Robert Lanter lives in a 600-square-foot house that can be traversed in five seconds and vacuumed from a single outlet. He doesn’t have a coffee table in the living room because it would obstruct the front door. When relatives come to visit, Mr. Lanter says jokingly, but only partly, they have to tour one at time.
Each of these details amounts to something bigger, for Mr. Lanter’s life and the U.S. housing market: a house under $300,000, something increasingly hard to find. That price allowed Mr. Lanter, a 63-year-old retired nurse, to buy a new single-family home in a subdivision in Redmond, Ore., about 30 minutes outside Bend, where he is from and which is, along with its surrounding area, one of Oregon’s most expensive housing markets.
Mr. Lanter’s house could easily fit on a flatbed truck, and is dwarfed by the two-story suburban homes that prevail on the blocks around him. But, in fact, there are even smaller homes in his subdivision, Cinder Butte, which was developed by a local builder called Hayden Homes. Some of his neighbors live in houses that total just 400 square feet — a 20-by-20-foot house attached to a 20-by-20-foot garage.
This is not a colony of “tiny houses,” popular among minimalists and aesthetes looking to simplify their lives. For Mr. Lanter and his neighbors, it’s a chance to hold on to ownership.
If they had gone for proper rowhouses, they could’ve increased the size of the homes and kept the back yards, all for the price of sharing a wall with your neighbors’ houses. Or maybe not even that, as there are rowhouses that have individual walls separated by a few inches while all sharing the same foundation.
Too high a price.
Understandable, but they could’ve built detached rowhouses and got like 50% more space by getting rid of those gates to the backyard and building up to the edge of the lots. And if developers didn’t cheap out on the construction (asking for a lot, I know), it wouldn’t be an issue anyways. I live in a condo that’s a duplex built in the 70s and I hear people out on the street, noise from a nearby construction yard, and gunfire at the range a quarter mile from here far more often than I hear my neighbor.
Its not just noise.
These are some of the kinds of things your neighbor can do that will affect your life or your property when you share a wall. Even 6 feet or a couple of meters separation between houses can save you from every single one of the things I listed above.
Maybe have one big communal courtyard in the middle
I’d definitely prefer that, personally, but I think that would be a tough sell in most of the US at this particular point in society. Especially when most construction of new homes isn’t really urban so people don’t feel the space confinement the way they would in a more urban setting (they just look past the row homes and go “well that field could be housing so I don’t want this”), and with the sprawling layout of suburbs, they would feel super out of place to the point where I bet NIMBY mentality would prevent it.
Perhaps if that was a more normal option here, but it’s pretty uncommon for now.
I agree, but I was surprised to see on the Wikipedia article for townhouses/rowhouses examples of what are apparently recent suburb developments of townhouses in the US. Things might finally be shifting back to some semblance of logic. Though, developments like the one in the article are valid evidence to the contrary…
That would be great! I’d love to be wrong about this one.
I really dislike the “shove them in smaller boxes” idea this seems to have to it, similar to the tiny house “movement” (which actively makes me uncomfortable for a variety of reasons), but in areas that don’t have basements or whatever, where it’s a house on a slab no matter how big, where people just have this “must have freestanding structure to fully own it” mentality (which in a lot of cases is legit, but if we planned for it could easily be handled). This is an option.
Just my own curiosity, and you seem fun to talk to; where you are from, are your foundations accessible spaces, or are you in a slab foundation swampy area? I ask because I’m from a “has basements” area, where the foundation of the house actually adds space to it. I assume most row houses have basement spaces, because you tend to find them in densely populated areas that existed before modern conveniences like refrigeration and roads. So maybe you’d need a basement to store preserved goods. I doubt there’s space on average to have that in the main space right? (Legit asking, idk, maybe space isn’t right, but root cellars have different conditions, cooler.)
But I lived down in Texas for a while and a lot of their land you can’t build basements on because it’s really flood prone, so it’s literally just floating concrete slabs on land with houses atop. Honestly if you are going to put houses on that, you might as well do it this way and maximize the space between them with native shade plants to use up the moisture.
I’m in Massachusetts, and we kinda have a mix of everything. I live in a condo on a concrete slab that was built in the 70s as a neighborhood of duplexes rather than what people think of today when they think of condos, while my parents’ house has an unfinished, root cellar style basement in a flood zone, and a friend of mine recently moved back into his mom’s furnished basement a stone’s throw from where I live. There’s a house near my parents that even had to put their front lawn up several feet with a concrete foundation so that they could put in the septic system above the aquifer.
As for rowhouses, I don’t know much about them, but I assume that they’re usually on a slab with no basement because they usually have 2 households in them with 2 separate entrances for them. The more fancy townhouses you see, like the brownstones in NYC or the ones in Boston, might have basements since they were built for the wealthy and are single family homes that even had servant’s quarters, but I’ve never been in one to see. There’s a cool section of Boston with townhouses that was originally built to attract the wealthy, and there’s streets behind the buildings simply named Alley #1, Alley #2, etc. because they were only built to allow the servants to move out of sight of the wealthy.