What if we took the space constraints of apartment living and subtracted all economies of scale from compact building?
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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The sad part is I want a small space. But I also want a big yard to grow things and to live in the woods away from people.
I get it, but sub urbs still kinda suck for that. Too dense for freedom and privacy, yet to sparse for transit or cultural events.
Totally agree. I don't think single family housing is really good or fair anymore. Hell I am not sure I even think humans can own a piece of land. I feel selfish for wanting to be able to buy a house.
So what you want is an apartment with community gardens, maybe rooftop gardens and/or a multi-tier greenhouse interior for an apartment block. (Doesnβt help with living in the woods, but I think we were all born a bit late for that to be practical for most, tho we could rebuild community gardens and rewild our spaces if we condensed housing)
Thatβs what I want too. I hate owning property and needing to upkeep it and shit, all so I can have growing space and privacy. And I donβt even have much of either.
We can do those things, we just choose not to for⦠reasons.
Here in the Netherlands we have lots of plots on the outside of cities with gardens people in apartments can rent for a small fee. Friend of mine has one and we get a ton of veggies and stuff from them every year it's great. Going out to take care of it is like a day to the countryside kind of thing, they tell me.
I suppose a shed in the woods is not impossible but a lot of factors need to be just right or it gets way too expensive and/or uncomfortable. In Europe, most forests are publicly accessible and there are various tiny settlements but I suppose that's not the case in many American states.
Just because you slap a second story on your trailers and call your park a subdivision, ain't mean the tornado won't find ya!
Oof. Floor plans for first floor. The front door opens to the living room, which looks fine until you realize that you need to leave room for the front door to open, open space at the foot of the stairs, and open space to walk through into the kitchen. And suddenly 2/3's of your living room is unusable. If you want to eat at a table, it's going to have to be tucked under the stairs, and you'll sacrifice any kind of pantry / storage space you might've had. I'm also not fond of the idea that guests have to walk through your bedroom to go to the bathroom, nor that the laundry is in the master bathroom either: it can be noisy, and it means anyone else wanting to wash clothes has to pass through the bedroom as well. They've tried to disguise that by labeling it as "owner's suite" instead of "public highway".
The second floor is essentially just a giant open space with a bathroom tacked on the end near the top of the stairs. The location of the stairs means the second floor is essentially split in half. You might think, hey, we can put a couple bedrooms up here!, but you can't. The 'bedroom' at the top of the stairs also becomes a public highway for the person in the front 'bedroom'. You could do like a bedroom in the front and a lounge area at the top of the stairs, but at that point the second floor is more luxurious and more private than the "owner's suite".
The front yard is essentially a driveway with a little space on either side, and I'm fairly sure the backyard is tiny, with maybe enough room for a storage shed, which you'll need because there's minimal storage inside - there aren't even any closets. The backyard is probably too small for a grill to be legal, because they're generally supposed to be a certain distance from the house - I'm basing that off the community amenities, which says
Residents are situated just down the road from Converse City Park where there is plenty of open space, walking and biking paths, a playground, fishing pond, BBQ areas and more.
Edit: just checked and "just down the road from Converse City Park" means 3.2 miles. So yes accessible, but it's not like just down the street and the kids can ride their bikes over.
The floorplan looks ok, except it's smaller than they're letting on. The bed in that bedroom takes up a suspiciously small space.
It says that room is 10β wide, so thatβs like a five foot bedβ¦ Iβd hate to sleep on that!
I lived in a 10' wide house once. It's not as terrible as you might think.
Maybe the bed is folding/pullout?
If you find them on a satellite image, you'll also see the entire development is on the high voltage line right of way, with the lines almost directly above the houses
Oh, how nice ....
And for some reason they made the second floor span over only half the length of the house. Had they made it full length they would have increased the available space by 33% without affecting the overall footprint. With that extra space they would have been able to shuffle the rooms around and make them far more usable.
I'm all for smaller practical housing. But these need to be designed with practicality and efficiency in mind. This apparent product of an architect-wannabe businessman achieves neither.
Oh wow, that's a horrible design. I was expecting the bedroom to be upstairs and the kitchen/livingroom to span the entire length downstairs.
I can see having one bedroom on the first floor, as it gives more flexibility: you could make it an office, or older people who don't like stairs could have it as a bedroom and have the upstairs for storage and a guest room. But I'd flip the bedroom and the bathroom/laundry: it makes the bathroom and laundry more accessible without going through the privacy of the bedroom, and gives the bedroom more room for windows (currently only one side of the building has windows, and there are none in the bathroom). Move the upstairs bath as well and it keeps all the plumbing in one section and splits the upstairs into two functional sections which could be separate bedrooms / office / storage / whatever.
Of course, that would mean that neither floor had an open floor plan so it could seem rather claustrophobic, especially with windows only down one side with neighbors right up next to the windows. The front window looks out right onto the parking slab and the high-power transmission lines running down the street. The best 'view' is out the back: that looks out onto some retaining ponds (potentially nice), and then there's a 4-lane road on the other side of the ponds. Except there are no windows out the back of the houses, so you're entirely missing out on the one potentially nice view. Yeah, I'd flip the bedroom and the bathroom/laundry, and I'd put windows looking out the back there - hell, maybe even a sliding door or something, make it easy to access your tiny backyard, have a cup of coffee out there or something.
3.2 miles
That's 5 km! Such a (relatively) dense development should be the first housing next to the park, second only to amenities and public transit access to the public space.
That would be Socialism! You can't expect us to care about the poor or elderly or disabled!
No, this is Poor People Housing: tiny homes on small plots stuck onto leftover land behind a 'real' development, underneath high-voltage power lines, next to some retaining ponds and a four-lane major commuter route. There's not even enough poor people there to justify their own bus stop, though they might get added in if they're already on an existing route and it won't affect the sacred timetables too much. There's some commercial space on the corner; if they're lucky they may get a Dollar General or other poor- person store, otherwise every place they need to get to will require a car.
It's so tiny yet they expect you to own 3 TVs. Is this a Freedom^TM^ thing I'm too European to understand?
Well, you need one per floor, and one per bedroom ... /s
No, not really all that sarcastically, there are a lot of people who live that way, have the tv constantly on in the background. When I was still living at home, a friend (who always had the tv on, even when she had company over) came to visit me. After a while, she asked why my mom had the tv off in a tiny viewing area way off in an unsociable corner. I said that when my mom had company over, she wanted the focus to be on their conversation and interaction and friendship, not on the TV, and my friend found this to be an astonishing concept.
That's a shed.
Yeah. Pretty sure you can get a bigger one from the big box hardware stores. For way cheaper. You'd still have to finish the insides, though. Not everyone can follow code for frami ng let alone plumbing and electrical. We won't even get into hanging and mudding drywall.
They could actually be liveable if you removed the driveway and yard, and added a frequent bus service on every other street, as well as a tram line/subway stop in the neighborhood, and a market square with mixed zoning. It could be more thermally efficient, too, with the houses touching. Or just build blocks of flats at this point, they are cheap, dense and not as uncomfortable as shotgun homes. However, I am sure that US regulations would never allow that.
Plenty of townhouses like you've described. The same crowd that moves into these houses are the ones that don't want all the issues you've just described in yours.
Pretty sure most don't have a market square with mixed zoning and trams that get them into the dense city centre in 10 minutes every 5 minutes.
Why not keep the driveway and yard, yet still add the frequent bus service on every other street and other things? The driveway and yard don't detract from livability. If someone wants they could remove the driveway themselves and plant a veggie garden or something.
They take up space that could be used to expand the house to liveable dimensions. And the lots are 6 m wide, enough for on-street parking.
Personally I would prefer 600 sq ft and some outdoor space over 1000 sq ft and no out door space, that's the benefit of detached housing. Otherwise you may as well buy a 1000 sq ft apartment.
Well, the houses could be shorter (square), which is a more practical shape, and have the cost benefit of only two outside walls, with the rest of the plot being a backyard. And the houses could now include a garage with a liveable space above. Its advantages as opposed to a driveway are obvious: the car is protected from weather and crime, and owners of small or no cars can repurpose the extra space for DIY or other purposes. Also, a backyard, as opposed to a front yard, incentivizes non-lawn use, so the street appears less green from the front but actually benefits biodiversity. Backyards also feel more private, especially with tall fences.
So yeah, I can get behind a 2-floor house with the footprint 55 mΒ² (or 600 ftΒ², don't be afraid of superscripts) with green space, as long as half of it is not a concrete driveway and I can do some gardening (or even grow "private plants").
Nothing wrong with tiny houses, but these look like theyβd blow over in a small wind.
The American dream was tortured to death, buried, dug up, ground into "dietary supplements," then sold by Mr. Beast so he could pay poor people to fight over the chance to claw their way out of debt.
Why 2 bath and only 1 bedroom?
~~Probably 1.5 bathroom. Downstairs toilet only upstairs bathroom for bedroom.~~
Edit: nevermind, saw the layout someone else posted. It's a shitty house design on top of being tiny.
I mean, I would buy that in a heartbeat. Where I live you would be lucky to get a 4th floor 600sqft studio for less than $300,000.
Not saying it's good, just saying if that's your nightmare then come to Canada.
It's a matter of perspective. In the grand scheme of things, that property is worth maybe $1.59.
But it's listed for $159,000.
That's the problem.
And the elms of the famous Elm Trails are in another location?