Future of American Dream 🏡

✅ Lawn
✅ Driveway that fits two cars
✅ Two baths
✅ Not sharing walls with neighbor
- That driveway does not fit two cars
  
  One of them in the pic has two cars. Of course, the ass is sticking into the road a bit but ehhhh it counts.
  
  Bottom right seems to be able to squeeze two cars.
- √ same price as a real house for an adult

To me, a european, those urban areas packed with the same house over and over again always seem so depressing and boring. Is there any variety or does it look like this for ~~kilometers~~ miles?
- Variety is against the HOA, you don't want to go against the HOA.
  
  HOAs should be a thing of the past.
- I agree, and these houses look way too small and overpriced for a comfortable family setting, but stating that identical homes packed next to each other is purely an American thing is disingenuous. It’s a byproduct of capitalism, which supersedes national borders
  
  In Chicago there is one block just north of Wrigley Field that was a demo for a planned community decades ago. Each of the 10 or so connected houses on one side of the street are all different. The opposite side of the street is identical, but mirrored. That means the northernmost house on the west side of the street is identical to the southernmost house on the east side of the street. The effect is that it looks like a very unique and natural community in spite of being completely planned and regimented.
  
  Those don't look as weird because they're connected. They look like a single building, which is okay to have a consistent style
  
  It seems like a huge waste of vertical space. If they condensed all of that into a small 8-10 story building, they could create green spaces all around it for everyone to enjoy.
- Not only is it boring, it's made in the shittiest way possible. It's the American way, after all. You want properly installed outlets? What are you, some sort of royalty or something? Properly sealed windows? Look at Mrs. Moneybags over here. The siding is falling off the house? What did you expect from a $350k home?
- This isn't what most houses are like in the US. Sure, there's a lot like them, but places that don't have a strong HOA (most places) become very diverse after a while. My home was built in the 60s and was initially very similar to the ones around it. Over time each house gets changed little by little and every house becomes unique.
- It really just keeps on going. It's hell
- Generally it is each subdivision, but it can be larger groups of homes like that.
  They are depressing, but people buy them because they're generally new construction and represent good value. You get over it if it saves you enough $$$.
  
  I've yet to go into any new construction that wasn't shit compared to the 100 year old house I grew up in. That place was rock solid. The only problem with it was a roof leak that was actually from the extension my parents had done on the 2nd floor (aka new construction). By comparison every time I go visit their new house they've uncovered some new shoddy workmanship from the shit builders that inly focus on cranking out houses as fast and cheap as possible. I hate so much that they sold their old place for this garbage I'm going to have to fix when I inherit it.

What a poor use of land and space for housing. Why not increase density with at a minimum a duplex or triplex? This is ridiculous.
- A lot of people don’t want to share walls.
  “Hey uh, I have 3 loud kids and a wife who is loud during sex. Wanna be my neighbor?”
  
  Then maybe develop the concept of a brick wall and social skills.
  These types of houses won't protect you from noise. You're never more than 5m away from your neighbors and only separated by cardboard. You will hear them.
  I'm currently living in an apartment building from 1910 or so, made from proper bricks. Hardly ever even notice that I have neighbors.
  
  Yeah man not just that, but if the neighbor has a bug problem, great now I have a bug problem.
  
  A lot of people have very narrow lived experiences, but are happy to talk about imagined experiences.
  
  What about neighbors who mow their own way 8am on a Sunday with their kids running around and screaming outside or their teenager blasting loud music out their bedroom window or every neighbor using some kind of noisy power tool because there's always someone doing renovations of some kind?
  It's not because you live in a separate house that you will automatically have peace and quiet.
  
  My current place is super quiet. I essentially never hear anyone and it's quite relaxing.
  I'm on the sixth floor in a building with 100 units, it's just built well.
  
  Exactly. If I'm working nights and need to use power tools in my home? No problem. In an apartment? Good luck
  
  Because three kids in this house would be whisper-quiet next door.
  
  Reading this thread has taught me that soundproofing a shared wall isn‘t possible in America.
- Not to mention half of the lot and interior square footage is dedicated to a car.
  
  Right??? How about increased density with amenities at a maximum 15 minute walk distance and public transportation?
  Where the fuck are the trees in that picture? Where's the shade? How far are things if everybody needs a car? How bad must traffic be in the morning and evening at rush hour? It's just a concentrated suburb with all of its problems intensified.
- I live in a duplex. The downstairs neighbor is my roommates's mom and she's the most fucked up miserable person I've met in my life. Don't be like me.
  
  Just because you happen to have a bad experience doesn't mean it's the same everywhere.
  My last residence was a triplex. While the walls were thin, the tenants and the landlord living on the bottom floor were great. I made some good friends there. We looked out for each other. Had a real sense of community.
- Texas in general is a poor use of land.

Why would you want 2 baths for a single bedroom house....
- Have you lived with another human that needs to shit at same time as you? It definitely happens.
  
  Just sit on the other’s lap and drop that double decker deuce, my friend. Also saves water with a single flush.
  
  Just get 1 bathroom with 2 toilets
  
  This can be solved by the technology of just waiting a few minutes until they are done.
  If you have the space for two bathrooms then sure, go ahead, but the argument here is that there isn't really space for it.
- You can have a separate half bath for guests.
  
  That would be 1.5 bathrooms, not 2.
- when you and your wife both have to take a massive shit in the morning
- One for the ensuite, one for the "main" bathroom when guests are over or whatever. I assume there's still a living room of sorts.
  
  You are right, check out the 3D tour:
  https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/7117-Elm-Cv-San-Antonio-TX-78244/2053945461_zpid/
  Looks really cramped...
- Do you people not have guests over? Do you want them traipsing upstairs and using your bath room?
  
  Uhm yeah? In Europe it's pretty common to just have one bathroom and just... Wait for the other person to be done.

- It's actually pretty big if it weren't for the lawn and driveway.
- Them's freedumb younuts to the laikes a you...

What's the use of having 2 bathrooms when there is only 1 bedroom?
- If one half of a couple has IBS, a second bathroom is a necessity
  
  100% bowl busting mood
- If you're a couple, you can both use a toilet at the same time.
  If you live alone you might want a separate bathroom for guests. The second one is possibly a half bathroom.
  
  Understood. But with such limited space, wouldn't the home be better served with a guest room/study instead of a 2nd bathroom?
- Right? We were just fine with 3 bedrooms and one bathroom for decades.
- A bathroom doubles as an inebriated guest bedroom
- The bedroom is obviously upstairs and would have an adjacent bathroom. Assuming they have guests, the builders have put in a downstairs bathroom for them.
  
  Bold of you to assume there's room for more than just the bedroom up there

What is amazing is that people would rather live like this, and have four feet of grass between them and their neighbors, than in a place twice as big with a shared wall...
- I think they're referring to terraced housing
- To each their own. I do hear all sorts of sounds coming from my neighbors in my apartment. From moaning to phone alarm vibrating, sounds of various objects hitting each other, even arguing sometimes.
  Not to mention some people open their doors and windows when cooking, allegedly for the draft to get in and get the smell out of the kitchen (don't know why they do this, just open your damn window and that's it). And when the air goes the opposite way, the hallway of the building is a mix of various smells of whatever they cook.
  Oh, by the way, did I mention I need to take the elevator to reliably reach my apartment?
  
  here in sweden we do this amazing thing called "actually building things solidly", our apartment blocks are largely solid concrete and the only thing i hear from my neighbours is when their kids drop what i can only assume to be anvils onto the floor, which results in a faint thunk.

You can’t buy a shed for that price where I live. An apartment of that size would be $2500+ per month.
I don’t want this to be the future but it’s better than a future where no one can buy anything at all.
- Exactly. I saw the price and the sq ft. and I was like, damn, I wish that wasn't in Texas.
  I fucking hate the real estate market where I live. So do all my roommates.
  
  My wife and I finally decided to take the leap and buy back in 2022. We had been waiting for years for the “market to correct” and finally just decided that we needed to stop waiting. Within months interest rates became unaffordable, and they’ve only gotten worse since then. We would not be able to reasonably afford our current home with current interest rates. It’s insane. The whole thing is rigged.

"Listen, you're gonna live as the markets dictate. The labour markets, the consumer markets... are you listening?"
me, lighting the Molotov coctail
Ah-huh. Continue.
- You don't have to be a wizard to cast a fireball
  
  I wouldn't be surprised to find a fair amount of computer wizards skulking around Lemmy

The absolute state of American urban planning. Jesus.

US-americans: apartments suck, I want a single house
Also US-americans:
Meanwhile, in the civilised world:

The houses are so close together and have so little yard I don't see why they didn't just turn them into townhouses.
- Probably local planning restrictions, they're quite fucked up in the states.
  
  Plus, people are obviously superstitious about shared walls.

Honestly not a bad deal if you live alone. Make an offer for 130k and settle for 145k then get approved for a loan with APR around 5% and you could be making monthly payments under 600 USD for 20 years. That's a lot lower than rent, I'll tell you that, and you can get your equity back at the end when you move.
Only issue is the loan term, variable property value, and if you're actually buying the land or just the abode.
- Not bad by today's horrid standards
  Ftfy
  
  What would you propose is a reasonable deal, then?
- Don't forget the mortgage insurance for several hundred a month if you're not able to put that 30k down to pass the 20% thresshold.
  
  PMI would be roughly $70/mo in the example they posted.
- Cool now you’re only locked into a closet for the next 20 years
  
  You can sell before your mortgage is repaid, and when you do you get to keep what is left after repaying the bank. It's called equity.
  
  I live in an 800sqft home by myself. 1 bed, 1 bath. I have plenty of space.
- just get an apartment holy shit
  
  That would probably be more expensive.
  
  Fuck ownership! Rent everything!
- You're not getting 5% APR on a fixed rate.
  
  It's unlikely at this exact moment, for sure, but USA national average 30 year rate was below that less than two years ago, 2.65% in 2021, and it was below 5% for almost the entirety of the 2010s.

The second car in the bottom driveway is partly in the road. This first cat is either partly in a garage, or missing. The driveways are so close that there is no street parking. I have concerns about buses (think school, not public transit) and garbage day.
- If you look at the front view of the house, it's clear the roof overhangs the driveway by about a meter.

That price makes no sense.
- Of course, it does! Tiny homes are hip now, and they still want to fuck us for every penny we have.

I thought this was a farce. It is real
- "Housing is cheaper in Texas!"

Why 2 bath? What idiot came up with this?
- Two people who share bedroom can use bathrooms at the same time
- I suppose it also has a living room, so the 2nd bath is a toilet for guests?
- They took the enshitment too literally

What the actual fuck is that?
It's like a fully detached apartment you can buy.
Honestly, I'd rather have one of those shipping container homes. Above that, I'll live in a fucking trailer park.
- Yeah it seems insulting that they could have boxed that space out for extra room. But they didn't. Instead they gave it an artsy flair. Like we're supposed to be happy with the damn things.

Why would you need two bathrooms if you've only got one bedroom??
- Two people living together and getting ready at the same time. Not the end of the world but can be helpful.

For fucks sake just drop four shipping containers, rig them, dry wall them, and walk away. 150k for that and it's got a little fancy art fling to it? That's fucking insulting.

I mean my first house was a two bed, 1 bath 900sq ft cape code in a much cheaper market. I paid 100k for it in 2005.
Honestly that seems like a pretty good deal for a first home. If you can come up with 10% down you’ll be paying ~1500 a month. Refi when rates go down and you could be close to 1k/mo.

~~Literally half the house is a garage.~~ This is fucking hell.
It's not even a garage.

people will complain about being forced to live in pods and then willingly live in places like this
- Willingly is a strong word when the housing market is so fucked
- Maybe those aren’t the same people.

That's not terrible honestly. The price will vary widely depending on where it is. It seems like a good low maintenance place.
- Yeah I don't see the issue here. My 2 bedroom condo costs more and doesn't have parking or a yard. I'd jump on an opportunity to own a place like that if it was in a walkable neighborhood or on a public transportation line.
  
  It's not a 2 br. It's 600 square feet.
  But agreed: housing is housing. 160k seems extortionate but that's housing.

I love that Americans would still rather have crappy rectangles of lawn that they never use for anything than build up to the edge of the plot and have more rooms. Those plots are probably slightly bigger than that of my three bedroom terrace house.
- Blame the zoning laws for that. They require minimum setbacks on each side and a maximum floor area to land area ratio.

That garage door is way to small and they forgot to build the appropriate house.
- It just highlights how absurdly much space cars take up compared to people. Residents could have 25% more room to live if they didn't have to dedicate the space to car parking. (That parking is likely required by law as a minimum parking requirement in the zoning code, by the way, so it's entirely possible the person who ends up living there might not even actually want it.)

I'm begging developers to stop.
The problem isn't "not enough houses," the problem is rich fuck "investors" buying up all the empty houses to sit on them
- No, don't stop building. The problem is rich fucks and their politician friends who won't implement any meaningful rules to curb the behaviour.
  I'm a fan of the 'y'all can have one' rules for home ownership. Anything after the first should come with cumulative tax penalties, +10% to the total value of your property assessment per property should be sufficient to start. So someone with three $1M homes is looking at a property tax bill of 130%.
  While I am dreaming, I'd like a pony.
  
  No, don’t stop building
  If we're talking about dreaming, I'd like a world where humans keep to relatively small and dense habitable areas anf leave the rest of the natural world alone
- We do legitimately need more housing. The population is always growing. The thing is we need sensible mid rise buildings with 1,000 sq ft 2 bedroom units. The hilarious thing is we could build them fast and cheap using modular techniques but the rent would still be horrendous because of the investors.

Pro: Can walk to Whataburger and Gold's Gym
Con: Literally directly underneath high voltage wires

Lennar is an insanely bad builder. They have no quality control. Whole neighborhoods with out of spec engineering and they rely on people being unable or unwilling to fight them.

It's like a suburban tract home developer with a case of brain worms tried to build townhomes based solely on a verbal description he got from space alien visiting Brooklyn for the first time, relayed over a cell phone with one bar of reception.

They're so tiny. They'd might as well make an apartment complex or multi-family homes.
- at the very least put them into cottage clusters with centralized parking lots facing the road, that wins you a significant amount of space efficiency and makes it a way nicer area to be in.
  seriously, look up photos of cottage clusters, it baffles me that anyone could say that's not the ideal way to do single family housing.

What's the dumb obsession with 2 bathrooms?
- I've lived in several 1-toilet apartments in my life and am now a firm believer that all 1-toilet tenants have a god-given right to access to a backup toilet (such as in a laundry room or rec room on the apartment complex's campus)
  a toilet is a VERY unfun thing to not have a backup of and suddenly it's not working
- You and your significant other eat the same crappy food together and need to poop at the same time

We need some 1500sqft 2br/2ba homes near major metro areas for under 400k. In today’s economy that would be achievable for most people.
The only options near major cities are 2500+sqft homes or 650sqft condos going for $700k+.
I don’t think I have ever seen a 2br/2ba detached home… it’s either shoebox condos or 4+ bedrooms going for the same ridiculous 700k+ price tag.
- The missing middle. The last city I lived in had a bunch of houses in the 1200sqft 2br/1ba range but they were built before 1950 and are now in the "historic" part of town that is zoned to prevent redevelopment. It's also the closest to the city center where many jobs are located and events like festivals take place. So it's a very desirable place to live and houses here sell for $1M+.
  The next ring out from the historic district was built between the 50s and early 2000s and is largely 2000+sqft homes on larger plots of land. Large plots of land are desirable so those go for $800k+.
  After the 2008 financial crisis we started building our third ring of housing with humongous "luxury" houses with 6+br. They're on tiny plots of land with maybe 6ft separating the houses, but since they have large sqft, granite countertops, and faux marble tiles in the bathroom they go for $700k+.
  Oh yeah and housing has been underbuilt since the 1970s so the vacancy rate is under 1%, and it's a smaller city (~200,000 people) so the job opportunities aren't plentiful and the best paying. I have no idea how so many of these houses are being paid for. I bet a lot of people that have bought since 2010 are house poor. Or a lot of them are cruising on super low interest rates.
- That's by design.

If you would leave out that damn car and made the house taller, you would have like 3 times the space, which is totally enough. Not for that money though.

No gutters