Eye on Housing

I'm glad you've found something that works for you (really!) but you're cherry-picking. The key problem is this:

> 5 minutes walk or 1 minute drive to a shop for groceries, hardware, lumber, restaurants, kid parks.

This might be true for you but that's probably because your income is much higher than the median where you live such that you can afford just off Main St is whatever qualifies as central where you live.

By definition not everyone can do that. And I say by definition because:

- Average walking speed is about 5 feet per second

- 5 minutes to just one of the destinations you mention puts you at at radius of 1500 feet

- The average supermarket size is, say, 40,000 square feet [1]

- Let's assume an entry on each side and a square footprint of 200x200. That doesn't include parking

- It seems ~150 parking spaces per acre is a good estimate [2], putting the space for each at roughly 300 square feet

- I can't find any stats or the average number of parking spaces for a supermarket so let's go with 100 for 30,000 square feet bringing out supermarket footprint to 70,000

- Assuming these things are circular (best case) and you can walk in straight lines (best case) the radius of the store is 112 feet. The parking lot eats another 38 feet of that

- So the circle for being within 5 minutes is 112 feet + 1500 feet - 70,000 square feet, which we'll call ~8 million square feet.

- Average lot sizes are harder to figure out. There's data like this [3] but that includes…

> House prices have grown much faster than inflation even if you introduce a fudge factor 2.

No prices have grown a lot in major metros where Software people work. I’m sure SF is insane. But also NYC according to the article has “only” grown by 200% - so it’s literally cheaper on a household level if you include wage growth (assuming you go from single income to double income), and I’m sure Cleveland has a lot less growth. According to (1) housing has only grown 150% nationwide.

It’s not “eat cake”. Houses have grown bigger over time. They gained electricity and running water and 2 car garages and high efficiency water heaters. But people also replace their now 2 car often and buy new iPhones and stream high qualitymovies from their large high def TVs. At some point houses don’t need to get bigger and theirs no more room in Silicon Valley for single family homes but there’s always room for more consumerism delivered faster priced cheaper and plenty of businesses who will deliver. Proof is that housing is becoming a smaller part of the GDP (0) despite becoming “unaffordable expensive”.

As a bonus, according to this article (2), houses are 150% larger and rentals are 200% larger since 1970s. So I guess you get what you pay…

I guess it depends on what part of the 1900s... I grew up (also in the 70s&80s) as a "latchkey" in an area that was built in the 50s and 60s and had the same experience of walking and riding to school. This seems like a "reality TV" phenomena of the last 25 years. Certainly, there are suburban deserts that are completely unwalkable, but most housing is not like that (certainly not "affordable" housing) simply because it was built earlier. Of course this is almost entirely dependent on where you live.

https://eyeonhousing.org/2018/08/half-of-us-homes-built-before-1980/

High growth Tech areas like Seattle, San Jose, Austin, Phoenix are ~10x bigger than they were ~40 years ago. So those are much more likely to have this low density housing than Boston, SF, NYC.

What I find weird is that even completely walkable schools/neighborhoods have parents that almost all drive kids to school every day. Parents legitimately worry about being labeled as endangering their kids, if they don't drive them. Interestingly for me this is more acute for immigrant families, who are worried about fitting in, than local families who will tell the vice principal to "shove it" when warned about the dangers of walking to school.

> And secondly... Are the second vacation homes really the problem? I'd guess the problem begins around 3rd or 5th, not the second one, which is a fairly common and usually also a good thing to have - for both the owner and the society.

I'm not sure if you mean owning one primary home and two vacation homes, or one primary home and one vacation home when you mention a "second vacation home," but either way this strikes me as out of touch.

In 2024, US home ownership rate is 65.6%. (https://www.bankrate.com/homeownership/home-ownership-statistics/)

In 2022, 4.6% of housing was comprised of second homes. (https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/09/the-nations-stock-of-second-homes-2/)

4.6% of 65.6% is 3%, meaning at most 3% of Americans own a second home (but this doesn't account for citizens that own 3 or more homes, so the actual percentage is even lower.)

I don't consider that to be common. I also wonder: why is it a good thing for society (or even most homeowners?)

One of the problems is that the average size of a new single family home has been increasing for decades:

http://eyeonhousing.org/2014/01/average-size-of-new-single-family-homes-continues-to-rise/

According to data from the Census the Quarterly Starts and Completions by Purpose and Design survey, the average and median size of single-family homes that began construction rose during 2013. For the third quarter alone, the average single-family square footage increased from 2,646 to 2,701, while the median rose from 2,446 to 2,491.

In the 1950s, average size of a new home was less than half that, at around 1200 sq ft. It also held, on average, more people.

I strongly suspect this is partly driven by tax incentives that are aimed at upper class families and help create or fuel a growing divide between the Have and Have Nots.

I don’t think we’re ever going to build houses again at the rate we did before the 2008 GFC. A substantial portion of people who work in construction are undocumented (and will be targeted for deportation by this admin for the remains of their term), zoning remains a challenge, cost of materials continues to inflate. How many years would it take to get back up to speed? 5? 10? What does the economy look like then? Will enough young folks go into the necessary trades to meet the demand for this labor? We might keep building along at the anemic pace of today, but I argue we’ll never build again at the rate we did pre GFC.

https://eyeonhousing.org/2020/01/a-decade-of-home-building-the-long-recovery-of-the-2010s/

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-the-homebuilder