
Where the missing middle of housing isn't missing - jseliger
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/5/where-the-missing-middle-isnt-missing
======
harimau777
My concern is whether owning a multi-family home would really give me the
autonomy that leads me to want to own a home in the first place. It seems to
me that non-single family homes are more similar to rental apartments than
they are to true ownership.

For example:

\- You probably can't put in a workshop because the noise would bother the
neighbors.

\- You often don't have any sort of yard or outside space so you can't pursue
hobbies that can't reasonably be practiced indoors.

\- You can't modify the outside of the house so you are limited in your
ability to customize your home.

I guess my concern is that this would lead to a world where only the rich can
have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family
homes. At least in the current system the middle class and the richer end of
the working class can often afford single family homes.

~~~
war1025
As someone who owns a townhome, I feel that this is a misinformed, but common,
view of the situation.

> You probably can't put in a workshop because the noise would bother the
> neighbors.

We hear far more noise from the neighborhood in general than the neighbors we
share a wall with. Granted they might just be particularly quiet people, but
there is some significant sound-deadening in that wall.

I think this is partly because of fire code that says the wall needs to
withstand a 30 minute fire before crossing over into the neighboring unit.

> You often don't have any sort of yard or outside space so you can't pursue
> hobbies that can't reasonably be practiced indoors.

This is perhaps unique to our situation, but the area has never been fully
built-out, so we have a 5 acre plot of land that the kids can play on as they
please.

Since most of our neighbors never come outside, we actually have an enormous
yard that we get basically to ourselves.

> You can't modify the outside of the house so you are limited in your ability
> to customize your home

This is true to an extent, but there isn't really all that much worth
customizing on the outside of a house.

I guess you could pick different colored siding, but that seems like an
expense I wouldn't be motivated enough to take on.

> I guess my concern is that this would lead to a world where only the rich
> can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-
> family homes.

Honestly this stigma is something I am benefiting from a ton.

I have 1200 feet of living space, plus an attached 2 car garage, plus a 5 acre
yard. I paid $106k for all that. I pay $100 / month to the HOA and get lawn /
snow taken care of. It's honestly great.

To get an equivalent standalone house in the area I'd be looking at 2-3x the
cost.

~~~
atombender
What area?

~~~
war1025
Iowa

~~~
djweis
Shhh - don't tell everyone about Iowa.

------
bluedino
>> Often, you can find this in college towns. A monoculture of single-family
homes is so obviously ill-suited for a population dominated by students

Not sure if that's a great example.

My aunt owned a home in Ann Arbor that she paid $45,000 for. Over the next 20
years, almost every other home around her turned into a rental units for
students. Landlords made tons of money, who could blame them.

She was older and didn't like living in between parties and chaos, and let's
not even get into Saturdays during football season.

She did sell the house for almost nine times what she paid for it, though.
There's no more empty land there, and hasn't been in forever, so what do you
do.

The neighborhoods makeup and appearance is very close to UW, you could swap
the buildings in the article and never know the difference.

~~~
chrisseaton
> A monoculture of single-family homes is so obviously ill-suited for a
> population dominated by students

Don't the students get together in little groups of four to six and rent a
family home? That's what they do in the UK.

~~~
joerickard
In some areas that is not allowed due to zoning laws. Boulder CO for example
limits household sizes to 3 or 4 unrelated people depending on location.
Family homes are often over $3000/mo making affordable housing difficult to
find.

~~~
rch
ADUs and Rooms in owner occupied homes can be much more affordable, but people
offering a portion of their primary residence to renters are subject to the
same restrictions as houses that are part of a landlord's asset portfolio.
Move the needle on existing regulations and landlords acquire even more
housing stock and raise rents across the board.

Equity based cooperatives and land trusts should be getting more attention in
Boulder, since both have solid track records of providing permanently
affordable housing elsewhere. Instead, local activists are following the
national trend of pushing measures designed to facilitate the large scale
transfer of private property into corporate rental portfolios.

------
tfehring
Madison is a strange example to hold up considering that there's a drastic,
almost Boulder-esque shortfall in housing supply, mostly driven by NIMBYism.
It's still an awesome city - I'm in the process of moving there - but I know
lots of people who've gotten priced out of the city itself, despite (or maybe
because of) the coolness of its eclectic combination of architecture.

------
nickthemagicman
I have a double and what I love about my double is that after it's paid off,
one side will pay off property taxes, insurance, etc. All of that meta
financial cruft that comes with owning a house is ameliorated. Cruft that can
often add up to close to the price of rent.

------
cwhiz
Why does this strongtowns crap keep showing up on HN? All of their "evidence"
is just anecdotal information, none of their claims are backed by any actual
evidence, and their whole site is designed to get you to pay money to become a
member and/or buy their books. It's not technical, and it's not even news.

What is it doing here?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
What is it doing here? The same thing that everything else is doing here:
someone submitted it. And enough people find it interesting that it makes the
front page.

Some of us want to _live_ , not just code. We care about how we live, not just
what we write.

Mind you, I myself don't find these strongtowns articles particularly
compelling. But enough people do for them to "keep showing up on HN". And I'm
not going to say that those who find them interesting are wrong.

~~~
cwhiz
If you want nonsense, go to an actual news site. This site was created for a
specific purpose.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
From the guidelines:

> What to Submit

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
> more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
> answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

You may be a "good hacker", but you're not the only one. Enough people here
find this stuff interesting that it's within the purpose of the site.

------
flerchin
The legislation followed popular opinion. The housing was built to satisfy
market demand. If no one bought single family homes, fewer would be built.
Every person was a kid, and raising kids is by far more comfortable in single
family homes.

~~~
apsec112
Most people don't vote in local elections. ~99.9% of the US (by land area)
bans multi-family housing, and those laws mostly come from city councils and
neighborhood committees dominated by wealthy, retired homeowners.

~~~
choeger
Interesting. In Germany you see kind of the opposite: The (often wealthy and
well-connected) people in local politics vote for whatever drives the prices
for real estate upwards. Guess who owns the real estate that is not (yet)
allowed for building?

~~~
khuey
They vote for higher real-estate prices but that doesn't in general require
multifamily housing, scarcity works just as well.

~~~
choeger
Well, say you have 1000m^2 to sell. In Germany, in a relatively dense area,
you can build two one-family homes on that real estate. Considering the
financing requirements and the relatively small size of the plots you can sell
the real estate for maybe 600k in total, assuming that a family can pay 600k
for a house and real estate and 50% goes into the latter. (This is a rough
estimate for generic metropolitan areas, might be much lower in areas where
there is place to build, might also be much higher in some areas.)

If you do a multi-family home, you can easily build up to 8 town houses or
largish apartments on that same area. Say you sell each of these for 500k,
leaving the family a good argument to move into this more dense configuration.
Even if the construction costs stay the same (they won't), that would leave
you with 1.6M for the whole real estate.

