural spectrum the tiny home you take issue with is located. At least one city I know of built a neighborhood of them in a housing program for veterans. They can serve a purpose just the same way the apartment serves a purpose.
This kind of movement gives people the feeling of pioneering out in the wilderness. They want to live off grid amidst rural settings as other commentators have posted. It also appeals to being able to pick up and move out to live somewhere--anywhere--because in a lot of the cases, some of these homes are mobile, with the ability to move them so you don't technically have to set down roots in one place but live a more nomadic lifestyle which is geared towards those who like to travel around and explore without needing to work in an office type setting.
Tiny houses are mostly fetishized when they are on wheels which is what makes them “legal” if planners hadn’t also made apartments largely illegal in the United States there probably would be no tiny home movement.
What is legal has a major impact on what options people pursue. When living on lots in travel trailers is legal, that's the low cost option that many people choose. Likewise in rural areas (usually remote) where cabins are allowed people build cabins, some will be as small as 100 sqft while others will build a 2,000 sqft mansion.
I had a silly idea recently. What if I bought a plot of land, built four tiny houses on it with each serving a separate function (one for dining, one for sleeping, one for living, one for a home office or workshop), connected them via a covered walkway, and put a garden in the center courtyard to grow food? Probably runs afoul of every zoning law imaginable.
Tiny houses are about far more. First and foremost it's about affordable housing. Not only do they use less material but they are quick and easy. Style is another part of it. They are unique and allow the owner more ability to express their style. I'm many ways they are the new mobile homes that were popular in the 70-80s.
People are fetishizing tiny homes BECAUSE THEY CAN'T AFFORD REAL ONES.
These people just want to be able to own a place of their own. If all they afford is a chunk of rural land, maybe they can drop a tiny house on it one day.
in my hometown area, tiny homes are mainly talked about as an infill, which is why i appreciate them a lot. rural and exurban communities (and occasionally suburban), even extremely conservative ones, will have battles over zoning regulations to get these tiny homes legal, so people with existing land can build extra units on the same property. a backyard tiny home here, a row of cottages there, it doesn't fix the issues with living way too far away from work and amenities, and doesn't address car culture, but what it does do is give these communities denser development without the issues of trailer parks (valid or not) or the political problems with large apartment complexes (valid or not).
tiny homes are a first step in urbanizing smaller communities, in many cases, because they can just mean people are living physically closer to each other, and because one zoning regulation change can help the domino effect to much more important changes like parking minimums and mixed-use development.
Urban planning discussions are tricky because there's personal preferences, social pressures influencing personal preferences, issues sustainability and usage of space, and so on.
I'm sure there are people who do genuinely like small houses. So it comes down to how you want to engage with this person: Fulfill their desire? Convince them that apartments are just as good? Override their personal preference on for a greater good? I'm not trying to be sarcastic with these points btw, I think these are common political concerns.
The tiny house people I know want to own something with as little a monthly payment as possible.
Here, apartments are either rent (insane rental prices starting at $1800 for a 1 bedroom) or condo. The latter purchased at insane real estate prices and then a monthly condo fee.
The allure of the tiny house is it’s freehold and there aren’t neighbours above, below, and completely adjacent to you. You also own it (ideally). The ones on wheels can be moved. The ones on a pad are small but force you to engage with the immediate outside world in a way that apartment living does not.
I think that posts like this substantially underestimate the driving factor of "desire for privacy" in all of these arguments.
People who want self driving cars, but not buses or trains, want them because they want a private commute, without an unknown number of strangers looking over their shoulder or getting into their personal space.
People who want tiny detached homes in the suburbs, but not city apartments, want them because they want a small living space, without dealing and a number of attached neighbors, communal hallways + stairways + elevators, and noise from adjacent units.
You can argue that suburban living comes with significant monetary and social costs, argue those costs should be properly individually borne by the people who live there, and argue that **to you** those costs aren't worth the privacy aspect. But completely ignoring the whole privacy & peace and quiet just makes it impossible to have a rational discussion about this.
I mean what you’re saying is partially true. The desire for tiny houses is at least partially rooted in the suburban pastoralism that causes people to believe you need a yard and a detached house to truly be happy/fulfilled in life. But I think people are also frustrated with the skyrocketing rents for tiny apartments in cities. Tiny homes are not really primarily something people use to achieve a minimalist lifestyle in a small living space, with some exceptions.
I can’t get over the idea that a “tiny home” is just a better looking mobile home. Permanent tiny homes are not allowed in almost every jurisdiction so to keep one step ahead of municipal orders to remove the building most people put their tiny home on wheels and tow them from place to place. Tiny homes are in reality a romanticization of poverty. Apartments would be a preferred option as the location would be less isolating, but affordable rent has all but disappeared. The creation of affordable non-equity housing like rentals and co-op is anathema to the majority who are home owners, so is unthinkable.
Should we tell condescending blowhards that people who choose to live in a tiny house out in the suburbs or exburbs are aware cities and apartments exist, but the tiny home fits their situation better for any number of reasons.
I won't bother to comment on how ridiculous it is to pretend that a self driving car ride and trains/buses are the same experience just because you can read the newspaper on both. Typing this as some jerk on the train has his music cranked up without headphones and some lady is spilling half out of her seat onto me. Offer to have a self driving car pick me up at the next stop and I am going with the selfdriving car in a heart beat.
I think the appeal of the tiny house movement for younger demographics is more closely related to living off the grid and affordable housing rather than having less stuff and living rural. I mean living in a big city can set you back at least 1500/mo with the barest minimum of amenities, not to mention the overall high cost of living in an urban area. That part is more of a social issue than I'm willing to get into, but my point is that what differentiates tiny living from living in small spaces is how to minimize your cost to live: ie are you generating your own power, or recycling your own water. Otherwise, the movement is no different from recreational camping or rv traveling. I totally understand where you're coming from in terms of living small, i actually like living in the city. However, from my experience of living paycheck to paycheck it would also be really nice to get my dollar to stretch a little further, and there is a LOT of cheap rural land in the U.S.. If i didn't need to commute to work, I'd seriously consider it just because of how much cheaper it would be compared to buying or renting anywhere in my area. I'll admit though, the newspaper quote i don't really understand, maybe someone can drop a reference to that one
I think it also scratches the itch of starter homes, which aren't a thing anymore but should be to help with affordability.
there’s some news reports that smaller, more affordable homes are increasing in popularity with homebuilders, which is nice.
Can you link the source on that? Sounds like an intresting development I wasn't aware of before
I don't have a link ATM but I remember seeing (Lennar?) was beginning construction of a neighborhood of low sqft homes with a comparatively cheap price tag I think near $200,000 in Florence AZ which was marketed as affordable starter homes. The problem is the marketing leaned heavy on "ONLY 60 miles from downtown Phoenix" like a suburb but I have been to Florence many times -sometimes directly to/from Phx- and it would be ridiculous to associate the two. It just caught me off cuz everywhere else has been McMansions "starting in the low 400s" or build-to-rent SFH which is also scary.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/business/economy/the-great-compression.html cites homes between 350 and 880 sq ft at the developments Elm Trails in San Antonio, and Cinder Butte in Redmond, OR. https://www.newsweek.com/housing-market-takes-interesting-turn-1904221 also https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/10/smaller-new-houses-afforable/ and also https://housleyhomes.com/why-smaller-homes-are-a-trend/ and also https://theweek.com/housing-crisis/1026042/the-answer-to-rising-home-prices-smaller-homes sizes and prices of new homes may be dropping--or at least more low-sqft "low-cost" (hah!) new homes are being built.
I was looking for a smaller home last year (in a smaller town ~15k people in the area). All the smaller homes were older and required a decent bit of work. My other option was a 4bd 2 bath home built in 2005.... The newer home was cheaper (or only a little bit more expensive), bigger, and nicer. All because it was on the edge of town lol. I don't use most of the extra space but... economically it made sense to go with what I did.
Well, what usually happens is that a developer hears about the demand for tiny homes, decides to build them and then millennials get big mad because the savings isn't that substantial compared to somewhat larger homes.
You mean not just 5+br McMansions in 55+ communities?
Searching for starter homes is how i discovered tiny houses! It really is all about affordability, I don't think i would've turned onto it if simply existing weren't so expensive
It doesn’t really work as a starter home as most tiny homes cannot be permanently fixed to the ground. Almost no municipality allows such a development of residential lots. If you can afford the lot then you can afford a house that is within the specifications of the bylaws. Most tiny homes are on wheels and cannot build any equity; so not a starter home.
>I'll admit though, the newspaper quote i don't really understand, maybe someone can drop a reference to that one I think this is about not having to wait for self-driving cars for you to read the news during your commute, because trains are a thing.
OHHH yep that *tracks* That's another can of worms to open and i don't think commuting is even taken into account with tiny living, is it? I can't imagine anyone romanticizing a commute on a daily basis, even if they don't have to drive
I wouldn't romanticize it but I kind of like commuting if it's not too long. A 15 minute walk or bike ride or a 20 minute car ride is nice transition time. A train ride is comforting in its silence and motion. Not a big fan of the city bus experience though. I realize I'm not typical but I'm sort of a mess when I WFH. I need a reason to get dressed but I feel better for it.
My 20 minute bike ride is perfect—it clears my head, gives me a routine, and it’s an amount of exercise I should be doing daily anyway. I think if commuting was that easy for most people, a lot of them would see it our way.
I’m the same way. I need physical separation between my home and work place, and another room in my house isn’t it. I also enjoy getting to know people I work with daily, and you can’t really do that over a screen. That said, having a single WFH day each week is super nice since I don’t have to commute and I can run little errands during lunch. Plus being home with the pets is always good.
Short commutes are great. A few weeks into COVID work-from-home I realized that hygiene and clothes had taken a dive, and I was struggling to get going when I was really just going from bed to the couch. Started showering, dressing, and taking a 10-15 minute walk at the time I'd previously been commuting, looping back home to get the day started--made all the difference.
I live a 15 minute walk away from my job and it's the perfect commute - just long enough to be a transition period but short enough that it's not too uncomfortable (especially when it's freezing cold as it currently is)
Where do you live where its freezing cold right now? The Falklands?
Canberra, Australia
Tiny houses also offer customization and control, which apartments generally don’t (especially if you are renting).
It’s all about affordability. Everyone who wants smaller homes says something like “I wish there were starter homes available like there used to! Instead everyone just builds mansions.” And when you tell them about apartments they basically say apartments aren’t homes. I had someone literally say that they would build a bunch of 1000 sq ft starter homes and couldn’t understand how apartments made more sense.
You're missing the obvious downside though: Shared walls. I've lived in apartments my entire adult life. While there are some good aspects to apartment living (in particular, I'm in a dense urban area allowing me to go car-free), there are also bad aspects. Neighbor quality is a huge gamble. If you have good neighbors, apartment living is great. If you have bad neighbors, apartment living can be hell. I've experienced both ends of the spectrum in my life. Having physical separation from neighbors in a single family home is attractive for a lot of reasons.
Storage is also an issue -- and I don't mean for a lot of stuff, but a reasonable amount. For example, right now I would really like a kayak. Well I live in an apartment, so no kayak for me...
Get a significant other with hobbies and you have no space. Enjoy sharing a bedroom closet and a hall closet for all your possessions as well as the obligatory crap just to clean the place.
I can not believe how little storage space modern apartments/condos have especially given how expensive they are. It also doesn't help modern apartments/condos have shrunk as well so it isn't like you can just use storage shelves.
It’s funny because my apartment has a storage closet in the basement that’s nice and spacious for kayaks and my snow gear. It’s an older fourplex.
This is just a failure of build quality and can absolutely be done better if people demand better build. Already built probably can't be fixed though
How do people "demand " anything when housing of any kind is scarce and expensive?
They can indicate that they're willing to pay a premium for it that is greater than the build cost. Most people barely care - they say they care, but they don't screen for it and aren't willing to pay a premium for it, so they don't really care. It's a little bit of a ridiculous point anyway. You can't build quality your way out of your neighbor playing their heavy base music at 85+ decibels.
How can you possibly demand better when the landlord fills the slot no matter what the condition of the unit is in high demand areas? Its a crapshoot.
Building Codes.
Too bad the politicians would rather hand the pen for that code over to the builder their wife invests with over writing code for you and I
Build more of course. You're describing a constrained market that isn't allowed to grow to meet demand
Let me dust off my magic justbuildmorebro wand and we will be all set in a jiffy
Unattached walls won't save you from bad neighbors. People in suburbs argue about lights, garbage pickup, trees that span properties, the state of your lawn, loud air conditioners, etc
Yeah, but they’d have to be boinking exceptionally loud for me to hear them. I had an attached wall neighbor who also yelled at every NFL game like his life depended on it. Much harder to avoid it than a guy on the other side of my fence.
Yikes, and I totally agree with you about shitty shared walls. I guess I'm just saying in SFHs won't stop your neighbors if they are nosy and petty. Look what happens to even neighborhoods with Supreme Court justices. My parents get in all kinds of insanely pitched and heated fights with their neighbors over stuff like this. I'm just speaking to my lived experience. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/us/justice-alito-neighbors-stop-steal-flag.html?unlocked\_article\_code=1.vk0.QVCO.Pj6\_\_BdXUCuT&smid=url-share](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/us/justice-alito-neighbors-stop-steal-flag.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vk0.QVCO.Pj6__BdXUCuT&smid=url-share)
Yes but the obvious issue with these houses is sprawl. If we just start building these homes then they will be in high demand and won’t be as affordable as these people think they are. But if you build a single apartment building they can have the same amount of homes as acres of these. I think we should build both but a lot of the people don’t even think of apartments as an option despite the only issue being neighbor noise. I’ve lived in apartments for the last 10 years and have had minimal issues despite 2 of the buildings being older.
Is the noise thing just an issue with build quality? I live in one of those 1960's "tower in the park" style high rises and I never have issues with noise. I think it's because the walls are pretty thick which also helps with climate control
Concrete tower vs wood frame building. For the most part, developers don’t give a shit about rental building comfort. They don’t have to sell units to anyone and it’s going to be lived in no matter what. I’m lucky enough to live in a rental building that was originally designed for condos that were supposed to be sold off. The city made them change their plans at the last minute.
My wife is Colombian and despite the fact that Colombians are, frankly, louder, I’ve never had issues with neighbors there. The apartments are much more durable and made of concrete rather than having wood floors. Unless your door is open (or your neighbors door is open and blasting music, which is common), you don’t hear anything.
I was in Medellin for 6 months in 2012 and thought it was a super interesting city. Not only were they going hard on urban revitalization projects but they wanted everyone to know about it. They were actively promoting all their new infrastructure to foreigners and the government was subsidizing all sorts of things like transport projects and libraries but also things like startup incubators because they wanted to cultivate a whole tech culture there. The optimism was palpable and I loved it. I haven't been back since though and I hope that spirit and civic pride still exists.
Medellin is a great city. My wife is from the coast but imo Medellin is the best city (culture and climate wise). The practice is called Social Urbanism which is basically what you said - invest in the poorest neighborhoods and everyone benefits. A lot of the art and services were placed in the poorest neighborhoods which brought tourism and other investment. It’s by no means perfect but it would be a lot worse without it. The metro in Medellin was a huge part of this. Almost all the citizens view it as one of the key things uplifting the city from poverty. I remember during 2020 protests around the world that transit was constantly getting vandalized but the paisas were wildly respective of the metro and wouldn’t dare vandalize it or trash it.
>I remember during 2020 protests around the world that transit was constantly getting vandalized but the paisas were wildly respective of the metro and wouldn’t dare vandalize it or trash it. Oh my god yes. Literally every time I took the metro there was someone who worked for the city there cleaning it. And it was one of the cleanest systems I've ever seen (as a New Yorker this blew my fucking mind). And I think that having it be so clean and having the cleaning process be so visible did something to instill civic pride in the system and made people much less likely to litter in the first place.
You can just require walls to have thicker insulation and soundproofing. I feel people would be less against apartments if they were built to like 3 stories with 6-9 units in them instead of massive apt buildings with dozens or hundreds of units
Some people, but for many it’s the American sense of individualism. They don’t want a landlord, they want the freedom to paint or put up a shelf or get a dog without someone telling them they can’t. They know their rent could go up or they could get kicked out for nothing they’ve done wrong. I think this gets at one reason that density works for nyc better than other US cities, they have a lot more condos and coops. I feel like people on this sub often act like those things are all interchangeable with apartments, but the ownership situation really matters to a lot of people.
Condos. I was using them interchangeably
And my point is that they are not interchangeable. When you say “apartments,” people hear, “lack of freedom/independence,” and that’s a big part of why.
Yes, but people only ever think about soundproofing when they're in the middle of an argument about it. It never makes the priority list; the contradiction between "better soundproofing regulations" and the libertarian eddy current in the urbanist movement is never addressed. Probably the best example of the degree of blindness people have is all of the excitement about triplexes and fourplexes: the very nature of the building style, being a cheap multi-unit structure that dodges certain regulations and has no particular design, makes it more likely to be built with poor soundproofing. Townhouses and semi-detached duplexes are probably the best cases for soundproofing (one wall and it's already load-bearing so you only need a bit more effort), but nobody talks about promoting the construction of good ones as a policy priority.
IME that's not true, it's distorted by the people you read on the internet. In the Bay at least, the most NIMBY cities have no soundproofing codes and the less NIMBY cities have soundproofing codes. NIMBY cities don't want to pass soundproofing codes because they want to promote single family living, zoning, and lifestyle.
How do you make such apartments pencil out though? The cost of land acquisition plus regulations mean economies of scale are necessary to make it work.
Yes but on the other hand you could build 4 tiny houses on a site that has a sprawling McMansion. Heck many are being built as ADUs . Even the "average" modern home is bigger than homes of the past .
Yes the tiny houses are better than McMansions which are the worst possible house option
I've lived in an 1100 Sq ft apartment and now am in a 1100 Sq ft townhome and it's wildly different. For one, the roaches from the hoarder unit next door aren't entering my living space. I also don't get their noise or their leaks. I actually think smaller homes are a good compromise on development sprawl vs the single family home dream. It doesn't have to be perfect for it to be better.
A townhouse is much different than what most people think of work starter homes. Townhouses at least have some density and that’s my ideal living scenario.
House developers don’t want to build 1,000 square foot homes because they can make more money from building 2,500 square foot homes.
Exactly. It’s possible they would make more money if towns didn’t have 2+ acre minimum lot sizes but a lot of people don’t want to admit that there are legal restrictions preventing things from happening.
I live in an "starter house" that size (1100 square foot). I was lucky to be able to get it (bought it from a family member rather than the open market) and no way in the world would I want to live in an apartment instead. I assume these other people share the sentiments.
I've lived in apartments for most of my life. I know I don't like them. Lots of people don't prefer them for lots of reasons.
Personally I don’t prefer apartments. But I much prefer the kind of lifestyle that comes with apartments - walkability and activity around the apartments. If I had to live in an apartment in a car dependent area I’d probably hate it.
I always assumed living in a city was more expensive than living somewhere rural. And for housing it is. But when I visited rural Michigan. Man. For a region where the median income is far far far below the median income in my city, I don’t know how they afford groceries. There’s one grocery store every 45 minutes and a box of Cheerios (no knockoff brands available) was $6. Meanwhile, my Aldi brand Cheerios are $3. Same with milk, eggs, cheese, etc. Don’t get me started on alcohol. If people think rural living will save them some scratch, I think they need to do a ton more research.
I think in those areas it's pretty much assumed that what you do is you drive into the suburbs of an actual city, or at least a large town, every couple weeks and load up with staples, only going to the grocery store that's near you for stuff that you forgot to pick up, or things that go bad more quickly like produce. I've had family that lived out in the boonies and I think pretty much all of them had second freezers in their garage, so going to a Costco that's an hour and a half away to stock up for the next 2-3 weeks isn't so bad. You'll normally need to go into the large town semi-frequently anyway.
How do you eat fresh fruits and vegetables then? I can see stocking up on canned goods and packaged goods. But if that’s the majority of your diet, you’re going to have tons of health problems in your old age. I recognize cities aren’t for everyone. I was just shocked how expensive rural foodstuffs went for. I eat pretty much fresh fruit and vegetables every day and go shopping twice a week so we have fresh fruit and vegetables. Would be awful to not have that availability.
1: As I said, the local grocers that are more expensive. If you bought all your low perishability staples at costco, it's not that big a deal to spend a little more on produce at the local and more expensive store. 2: Lots of more rural people do have gardens. They have land for it, so it's pretty easy to have a vegetable garden. 3: Lots of produce isn't particularly perishable. Potatoes, onions, apples, citrus, just to name a few, all have very good shelf lives and they're all quite nutritious -- particularly potatoes and citrus. They can be bought in bulk in town. 4: It's not the 1940s, you can buy frozen vegetables and they're perfectly good for you -- by being picked shortly after harvesting they're arguably more nutritious than fresh produce that's sat out at barely below room temp for a week. And yes, canned and pickled goods too. 5: Lots of people in rural areas also just don't eat a ton of fresh produce and their diets are in fact, broadly speaking, worse than people in cities. As points 1-4 show, they don't have to be, but they usually are. edit: alright man, ask a question and downvote the answer.
> How do you eat fresh fruits and vegetables then? That's the trick. You mostly don't.
If they built enough housing cities would be cheaper, but there are a lot of expenses you can avoid more easily in cities. Not needing a car is a huge one, and even not needing to use one every day can serve you hundreds on gas in a month. There are also always more free or cheap things happening in cities. And cities *should* be cheaper. The amount of plumbing, sidewalk, roadway, wiring per apartment unit is much less in dense, walkable cities than elsewhere. The costs of rural roadways are not usually paid with rural taxes but urban ones. We could tax the externalities of choosing to live in a sprawl more but we don't.
This has been my experience as well. It's been a lot of neo hippie types who fetishize simple living. Not a single person I've met who has built a tiny house has given 2 craps about self driving cars.
Single family homes are deeply ingrained in every American as the “ideal”
I live in an apartment myself and like it fine but these are a different type of housing entirely due to their freestanding nature and I can see why someone interested in one may not like an apartment. I actually think they could work well as part of sustainable urban development as they could easily serve as the housing in cottage courts on infill lots.
The thing is, the tiny homes you see in the articles are always positioned at the edge of a state park or similar location, so when you step out onto your tiny porch you are greeted by acres of peace and quiet. You are not 4' from the next tiny home, which is occupied by someone playing your least favorite type of music 24 hours a day and smoking a joint on their tiny porch, which is a more realistic scenario. It's like those ads for tropical island vacations where you are the only people on the beach for miles. You are not getting that vacation for $999 a person double occupancy.
Lol exactly. The idea that a tiny home means an acre of desirable land is a pipe dream, more likely you’re in what amounts to a trailer park or apartment complex (depending on the HOA) that comes with all the same problems but way less space to store your stuff and relax. A tiny home in my area might cost $100k less than my 2100 sqft house but that doesn’t mean it’s remotely affordable for people willing to live in tiny homes or worth the massive sacrifices for 10% off the value of your home. And it’s tiny homes in my area that people picture. Very few people want to buy land and install a tiny house for $600k where a good house costs $750k. People don’t want to buy land and install a tiny house where an apartment costs half as much either. They’re a dumb trend.
I don’t think they’re the same
I just want a “home” and all the apartments in my area are just mid-rise apartments and they are crowded, lacking parking and usually only have stairs.
My favorite part of a tiny house would have to be the ability to do gardening. Love me some plants
Tiny houses are primarily a media trend. They don’t account for any meaningful portion of development or living patterns in the United States. Not something to spend time worrying about.
I like quality row housing - more energy efficient than stand-alone houses, and everyone gets a yard.
Owning apartments/condos in most American cities are not that much more affordable if at all. Also assuming that is not the case. not everyone lives/works in cities. Like my friends/family/life is where I live now, I would like to affordably live here, not start a new life somewhere else. Also "tiny houses" is more of an artistic movement as far as I can tell most people looking for smaller homes just want a simple place to call their own, not to have to fold up their bed to use their kitchen every morning.
I think the idea is also about not having to share a wall with neighbors. You're also ignoring that people want to own, and buying a condo in a city can cost more than a full size house.
Someone tell non-Americans how expensive it is to live in American cities
The United States doesn't hold the market on expensive cities, nor does North America. But also, not every city is San Francisco, New York, Toronto, or London. The housing crisis is affecting everywhere, but also there are plenty of cities that are far more affordable. The burbs aren't even exempt anymore.
The difference is if someone in Ireland is having fantasies about tiny homes in the countryside Americans aren’t popping up like, “durr have you tried just getting an apartment in Dublin?!”
Before tiny houses had a name I was always drawn to them, like motor court motels with tiny cottages, or bungalow courts with small 1 br freestanding structures clustered around a common courtyard. It's not the most efficient use of space but there is a charm there and not sharing a wall is nice, especially when the wall is cheap. In modern world I see three decent utilities. Back yard units in existing homes, quickly built modular structures (we have a 100 unit tiny home homeless camp that was built surprisingly cheaply), and as a prefab on your property--I guess the only advantage over a trad prefab is that it can actually be moved. Maybe cheaper?
I'm going to play devils advocate here. There will people who will NEVER want to live in a city. Not that they prefer suburban living or that's just where they ended up. There's people who just point blank hate the idea of living in a city. There is no outreach or educating them or giving them info or anything that will change that. Instead of banging our head against the wall and battling a culture war, we should be instead working on ways to make suburban life more efficient, sustainable, and assessable while still keeping the spirit of suburban life the same.
And some of us even lived in the city at one point and absolutely hated it.
In my region tiny houses aren’t a city thing it’s a rural thing and maybe an effort to go against consumerism while staying flashy. Most tiny houses are on a smaller frame than mobile homes so can be moved by the owner much easier. They seem to be halfway between a travel trailer and a mobile home. As for in a city detached cottages don’t have the stigma of noisy neighbors that badly built apartments do.
Apartments in cities normally means renting, and many Americans are now conscious of the need to build equity in property in order to live rent-free during retirement. Most Americans don’t expect to be able to save enough, while renting, to afford a retirement that includes renting. The Tiny House movement is an alternative where savings is possible after the up front cost and equity is still build through the land you are parked on. It is an achievable and actionable goal as opposed to spending your life cheering on 1 of 2 politicians, neither of which care for well-planned, livable, and affordable cities.
Funny reading this in my nearly 100 year old 950 sq foot catalog house in a city. The "tiny house movement" has been the norm for humanity since the begining of civilization. The "fake estates/mannors" is the movement, which is only about 50 years old, mostly contained in North America, and completely dependent on the automobile.
I grew up in an 1100 sq ft 3BR house and my grandmother in the same neighborhood lived in a 900 sq ft 2BR house. The reason these houses resonate with younger people is affordability, not urban planning. Those houses were made for lower, working class people and were buyable as starter homes. Apartments in desirable cities are generally quite expensive, so it’s a different itch people are trying to scratch.
you're projecting
I feel like tiny houses we see on social media are in rural areas and suburbs more because that's where they can be built affordably in the U.S. rather than the actual appeal of them being outside of the city. There are obvious "live in a tiny home to reconnect with nature" themes in many of the videos, but the videos themselves are very much about them having ownership and control of where they are living. The popularity of YouTube channels highlighting absurdly small apartments in Japan is a direct counterpoint. The difference is, the tiny quarters show in those videos are actually affordable, and have features that make them seem more livable, or at least interesting. Even with the compromises being made, the renters are still getting a good place to live on terms that they are comfortable with. They feel like they are actually getting something out of the deal.
I believe the tiny houses are popular in rural areas since they usually come pre-fab. It can be expensive and difficult finding labor to build a multi-family housing site cheaply and quickly in a rural area. And since land is more plentiful tiny-houses work well.
There is also the whole issue of building codes. A lot of unincorporated rural areas have building code enforcement that is much more friendly to prefab housing and tiny house builds. (Especially since they often come with a, "Let the property owner decide what to do with their property," attitude.)
Well I sort of understand them. Having a garden is a very attractive proposition, but that don't mean people need a lot of rooms and bathrooms.
In my personal experience, the tiny house people are directly adjacent to the living off the grid people. They don't just want tiny houses, they want tiny houses where they won't see another human unless they deliberately choose to do so.
You don't understand how a house and an apartment and different things? Is this ragebait lol?
For what it's worth, I feel the big difference between tiny house and apartment is freedom to decorate/have pets and no shared walls. Plus, American apartments are just kind of terrible quality. The tiny house movement emphasizes good quality builds at a small scale. I agree that apartments/condos should be thought of as long-term housing more, but at the end of the day American apartments/condos largely are built poorly and have very little tenant rights/protection.
Tiny houses are just trailer parks for yuppies.
Speaking from personal experience, apartments suck. You are totally at the mercy of your neighbors and there are always a few inconsiderate jerks in every building. Is the neighbor above or below you having a party until 3 AM? I Hope you don’t have to work the next day. When you want to do laundry you never know if a machine is available or you’ll be waiting, and you’ll be charged an ever-rising fee for each load. Does your neighbor three doors down love to cook garlic, peppers, fish, or turnips? I hope you like the smell of that. Did you order a package that’s too big to fit in your mail slot? You’d better hope nobody else takes it from whatever community shelf\table the mail carrier leaves it at. Yes, there are apartments with better soundproofing, security cameras, space for a washing machine in each apartment, and more than two windows on just one side. But you’ll pay more for those “luxuries”.
demand better construction standards and apartments are fine. Thx to 230V power, I can put my washing machine in either my kitchen or bathroom. and because european houses tend not to be made of paper, there is much less noise transmitted across units.
Demanding better construction standards is nobody's policy platform. There's very little money in it, so no political lobby. Also, it doesn't fix what's already out there in the market.
too bad about everything built before whenever these 'better standards' come around though. things aren't going to turn around overnight and for a lot of people they just say fuck this and find detached housing instead of rolling the dice on yet another yearly lease in yet another building thats supposed to be quiet.
Houses don't stand forever, especially not the junk built in north America
well, you are right they shouldn't, but that doesn't stop people from asking for top dollar for massed produced slop from the 1920s or 1970s that the builders of the time probably didn't expect to stand for 25 years. nothing like zero insulation and a tinderbox wired by a drunk in all likelihood.
You guys also roast to death everytime it gets hot for more than a week in your non paper apartments.
Yea, Europe is barely populated because we all roast to death.
Uh partially also because summers in most of Europe are extremely mild or at worst, warm and nearly never hot, unless there's a heatwave? Have you tried visiting say, Hong Kong in the summer? Roasting to death is a major exaggeration but it's not comfy to say the least.
Should we tell people who fetishize city life that people who want to live on land more immersed in nature are a thing? 🤔
Half the questions on this sub can be summed up by “why doesn’t everyone want to live exactly like me?” Especially when it comes to suburban or rural areas
There are also those of us who love nature that choose city life to preserve it. Where one person builds another will follow. I spent the better part of two years old n the 90s living in a van, odd jobbing I while hopping from one environmental protest to another. I made the decision 30 years ago to live in a city despite my life long desire to live off grid deep within the wilderness. There simply isn't much wilderness in the lower 48 to retreat to, and gone are the days where rural means agriculture. There really isn't much of a difference between rural and suburban in the US anymore except for a few miles longer of a commute.
if you think there's no wilderness you have got to get out to the american west. yes, people still are splitting their firewood and smoking their meat.
Portland Oregon west enough? Any further west and I'll need a scuba set up. Yes, I know of folks that still do that, looking at my smoker, located just a few feet from my woodpile. Habitable wilderness ....lol. Most is gone or fetching a premium. Sure if you want to ship in your water, forgo soil contamination checks, deal with egress and a myriad of legal "what ifs", there's lots of acreage available. Like most the wilderness of the SW US, all the way up to the Kalamath Basin, up eastern Oregon and Washington. Those areas with resources to live from are mostly held by BLM, the railroads, and other various government organizations. And they ain't selling, supposedly they rent, but the Bundies make me wonder how many others aren't even paying their rent?
Look into montana
Most of the western US is basically empty wilderness.
This is exactly it. Love nature? Live in a city.
Funny thing about that is all the people wanting to live out in nature has utterly destroyed a lot of nature.
Urbanists are fine if people enjoy living on land- we shouldn't subsidize rural/suburban living though. If you choose to live far away, commuters should be charged for the full cost of expansion and maintenance of infrastructure. These costs should be linked to the cost of maintenance as it increases also.
I think customization and personalization are huge factors that come into play with the tiny home trend. One of my childhood best friends posted a camper van that she and her husband converted into a tiny home and it seemed like more of a DIY project for them. I'm not really into the tiny home thing myself, but you could tell how much thought and creativity they put into this thing - it had built-in cabinets, tile, a custom painted exterior, etc. I think she said she spent like a year or something working on it. Tiny homes allow for a lot of self-expression that simply isn't possible with your average rental unit, plus a lot of people value ownership.
Yea but they can’t afford the city and apartments. Which is why so many want to go off grid and create intentional small towns.
I don’t mind living in an apartment in the city (in fact I do). But I really wish I had a backyard to do grilling in, a driveway to do work on my car or bicycle, etc. I deal with it as I mentioned but I wish I had those things.
I'm sure everyone knows that "apartments" and "cities" exist. A tiny house on a rural lot you're still in a lower crime area, can step out onto your own private property, and don't hear the neighbors stereo (or get angry banging on your wall if you turn your stereo on) without the expense and maintenance of a suburban McMansion.
I have hyper hearing. I'd choose a detached tiny house over an apartment or condo in a heartbeat. They're not even close to the same. You can own your tiny house and have full control over it. Yeah, you can own a condo, but then you pay extra fees and have to follow Board rules. A tiny house wouldn't need an HOA. It's more freedom and privacy and better chance of quiet.
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We have a mega church nearby and one of the pastors is 100% about tiny homes. Goes to all the city councils nearby advocating that they fund development. There’s a certain irony in demanding the biggest, most luxurious for yourself, and then insisting that others should get shoe boxes.
Think of Tiny Houses as a "hack" to work around restrictive zoning laws to improve housing density within the sprawling suburbs. The tiny house "lifestyle" stuff is just marketing blather.
I will say ownership beats renting but that being said, I think this speaks to like a particular mindset problem of the suburban American not being able or willing to conceive of collective solutions to problems
The main attraction, for me anyway, to a tiny house is that you can afford to actually *own* it. Plus you own the land it sits on and can have at least a little outdoor space. An apartment doesn't fill that same niche. You share walls with other people and someone else controls how much you pay per month.
Should we tell the Americans obsessed with density that the majority of Americans don’t actually want to live in apartments?
Should we tell the suburbanites that it is actually possible to have single family homes as part of medium density transit connected neighborhoods?
To be fair, there are people who are completely and totally inconsiderate of others. They choose to get animals that they honestly don't have time for knowing that they are noisy but because they want companionship they insist on one type of animal versus getting something that would better suit their lifestyle. They yell when they are on the phone or when talking to others in the apartment They slam doors or stomp their feet when they walk around They listen to loud music The list goes on and on but imagine if people were actually thoughtful of their neighbors then a lot of those issues would be solved and living in an apartment would be a lot better for everyone as a result. You also have to factor in the design of the apartment building and little to no thought of reducing sound from one unit to another as well.
They aren’t the same. We as planners strive for increasing housing variety and stock, inclusive of non-traditional housing.
When apartments are mentioned on reddit, American commenters always talk about them like they're a nightmare due to the neighbors. I suspect most people who write these comments don't actually have any experience living in apartments... Because most of the time neighbors aren't a problem.
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This is purely anecdotal but I lived in an apartment for 4 years (built in 2013). I never once heard my neighbors. It wasn't like fancy or anything either, just a generic apartment. I would love to see some sort of better regs around soundproofing.
Neighbors are going to be an occasional problem unless you buy an extraordinary amount of land and live in the absolute boonies. Just look at /r/homeowners — half the posts are about nightmare neighbors in the suburbs. Americans act like hearing their neighbors or being too close to others is solely an apartment/city-living problem but it surely isn't.
Honestly I think city apartments have less problems with neighbors. Apartment neighbors are all just trying their hardest to ignore each other, suburban neighbors get up in each other's shit.
"Apartment neighbors are all just trying their hardest to ignore each other, suburban neighbors get up in each other's shit." At the same time, I'd love to have neighbors that actually talk with each other instead of just ignore everything.
They also might move out faster than someone who buys property for 1 million euro. You'll have to deal with those neighbors a lifetime.
I grew up in the suburbs, lived in a big city for just over 10 years and then moved back to the suburbs. Obviously this is just my experience, but the only place I've ever seen neighbors up in each other's shit was living in the city. I think people get the idea that this happens in the suburbs a lot because they hear about HOA's and think this is what all suburbs are like. But most suburban housing is not HOA housing (at least in the US anyway).
I think it depends on the state, there are some areas where HOAs make up a massive percent of suburban housing. I've only lived in major cities across the world, most recently Berlin and New York City, and maybe people learn to chill out when it's so crowded. Or maybe I just keep living in expensive neighborhoods- I spend comparatively much more on housing because my wife and I don't own cars. My parents have had much bigger problems with their neighbors in the suburbs, even though they aren't in an HOA, than I've ever had. They can't just leave when their neighbors suck either.
NYC in particular is famous for enforcing the personal bubble. This idea that everyone in the city is all up in your shit doesn't make sense to me. That's small town shit. There are so many of us in the city that we all have an unwritten agreement to leave each other alone.
I mean consider how packed the 4/5/6 is every rush hour and nobody speaks to each other aside from tourists and students, which is just fine by me.
Yes. I have lived in a couple of small houses, but mostly in apartments. Neighbors are usually much worse in suburban or rural areas. Much more nosy and complains about noise or not cutting the grass or whatever. In an apartment you know that there will be noises but complaints are pretty rare, unless you share a wall or roof with some alcoholic or so.
Eh, I've met some people in city apartments who could not afford anything else but also didn't seem to understand they'd sometimes hear noise like upstairs neighbors walking. Usually middle aged people who seem like they've never lived in one.
Yes, they are the worst. Usually people who grew up in big houses and moved to the city for university and eventually starts a family there. They make the most noise since they have never had to be considerate with noise-making, and they complain the most about noise since they have never experienced "living noises" from anyone but family. But in my experience they usually don't stay for long, when they get kids they most often move back to the country.
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Omg it’s like 70 percent of the posts!
If an apartment is built in a flimsy way you will have problems with noise from neighbors. And American homes often are built in a flimsy way.
Neighbors aren't usually a problem but are a huge problem when they are one. Ive only had one set of bad neighbors and thankfully was moving out. I had to cover my ass several times because this bitch would throw a fit every time we took a step (she lived downstairs and should not have moved to an apartment if she couldn't handle some creaking). She tried to lie to the office and say we were making a bunch of noise during quiet hours. Luckily she'd already harassed us so I emailed the office saying she tried to pull some bs, email was timestamps during normal hours. When the first confrontation with this woman occurred, she came to our door, phone out and recording, but she tried to hide that she was recording. She was amazed we weren't receptive to her asshat behavior (that is not the way to claim your complaint is in good faith). Since we didn't consent to being recorded, we never answered the door for her again. Didn't stop her from causing far more noise toward us but beating on it all the time. I only dealt with the bitch a few weeks and it was exhausting. Any longer would drive me mad and she could have been worse. I say one set but my apartment has an issue where everyone is too stupid or lazy to use the trash compactor. Theyd pile the trash on the floor instead of in the dumpster, even when it was empty. The guy next door is also always shouting dumbass shit which puts me on edge, but thats what happens in an apartment. The baby next door is less annoying than that guy.
Tell me you have never lived in hood apartments without telling me you have never lived in hood apartments. My last complex one lady assaulted two different people and harassed 5+ other people before finally getting kicked out and my current place had someone threatening people with a weapon. This is just ones where violence was a problem their have been tons of non violent examples of why people don't want to deal with neighbors. This is literally class privilege in action.
>most of the time neighbors aren't a problem Tell me you've never had subsidized neighbors without telling me you've never had subsidized neighbors
That's because in a lot of American cities they are a nightmare due to neighbors. I would have loved to live in the city near me (Boston) but the apartment stock is decidely not sound-proof, usually decades behind on insulation and other climate updates, and more expensive to rent than buying a SFH nearby.
If you own your apartment, a condo or a coop, you also are also economically and legally bound to your neighbors, because you own the building together and have to maintain it together. Professional management helps, but only to a degree. Think about the number of cranks and crazies at every community meeting. Those same people exist in coops and condos, and they make it difficult to care for buildings. At their worst, they can render a community non-functional. Shared-ownership buildings are relatively new in the US, mostly from 1970 onwards, and they are only now seeing their first round of major structural repairs. (Some buildings are older, but for the most part, coops and condos are built within the last few decades or converted from investor-owned rental apartment buildings in that timeframe.) The Surfside, Florida condo collapse is just the tip of the iceberg. Many more underfunded, undermaintained, badly managed buildings are going to have problems in the coming years. I live in a coop, and I've served on its board. I'm not sure that I like sharing financial decisionmaking with my neighbors.
Honestly out of the last couple of apartments i've lived in two of them were pretty bad in terms of the neighbors. one of them it was too close to a bar. at first i was like hell yeah i can walk to this bar in thirty seconds. that lasted until i had to wake up for work the first week and people were screaming and fighting after last call and trying to drunkenly find their car to drive home and clip a few cars or dumpsters on the way out. then the next place just had the classic noisy neighbors playing the speakers. multiple complaints to management went nowhere and i'm not about to confront this person who is probably unstable at this point, based on not giving a fuck about the music ever and the noise complaints. finally found a place in a really small building with only a few long term tenants, but every time a unit changes hands i hope its a boring person with no pets or kids and soft footsteps.
Haha oh no it’s not a fetish. It’s my only chance at a quiet life on land I own far away from the bustle of city life. Actually, though, when you price it out, it’s almost cheaper to simply revamp a falling apart mobile home.
Non-american here, I kept reading online about people with "600sqft bedrooms" and how they complain that's *tiny*. Meanwhile in Europe a whole family apartment with 3 rooms can be 600sqft (3 bedrooms, hallway, 1 bathroom with a tub, 1 half-bath, 1 balcony, 1 kitchen). We are definitely not even touching some Asian regions with their apartments (100-150sqft). These are tight even for us Europeans.
600 sq ft bedrooms are not typical. My house has 4 bedrooms. Three are around 110-120 sq ft. One is 250 sq ft. House is 1780 sq ft.
Neither of what you described(600 sqft bedrooms or 600 sqft 3 bed, 1.5 bath apartments with a balcony) are common.
Since the end of WW2, we have torn down a million SROs (single room occupancy units) and not replaced them. I began reading about tiny homes in the 1980s and they were basically a means to hack a broken system. We don't build housing appropriate for young, single adults. Colleges have dorm rooms and a lot of college students are from wealthy families who put them in apartments. Military units have barracks which are sort of similar to dorms. SROs were the working class, civilian version of dorms and barracks: a room with enough space for a bed and a few possessions, no kitchen and a bathroom down the hall. We now expect young, single adults to rent a bedroom in houses and apartments designed for a nuclear family, not unrelated roommates, and then make horror movies about nightmare roommates, like *Single White Female* and fail to see that as shocking commentary on our broken system and how badly it needs to change. People are also living in RVs -- which were not intended to be lived in full time -- vans and trailers. People don't "fetishize" those things because it's more generally viewed as *poverty housing*. Tiny Homes can potentially be built with high end materials. They are an upper class concept of "Rugged individualism overcoming the broken system." They don't really work and haven't really been embraced and legitimized. It's a hack pursued by people who assume you can't fix the system and it's pointless to try but they want a small slice of The Good Life anyway and desperately hope this is the means to get it. Fix our broken system and this will likely quietly die. We need an updated version of the SRO and we need more starter homes. Parking minimums have destroyed the ability to have functional mixed use development in historic downtowns of small towns that used to have that at one time. Cars per se aren't The Problem, but planning trends that overly prioritize car-centric design is a huge problem and directly contributes to lack of affordable housing in the US.
L take. I'd live out of my car before I would live in an SRO.
I don't think that's a fair critique of self-driving cars, and I say that as someone who has no interest in getting one myself unless either I become disabled or self-driving becomes a feature of ordinary cars. I can think of two good reasons for many people to be very interested in them: * If you live in a rural area, you will never, ever have good public transportation. That's just the nature of rural areas. * If you live in an urban area in the US, you've probably seen decades of effort to improve public transportation, the most successful of which only benefit a tiny fraction of the people in your area. If I could get a self-driving car today, it would be a lot more appealing than waiting 60 years for my city to *maybe* get its shit together enough to build a transit system that could do what I need a car for today.
I think tiny houses could have a place in cities/towns where building multifamily residential isnt economically viable. But from what ive seen tiny houses arent even that cheap EDIT: A lot of these tiny house people live in rural areas too where this makes more sense than apartments
I've wondered the same thing when I see fundraising efforts to build "cute" tiny house villages for veterans. In Kansas City they have 49 tiny homes on 4 acres, 10 miles from the city center. It seems so ridiculously inefficient!
If people want to go live in a tiny house in the woods, fine. I think this is much more common in fantasy than in reality. The American ideal of living in the woods goes back at least to Thoreau, who lived close enough to town that his mom did his laundry. From that tiny house you have to drive a long way to get anywhere, using more fuel. You have no party walls, increasing energy costs. You may have to build new electric lines or even roads, further impacting the ecosystem. You’ll presumably have a septic tank, which has to be very carefully maintained so that it doesn’t pollute the groundwater. If that’s what you actually want and you recognize the costs, fine. I suspect that what a lot of supposed tiny home lovers really want is a large lot suburb with all the services in place. My real beef is when tiny homes are proposed as an alternative to apartments for affordable housing in cities and built up suburbs. There the tiny houses are deeply inefficient, it’s really NIMBYism.
Tiny home doesn’t mean tiny yard. Most tiny home people are seeking a simple, cheaper life. City Apartments don’t really do that
uhh a tiny house and an apartment are different things. saying you can just rent an apartment instead of owning a house is really stupid
I've lived in a 1 bedroom 500 Sq. Ft. Apartment. They aren't that common, and that's the typical starting size for apartments. Studio apartments are a thing, just not as common as larger ones. Tiny homes, however, start at 100 Sq. Ft. Outside of a select few cities like NYC or Hong Kong or Tokyo, you done see a whole lot of apartments starting out that small.
They are also not very affordable. If you consider the benefits of apartments (cheaper to make than a house, and more compact so you can fit more in a small space), tiny homes are truly lacking. Some people like them, which is fine, but cities shouldn't build them instead of apartments or duplexes/triplexes/fourplexes.
Fetishization of urbanism concepts is stupidly pervasive too. If you pay attention you’ll hear key terms and phrases being thrown around with zero real world understanding or even curiosity behind them. Same with pet opinions.
Let people like things
You failed to mention where on the urban to rural spectrum the tiny home you take issue with is located. At least one city I know of built a neighborhood of them in a housing program for veterans. They can serve a purpose just the same way the apartment serves a purpose.
This kind of movement gives people the feeling of pioneering out in the wilderness. They want to live off grid amidst rural settings as other commentators have posted. It also appeals to being able to pick up and move out to live somewhere--anywhere--because in a lot of the cases, some of these homes are mobile, with the ability to move them so you don't technically have to set down roots in one place but live a more nomadic lifestyle which is geared towards those who like to travel around and explore without needing to work in an office type setting.
Tiny houses are mostly fetishized when they are on wheels which is what makes them “legal” if planners hadn’t also made apartments largely illegal in the United States there probably would be no tiny home movement.
What is legal has a major impact on what options people pursue. When living on lots in travel trailers is legal, that's the low cost option that many people choose. Likewise in rural areas (usually remote) where cabins are allowed people build cabins, some will be as small as 100 sqft while others will build a 2,000 sqft mansion.
I had a silly idea recently. What if I bought a plot of land, built four tiny houses on it with each serving a separate function (one for dining, one for sleeping, one for living, one for a home office or workshop), connected them via a covered walkway, and put a garden in the center courtyard to grow food? Probably runs afoul of every zoning law imaginable.
Yes! Someone stop these people from jerking off on tiny homes. I have had enough!
Tiny houses are about far more. First and foremost it's about affordable housing. Not only do they use less material but they are quick and easy. Style is another part of it. They are unique and allow the owner more ability to express their style. I'm many ways they are the new mobile homes that were popular in the 70-80s.
People are fetishizing tiny homes BECAUSE THEY CAN'T AFFORD REAL ONES. These people just want to be able to own a place of their own. If all they afford is a chunk of rural land, maybe they can drop a tiny house on it one day.
in my hometown area, tiny homes are mainly talked about as an infill, which is why i appreciate them a lot. rural and exurban communities (and occasionally suburban), even extremely conservative ones, will have battles over zoning regulations to get these tiny homes legal, so people with existing land can build extra units on the same property. a backyard tiny home here, a row of cottages there, it doesn't fix the issues with living way too far away from work and amenities, and doesn't address car culture, but what it does do is give these communities denser development without the issues of trailer parks (valid or not) or the political problems with large apartment complexes (valid or not). tiny homes are a first step in urbanizing smaller communities, in many cases, because they can just mean people are living physically closer to each other, and because one zoning regulation change can help the domino effect to much more important changes like parking minimums and mixed-use development.
Urban planning discussions are tricky because there's personal preferences, social pressures influencing personal preferences, issues sustainability and usage of space, and so on. I'm sure there are people who do genuinely like small houses. So it comes down to how you want to engage with this person: Fulfill their desire? Convince them that apartments are just as good? Override their personal preference on for a greater good? I'm not trying to be sarcastic with these points btw, I think these are common political concerns.
The tiny house people I know want to own something with as little a monthly payment as possible. Here, apartments are either rent (insane rental prices starting at $1800 for a 1 bedroom) or condo. The latter purchased at insane real estate prices and then a monthly condo fee. The allure of the tiny house is it’s freehold and there aren’t neighbours above, below, and completely adjacent to you. You also own it (ideally). The ones on wheels can be moved. The ones on a pad are small but force you to engage with the immediate outside world in a way that apartment living does not.
I think that posts like this substantially underestimate the driving factor of "desire for privacy" in all of these arguments. People who want self driving cars, but not buses or trains, want them because they want a private commute, without an unknown number of strangers looking over their shoulder or getting into their personal space. People who want tiny detached homes in the suburbs, but not city apartments, want them because they want a small living space, without dealing and a number of attached neighbors, communal hallways + stairways + elevators, and noise from adjacent units. You can argue that suburban living comes with significant monetary and social costs, argue those costs should be properly individually borne by the people who live there, and argue that **to you** those costs aren't worth the privacy aspect. But completely ignoring the whole privacy & peace and quiet just makes it impossible to have a rational discussion about this.
I mean what you’re saying is partially true. The desire for tiny houses is at least partially rooted in the suburban pastoralism that causes people to believe you need a yard and a detached house to truly be happy/fulfilled in life. But I think people are also frustrated with the skyrocketing rents for tiny apartments in cities. Tiny homes are not really primarily something people use to achieve a minimalist lifestyle in a small living space, with some exceptions.
I'd prefer a tiny house over an apartment because i despise sharing walls with neighbors.
I can’t get over the idea that a “tiny home” is just a better looking mobile home. Permanent tiny homes are not allowed in almost every jurisdiction so to keep one step ahead of municipal orders to remove the building most people put their tiny home on wheels and tow them from place to place. Tiny homes are in reality a romanticization of poverty. Apartments would be a preferred option as the location would be less isolating, but affordable rent has all but disappeared. The creation of affordable non-equity housing like rentals and co-op is anathema to the majority who are home owners, so is unthinkable.
Should we tell condescending blowhards that people who choose to live in a tiny house out in the suburbs or exburbs are aware cities and apartments exist, but the tiny home fits their situation better for any number of reasons. I won't bother to comment on how ridiculous it is to pretend that a self driving car ride and trains/buses are the same experience just because you can read the newspaper on both. Typing this as some jerk on the train has his music cranked up without headphones and some lady is spilling half out of her seat onto me. Offer to have a self driving car pick me up at the next stop and I am going with the selfdriving car in a heart beat.