Smaller households, smaller homes

If you come, they will build it. Compact houses, compact cars. Opendoor dishes on the real price of housing

• Smaller households, smaller homes

• One builder surges ahead (maybe)

• Here in my compact house car (reprise)

• Opendoor dishes on the real state of home values

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Smaller households, smaller homes

On balance, the “built world” is downstream of how we choose to live, and not the other way around.

Real estate can be interesting like that, as an anthropological artifact, that often outlives the people who built it. It’s not quite a peak into of an ancient civilization, like say Petra, but it’s kinda like that, in the sense of Hudson Valley mansions, or even the townhouses of Park Slope, or the Victorian/Queen Anne style single-family homes in a New Haven, or a Rochester.

The people who built those homes, and the reasons they built them where they did and how they did, don’t really exist anymore (at least, as such).

Of course, a successor people and culture, with different patterns of life and living, might find good use for what’s been built, often with some modification (although sometimes they just it into a museum), but the space conforms to their concerns, and not the other way around. One doesn’t adopt the lifestyle choices of a 19th Century merchant because one lives in a house originally built by one.

Likewise, you can’t engineer ‘small town urbanism’ by building places that look like the places that ‘small town urbanists’ built.¹ You’ve gotta want it first, and then it gets built.

Consider, for a moment, how household formation has evolved in parallel with home sizes.

Households have been getting smaller:

And so have homes:

Resiclub

Smaller households, smaller homes.

It makes sense. If you’re unmarried and have no plans for a family (as is increasingly the case these days), but you still want your own place outside of a people-hive, then a smaller home is a good choice (especially given the rising cost of capital).

Indeed, builders have wisely adjusted product to fit the new market.

Now, the truth is that the relationship between family size and home size is more complicated.