Our house is on about 2,000 square feet. The only downside is we can't have chickens.
Also, when my neighbor put in a 50,000 watt outdoor light pointing at our windows (on a motion sensor so easily triggered that walking inside our house could set it off), we had to be more than a little rude.
"Just shut the blinds" didn't work because the light would go on when it was still daylight and we were unwilling to live in a cave.
Fifty THOUSAND watt? Good lord. Sounds like it should have scorched the paintwork.
Lighthouses don't use that much - I remember being amazed to learn that there were some Scottish lights that got by with just a 100W bulb (and a colossal Fresnel lens).
I'm guessing. It was not possible for us to eat dinner without putting foil over the windows. The curtains we had at the time were not able to block it.
Googling around, it was probably 5,000 lumens. They sell them as security lights for suburban houses with 1/2 acre yards.
Anyway, I live in a dense neighborhood with easy access to public transit. It's very nice.
How it got this way is that property taxes used to be based on the value of the land only, not the land plus the building.
I am irritable about tiny homes -- they seem to me like a cutesy idea that's plausibly going to be housing that doesn't last and doesn't provide a reasonable level of protection from the weather. But everything else seems good, and maybe I'm wrong in detail about tiny houses.
It seems one big development standard that's treated almost like a third rail in Austin, and may not be touched by these rounds however good they are otherwise, is impervious cover - how much of the lot is buildings, driveways, concrete, anything hard as opposed to dirt or landscaping. Treated as a flood control measure, but dates to the 70's with the rest of the downzoning.
When I was back home in Austin, I met many aging friends of my parents who were there when they came in the seventies. One, an architect who's following my work, said he remembered a civil engineer friend who had a tirade against the impervious cover standard as rejecting the idea that people adapt to environmental concerns collectively and demanding a solution that involves everyone standing apart. Another boasted that back in the day on the planning commission he had rejected so many apartment buildings, and he did those developers a favor because they would have gone bankrupt as some are in today's boom (where rents are down 12%). Some my age who married into the family wondered if Houston's lack of such standards led to their flood problems (doubt it).
I am irritable about tiny homes -- they seem to me like a cutesy idea that's plausibly going to be housing that doesn't last and doesn't provide a reasonable level of protection from the weather.
If you mean the TV/magazine version of tiny homes, that are ostentatiously small like 200 sq.ft., yes, except maybe as supportive housing for the homeless. If you mean ADUs, those are up to all the relevant codes and are essentially just modestly-sized houses (500-1,000 sq.ft. usually).
No, they're dumb, you're correct. They protect you from weather, though, because they have a proper foundation (according to the Heebieville land development code.)
My belief is that you must have so few possessions to live successfully in one that you must be wealthy enough to purchase all sorts of single use items that you then donate to goodwill.
You need 500 square feet a person, a bit less for larger numbers of people because hallways, bathrooms, kitchens, and such can be shared. That is, you can do six people in 2,500 square feet but not two people in 1,000 square feet.
Take a stand for sustainability by having a home you can't shower in, & drive to the gym instead.
13: I disagree. You can fit a perfectly good 2-bedroom into 800 sq. ft. Not everyone will choose it, but plenty of people are fine with it as a tradeoff for lower rent. (It creates a bit more need for good outdoor space to roam in, but everyone needs that anyway.)
I know people do live as a couple in less than 1,000 square feet, but if done for long periods of time, it won't last. Within eighty years nearly all will have separated or one will have died.
Some examples of such 2BRs (at the bottom of the page). One of them is even 762 sq.ft.!
Or this manufactured 2BR/1BA, 747 sq.ft.
Out of all the HOME changes, the only one Heebieville council is open to is the tiny homes. But it still has to be on a regular size lot because otherwise you're destroying the character of the neighborhood.
The first wave of CA ADU ordinances back in the 2010s (and probably in a few waves earlier), they were approved on paper with development standards making them infeasible in practice - so, to make them look like they're addressing the issue and nothing else. Like, you can build a 600-sq-ft ADU if you continue to respect 20ft setbacks and build on no more than 40% of your lot including the primary home, and only if you're the owner-occupant.
My area is full of houses with like 1,200 to 1,700 square feet, including duplexes and other semi detached. There are a few small apartment buildings and a few larger houses. But it's mostly quiet.
The other thing that frustrates me is that we do have denser zonings, but developers don't pick them. They pick the safest, most copy-paste sprawl design, out in the middle of nowhere, and then go to cities and ask to be annexed in. (And for some fucking reason, the cities say yes.)
Here, developers who build outside the city limits generally do not want annexed. They fight it, or would fight it if state law didn't make it impossible to annex things anyway.
I think there was some battle in the Austin area (or at TX state level?) where originally developers tried to be unincorporated but had a way to freeride on city resources, and that got clamped down on / it became easier for cities to charge them their share.
In Austin metro, although there's plenty of sprawl still, amazingly 40% of new homes in recent years have been multifamily. When I heard about their supply boom I originally thought, that has to be sprawl helping prices but not sustainability. But not, they're getting much better at infill!
Also the Austin metro area has built more housing in the last year than all of LA County, which is 4x bigger.
We just passed a "Cottage Court Ordinance," which allows you to build as many up-to 1250 square foot housing units as you can fit on any lot in the city that has public water and sewer.
We have a family of six plus dog in ~1500* sq feet. Before we had kids it was two of us plus somewhat larger dog in 580 sq feet for 5 years.
*We have an unfinished basement for storage of bikes, hockey gear, extra freezer, etc. Also some assorted crawl spaces like a loft that is max four feet high but the kids don't spend that much time up there.
The city is debating a 5-story allowed everywhere rule as long as the structure complies with other rules, but since the other rules are things like floor to lot area and setbacks I'm not sure how much of a difference it will make. Regardless the usual NIBMYs are freaking out of course.
We've got 1900 for 6 people, 3 cats. Storage under the house for anything weatherproof that can be locked down, and a mezzanine that we absolutely cannot get the kids to step foot in, for some godforsaken reason, even when I decked it out like a cute reading nook and lego area, so now it is just storage.
If we did exist someone would have picked us up off the ground by now.
The kids probably find the mezzanine too liminal.
They're just sick of seeing what John Malkovich is up to.
(I saw him walking down the street last fall, he has a house around here)
We've got 3 in 1300 square feet plus unfinished basement.
The main floor of my house is 1100 sq with three bedrooms. The basement is 95% finished so we have a lot of room, but the kids have annexed most of it for toys. So many toys.
Our basement is all spiders and storage. Plus some mice.
Snakes can take care of your mouse problem.
The mice eat the spiders, I assume. Something does.
Tiny homes make sense for vacation rentals in touristy rural areas. Instead of pushing out residents to convert their residence to an airbnb, locals can supplement their income by putting a tiny home on their property. And it's much cheaper to have something pre-fabulated in a city and delivered out to the middle of nowhere than to try to build in the middle of nowhere. We've stayed at several in Scotland (Skye, Oban, Sandhaven (4: near the excellent Museum of Scottish Lighthouses!)). I don't think they make much sense outside of that specific scenario though.
We used to have millipedes, but we redid our sump system and they are gone now. I don't think we have a breeding population of mice inside. They run in through the garage when it's cold.
I assumed all houses in Texas were at least 5000 square feet. Why would HGTV lie to me?
37: If I find the right bit of forest near me, that's what I'll do. There's not usually enough actual dirt to build a cob house in the mountains of PA.
Also kind of stayed a month kind of a tiny home in Seacoast NH, which is a similarly overtouristed area. Though there it wasn't a prefab tiny home and instead was a refurbished old beach hut.
This is not strictly on-topic, but it's as close as we'll get for sharing this thing I heard about recently. I know a guy who lives in a town that hosts a major golf tournament. He said that corporate sponsors pay bonkers money for nice houses that can accommodate a group. So he and his family keep a second set of house goods in the attic (decorations, linens, towels, etc...) and it takes them about a month each year to re-stage the house in preparation for renting it out. This sounds like an incredible pain, but he said that in the one week it's rented out, they make their mortgage, insurance, and property taxes for the entire year.
25-27. I have a 3 bedroom with 2 bonus rooms, so I suppose you could have 4 kids here each with their own room in 1880 sq ft, but the septic says 3 bedroom only. I woukd feel that 2600 4 bedroom plus office is the biggest SFH I would ever want. Assuming a basement for storage and a garage.
42: I have a classmate from high school who owns a house in Nantucket that his family had. I'm sure the taxes are crazy high, but he gets $40k/ week. I'm sure the house is worth millions, but Nantucket has low property taxes, so they are only like $13k. Which is about what mine are.
There once was a man from Nantucket,
Whose house was worth a whole bucket.
He said with a grin, as he topped up his gin,
My property taxes are easy to budget.
It's probably not quite as ridiculous, but we could probably make a few thousand dollars renting our house out a few days for graduation. But it's just so much work.
11: Right, ADUs are terrific in general. It's the adorable shed-type tiny houses that make me irritable, and of course there's not really a clean line between the two.
Around 600 sq feet for 2 people (no dog allowed) with a locker in the basement was tight and stressful. We needed to get a storage locker, because we have winter tires.
ADUs are fine, but I want mixed use townhouses built next to my local commuter rail station so that we can get a bike path and a coffee shop there.
They're tiny and adorable, but also they're manufactured, and they're allowed in a lot of scenarios where trailers are banned.
(46 was me.)
47: I think the dividing line is whether it's boasted or marketed as a "tiny home", because that's usually for people looking for a particular aesthetic or experience. Most proper ADUs are just... homes.
All Season radials save on housing.
When my parents had snow tires, the garage stored the unused set.
When my parents had snow tires, the garage stored the unused set.
One of the big tire places here used to do that, which worked great until they suddenly went out of business and no one could retrieve their tires.
What goes around doesn't come around.
54-55: I've heard that' pretty common in Winnipeg.
I often think of myself as density-friendly, but 27 is mind-boggling. I often feel cramped in a similar space with half as many people. How big is that not-weatherproof storage under the house (ours is about 100 square feet, and only sort of weatherproof, but then that means something different in DC than in Texas) or your backyard (ours is about 275 square feet)?
There were six of us growing up and we had about 2,200 square feet upstairs, plus a full basement that was unfinished but still had places to play or read. My family needs to spread out.
Yeah we AirBnBed said 1500 sq foot to groups of up to 12 (2 per bedroom plus couch/futon) for $1000+ per night for graduations and HOCR (had a whole Swedish 8+ women's crew team stay there.) Which, on a sq ft per person basis, is like a tiny house.
We used to find somewhere else to go for those weekends and made the difference in our trip cost vs rental as profit. But it's a pain to set up especially when you're living there and need to put your things away so we stopped doing it.
42: if Salt Lake City gets the Olympics I should probably rent the house out.
4 people in 1200 sq ft felt luxuriously spacious, but that's NYC apartment standards.
58: It's the footprint of the house, since we raised it off the ground. So 1900 sq ft. Fairly dense with cement piers, but plenty of room to store more stuff if we accumulated it, but I'm not sure what else we'd put there. It's tools, bikes, kayaks, SUP, etc. One five-seater bike.
Also keep in mind that it's only 3 bedrooms, and they're not that large, so there's plenty of communal living space. Which is good since only the littlest Geebie is capable of enjoying being alone.
On point 2 of the OP: Apparently a Jewish organization was worried because the nearly elected president of Mexico is Jewish and publicly thanked Jesus. But it turns out she actually thanked Jesús, her husband. I'm pretty sure that's not a joke, but I can't find a real citation.
The same image has been reskeeted twice, so I'm calling it confirmed.
It's true. This is her original tweet, and here's a screenshot of the co-chair of Democratic Majority for Israel misinterpreting it. (He seems to have deleted the original.)
Why would he delete his best joke ever?
I had seen some screenshots of people saying accusatorily she "thanked Jesus" but thought they might be randos. I looked back and one of the big ones seems to be Todd Richman, co-chair of Democratic Majority for Israel. I don't think it's a fake screenshot because I found a thread where he had deleted a post that from surrounding context seems to have been that.
Possibly just Richman - I think I saw the same screenshots linked in 70, where the first of the two images is just her original tweet.
The Richman tweet was definitely live when I first saw it, so yes, it's real.
She thanked "Jesús, mi esposo". "Esposo" could mean anything.
Like that guy named Hermano, on Arrested Development. Could be anyone.
No spoilers. I'm still on the first season.
I'm having just the worst "get disappointed by someone new" humbug reaction to Sheindlin. A relatively young Jewish climate scientist becomes the first female president of Mexico? I don't even want to find out how this goes wrong. I literally can't bring myself to read about it.
64: Maybe it's just me. I've thought of needing more space in the house because the kid is growing up, but maybe the real problem is me working from home full-time. I get a bit stir-crazy.
61 is only relatively young when the comparison is the current US race.
Sheinbaum. Not observant, not particularly young (or old, for a head of state). It'll go wrong because she's beholden to AMLO.
Oh good grief, thank you for the corrections.
She's more observant than the head of Democratic Majority for Israel.
At 61, I'm going to start the Pacific Crest Trail. Maybe.
I had a vague stupid thought in my head, I'd been away from the computer for most of the day, and I decided to post without fact-checking a thing because that's efficiency. My mental acuity at 61 is going to be exceptional.
No one could blame you. Climate scientists all look the same.
Good news, they already built it so you don't need to start it yourself.
And building a climate scientist takes for fucking ever.
It's probably mostly just learning math.
Peña is younger than Sheinbaum (and was 16 years younger upon taking office).
Hey, this is cool: last I checked, Mexico officially had same-sex marriage by Supreme Court ruling but you had to go to a big city, usually CDMX, to get it actually issued and then sometimes had to go to court again to force your state to recognize that license. But under pressure from the current government, all states have now started issuing the licenses.
I'm about to turn 61, so I'm saying that qualifies as being young.
I used to like to explain to people that as a person born into a Jewish family you could do almost anything and other Jews would still consider you to be Jewish. For example, you could denounce Judaism and proselytize for atheism, or join Hare Krishna, or say you're a Buddhist, and other Jews would still say you were Jewish. But if you proudly announced your Jewishness, and said that you also accepted Jesus as the messiah, then other Jews would be outraged and absolutely refuse to accept you as a Jew. I'm not sure how marrying a guy named Jesus fits into this schema.
I don't see why it would be a problem. Unless he's a triplet.
I thought that "Jesus" and "Joshua" were different forms of the same name. And you could marry a "Joshua" without any doubt of your Judaism.
Though I bet if you went "Hey, Zeus!" and thunderbolts actually appeared from the sky, someone would have questions about your Judaism.
97: No, I don't think so.
Of course the "other Jews" I'm referring to are secular liberal Jews not the kind of Jews that let their rabbi or Donald Trump tell them who is Jewish.