“There is nowhere in this country where someone working a full-time minimum wage job could afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment” (Washington Post).
Why not have the government buy or rent apartments for low-income Americans? It seems that we have pretty much run out of other peoples’s money:
The current level of public subsidies is already not enough to meet the needs of low-income families, with only one in four eligible households able to receive assistance, the report said.
If the U.S. economy isn’t vibrant enough to generate spacious housing for everyone at the wages that residents actually command, and we have run out of subsidy cash, how about going back to living in smaller houses and apartments? Back in 1973 we managed to live in half as many square feet per person (AEI). Maybe we don’t want to go back to 1973 living standards, though. Could we use superior engineering to make 1973-sized housing more comfortable?
Check out the video at Ori Systems (MIT Media Lab spinoff) for an example of one approach. For $10,000 you get a piece of furniture that expands to about twice the size of a bed (about 90 square feet?). How much could we cut our consumption of square footage, while remaining equally comfortable, if we had this? Perhaps by 50 square feet (the size of the bed that can be hidden away)? If construction costs $300 per square foot, that’s $15,000 of built space saved ($5,000 net savings, enough to keep a welfare family going for a month), but maybe long-term savings from HVAC, lighting, maintenance, etc. could be higher?
Is this substantially different from 19th or 20th century furniture that folded up against a wall (Murphy bed) or placed a child’s bed above a desk or whatever? Motorized is fun, but what does it enable that couldn’t have been done with wheels and human power?
Readers: What do you think? Given our growing population, gridlocked transportation system, inability to build public transit, and high costs of construction are we destined to live in higher-density housing? If so, is there a tech-based way to make that a lot more comfortable?
Related:
- 77 Bluxome; 237-square-foot apartments for rent in a new building in San Francisco for about $2,300 per month; some apartments have built-in Murphy beds
- “Inside Mars Simulator, IKEA Designers Learn How To Live In Close Quarters” (NPR): “Because there are a lot of people that are moving to big cities, and urbanization is bigger every year. And that mean also people – they live in a smaller space. And that is kind of the things and the learnings we are trying to solve in a better way in our development and in our designs when it comes to products.”
It’s a story of the end of marriage as much as hyperinflation. All those people sharing houses are now spending their entire lives in different houses.
Is it different than a Murphy Bed , Castro Convertible couch, etc?
No , not really.
You don’t really NEED a lot of space (my freshman dorm room in the Quad at Penn was about the size of a jail cell – maybe 100 sf) but, especially if you are living with more than 1 person, you will go nuts if you don’t have it. Americans are programmed for wide open spaces. Japanese have pod hotels where each pod is about the size of a sleeping car berth but Americans would never go for that.
It could be a viable option for temporary living space for a limited term contract at a far-away location or as a seldom-visited second apartment. I do not see how it could become a primary family dwelling. I sure would not go for it.
There was a ted talk by a minimalism guy. I think his company made this: http://lifeedited.com/see-the-lifeedited-apartment-move-through-its-many-functions/
One thing: Americans really aren’t minimalists.
Construction costs $300 per square foot seem very high for the US outside of SF/NY – does this include the cost of land?
https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/nycs-construction-craze/ has some NY prices.
http://markasaurus.com/2013/10/22/why-can%E2%80%99t-developers-build-housing-in-san-francisco-for-the-people-who-need-it-most-instead-of-for-the-rich/ gives SF costs of $300/sf back in 2013 (not including costs of dealing w government)
$300 seems like a random number. Outside of SF/NY costs are closer to $50/per square foot. For SF mini-apartment selling price of 200 sq. ft. apartment seems to be around $250,000 based on rents mentioned or over $1000/sq. foot. $300/sq foot seems plausible but its origin is probably journalists over-simplification.
In 2011, I bought a wonderful 2000sf Florida single-family home on a third of an acre w/ and oversize 2-car garage on a golf course, a mile from the Atlantic Ocean for $30/sf.
I’m getting tired of the upkeep and thinking about soon cashing out at about $300K, fatten my early-retirement nest egg, and go rent a nice beachfront 1 br condo for $1200/mo.
dean: $50/square foot? Back in 2015 it cost about $100,000 per to build a “midscale” hotel without food and beverage, net of the land (see Exhibit 2 of https://www.hotel-online.com/press_releases/release/hotel-development-cost-survey-2014-15). It was nearly $150,000 per room for an “extended-stay hotel”, which is more like a studio apartment (e.g., has a kitchen). http://www.orourkehospitality.com/average-hotel-room-size-is-shrinking/ says that 170-330 square feet is the size range for a room. If we assume that the extended stay room is 450 square feet, that’s $333/ft. to build. If we assume that the midscale room is 275 square feet, that’s $363/ft. to build with no kitchen.
Are you willing and able to build me a multi-unit apartment building or hotel at $50/square foot? If so, I have money to invest! We are going to crush competitors!
https://www.fastcompany.com/3017659/these-photos-of-tiny-futuristic-japanese-apartments-show-how-micro-micro-apartments-can-be tokyo’s there (although keeping immigration restricted as their birthrates continue to plummet will soon make more spacious options available)
A tech based way is buying a house for a deal in Florida as a commenter mentioned and then working a tech based role that allows tele-commuting.
> public subsidies is already not enough … Given our growing population
Hmmm, if only there were some way to limit the number of new low-skilled low-iq low-wage people immigrating our country…
“role that allows tele-commuting”
The extent to which any telecommuting option exists in the Boston area high-tech is arguably statistically insignificant based on admittedly not very large (a couple of dozens) sample of my friends, colleagues and neighbors. They are employed as bio-statisticians, “big” data scientists, software engineers, hardware/firmware engineers, etc. *None* but one of them has/had that option. The friend who does have that option belongs to the management layer and physically commutes to another state once a week spending there 2-3 days in a company apartment.
Recently, a friend who lives in a Boston suburb was offered a pretty high-level software architect position in a company that just opened an office in Boston proper. He tried to negotiate a partial telecommute of one or two days a week to no avail.
There may be multiple reasons on why the overwhelming majority of high tech companies reject telecommuting in favor of surrounding their campuses with minimalistic modernized Soviet style “рабочие общаги” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8289577).
Pretty sad really because many problems like housing price, road congestion, pollution might have been alleviated if the option truly existed.
Here in the Midwest (Minneapolis), I see new mid-range suburban homes with ~2000 sq ft (and unfinished basements with another 600-800 sq ft below grade) selling for 300-350k including land. Similar lots cost 60-100k, so net of land, the price per square foot for these houses is in the $100-$150 range, including builder and realtor profit.
Minneapolis has much cheaper real estate compared to the coasts, but it is not the cheapest in the Midwest, by far.
philg 9, I will check your references.
I happened to be involved in a construction of 3000 sq ft home and also researched other similar constructions and small motel valuations. Different builders and architect billings their time resulted in total billings of about $150,000 sans land. It involved septic and all external plumbing and heating construction that is done for large buildings. Everyone involved was 100% legal business and turned the profit and only voluntary labor compensated $25 – $40 /hour was used. Similar for a motel. I think you that want to use better materials for a larger building but due to economy of scale and more living space cramped in the same area I would expect total costs per unit of area be smaller, not larger.
Zapiens: Certainly the U.S. excels at building suburban tract housing, just as we lead the world at handing out the SSDI and OxyContin to those who have been marooned in said tracts. But given our crippled transportation system and inability to build infrastructure I don’t think that it will be sustainable to support population growth with more tract housing in the exurbs. Also, one reason a house isn’t that expensive per square foot is that it has only one kitchen and a couple of bathrooms. If you built 1,000 square feet with two bathrooms and one kitchen, the total cost would be about the same.
If we assume that Americans will need to cluster in cities to get jobs and to be able to commute to those jobs in less than 3 hours round-trip per day, I think it is more reasonable to look at the actual construction cost of multi-family structures such as hotels or apartment buildings where most units are studio and 1BR.
Ivan 13,
There are plenty of tech positions in Florida. I have had jobs that allowed significant percentage of telecommute time with only part of working week in the office. This may be an option for someone who wants to live on a golf course.
Zapiens 14: Land price 60 – 100 K is an offer price. Often in large parcels good land costs around $1- 3 K per acre and you can shop around
dean: I don’t doubt that you were involved in some highly efficient projects. But https://www.hotel-online.com/press_releases/release/hotel-development-cost-survey-2014-15 contains what I think is the average across the entire U.S. Also remember that in a multi-story, multi-family building in the kind of urban environment where jobs are likely to be available, you need to allocate space for the lobby, hallways, fire escapes, elevators.
philg 19:
More, my projects involved extending two-lane road and stretching electric wire to the location (not covered in total but on a town whom I paid for building permit, included in the total. If rates for large buildings are that expensive, why bother building them? It is more efficient to create a row of townhouses with private driveways. I could easily make my projects more expensive with more expensive (but not longer lasting) materials.
Dean: That’s a good question as to why people build large buildings! I guess land is expensive in the places where Americans actually want to live. On the other hand, I’m not sure why people need to live in high-density housing in South Dakota and yet a quick Google search brought up
http://www.jamestownsun.com/news/local/3695696-construction-lot-costs
(2014 costs of building each apartment in a multi-unit structure were $102,000, up from $45,000 in 2002. (Fortunately the government tells us that we don’t have inflation in the U.S.))
Zapiens mentioned Minnesota.
http://www.mnhousing.gov/get/MHFA_1016268
is a four-year-old report. It looks as though the construction cost of a unit of public housing (within a multi-family structure) was $100,000 to $150,000 (closer to $300,000 in Massachusetts; see Table 7).
@Philg 16
Zapiens: Certainly the U.S. excels at building suburban tract housing, just as we lead the world at handing out the SSDI and OxyContin to those who have been marooned in said tracts.
This may be true, however, I had in mind above-average income, low unemployment suburbs easily within 30 minute commute or bus ride of the core downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul, not that all the jobs are in downtowns. Of course, this is specific to a medium-size Midwestern city – having stayed with friends in Sudbury and commuted to a social event in Waltham (not even in Boston proper) for a few days, I realize larger metro areas are different.
Zapiens: I guess part of the reason why public housing may need to cost more than private suburban housing is that, while we give low-income Americans free housing, food, health care, and mobile phones, we don’t give them free cars. So they need to live near the city center.
philg: townhouses are pretty efficient to pack limited area in and they do not need extra space that is always present around any high-rise. That’s why large parts of Manhattan (and other NYC boroughs) are covered with townhouses, including townhouses for poor people.