51–60 of 215 posts
basically everything I read about the USA housing market seems so weird, especially in SF/Silicon Valley. They makret themselves as being this "tech area" yet they have 100 year old houses with limits of 2 floors. or big suburbs without anything in them. Where is the uber, airbnb and doordash for housing?
> Where is the uber, airbnb and doordash for housing? Outside of SF and Silicon Valley.
'Family' and 'Apartment' are words that don't go very well together. Children/large families can be noisy. And they benefit from safe outdoor space to play. For the childless WFH-er trying to concentrate, it's not much fun when kids noisily use the communal areas of apartment buildings as a playground. I know this from experience. Thankfully, noise-cancelling headphones are pretty good these days.
It would not be hard to design an enclosed communal area visible to all of the units. Lots of early suburbs had a communal design where the play area faced into the kitchens of the houses.
You can easily have a family in an apartment if it has 2-3 bedrooms in it. That’s a very common design in Eastern Europe and other parts. It’s only in NA do people believe that you can only have a family in a SFH
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally not the case in a lot of HCOL areas. For example in NYC, most new developments are built out something like this: 4 bedrooms - less than 5%, 3 bedrooms - 10%, 2 bedrooms - 30%, 1 bedrooms - 40%, studios - 15%. As a result, the larger units are not just more expensive due to square footage, but the pricing scales non-linearly per square foot because 3+ bedroom units are a rarity. Typically you'll see a 3BR h…
Seems like an easyish solution would be to have some modular walls. Like imagine if you had a repeating layout like - [ 2br | studio | 2br ] where the | represent say a section of wall that is designed to be disassembled and removed. Then either 2br can be converted into a 3br by unbricking the doorway, so to speak. If neither 2br needs it it can be rented out on it's own as a studio. Or even take out BOTH walls and…
The bigger issue would be plumbing for bathrooms & kitchens.
Having light on both sides of an apartment makes the whole apartment brighter and improves air circulation. Almost every apartment I visited had a similar layout—totally unlike apartments I've seen in the U.S. A townhome is probably the closest thing we have here, though they only go 2-3 stories and don't share staircases.
> In February, I, along with real estate developer Bobby Fijan, went on the Bloomberg podcast Odd Lots to talk about why it’s so hard to find a family-sized apartment in the United States. I argued that North American zoning and building codes work together to drive up the size of multi-bedroom apartments in particular, putting them financially out of reach for many parents raising children. In other words, even if d…
In Europe a closet is furniture, not a built in room.
> In other words, even if developers built more two-, three-, and four-bedroom apartments, you probably wouldn’t be able to afford one But almost most apartments are multi-bedroom??? I searched my area on Zillow for Apartments/Condos for rent. [1] Studio - 85 1 bed - 225 2 bed - 233 3 bed - 39 4 bed - 1 https://www.zillow.com/salt-lake-city-ut/rental-buildings/?s...
Salt Lake City isn't representative of the US -- and in particular places in the US with a housing shortage.
basically everything I read about the USA housing market seems so weird, especially in SF/Silicon Valley. They makret themselves as being this "tech area" yet they have 100 year old houses with limits of 2 floors. or big suburbs without anything in them. Where is the uber, airbnb and doordash for housing?
Buildings are living things that are constantly being changed by their owners too. After 10 years of their being lived in no two cookie-cutter houses will be the same either.
The reason what you want doesn't exist is because it's impossible to scale using technology without rendering these differences moot. The construction industry is doing the best it can by clearcutting every lot and bulldozing the surface features into a set of flat terraced lots and then building houses on that infill. The only thing SV could contribute is capital.
There are a lot of things like this that consciously or subconsciously push people to have smaller families.
> In February, I, along with real estate developer Bobby Fijan, went on the Bloomberg podcast Odd Lots to talk about why it’s so hard to find a family-sized apartment in the United States. I argued that North American zoning and building codes work together to drive up the size of multi-bedroom apartments in particular, putting them financially out of reach for many parents raising children. In other words, even if d…
It's not just Bobby Fijan, there's also Michael Elias, an architect, who has been trying to build family suitable apartments in the US after experiencing them in Germany. The problem really is the hallway cutting the building in half. It puts such restrictions on what can be built in sensible ways.