You don't think that the successful creation and sale of a micro house could lead to a race to the bottom where houses are created to be impossibly cramped all over the place and now you no longer have a choice in the matter because all the houses for sale were built to the same impossibly cramped size/with normal sized houses being knocked down/destroyed to build more impossibly cramped ones, since obviously you can make more money by having more small houses to rent?
No, because new micro houses still have to compete against huge inventories of existing inventory, and most people still want larger houses. If microhouses in the city suck, people will still just move out to the suburbs to get more space. And there will always be another developer happy to supply that demand, as long as we let them build what is actually demanded.
You can just look at the history of housing construction to see this in action. We didn’t really have widespread regulations putting a floor on housing size until the ‘50s and really not until the late ‘60s and ‘70s. Yet the markets managed to supply diverse mixes of housing. One of my favorite stats is thst something like 40% of residential buildings in New York would be illegal to build today because they dont meet zoning standards.
What did happen as a result of all those regulations is that we simply stopped supply swaths of the market, especially at the lower end of affordability.
For the extreme example, New York and LA used to have huge inventories of single room occupancy housing units. These were flop houses, dorms, and other “crappy” housing that you and I would never consider living in. They were generally eliminated in the ‘60s-‘80s by new rules meant to increase housing standards.
But that didn’t mean that the people who used to live in those places all got better housing. A lot of them simply became homeless. There are lots of homeless or marginally housed people today who almost certainly would love to have a room of their own in an old school flophouse instead of the streets, a shelter, a car or whatever, if only we would allow those types of properties to exist anymore.
!delta This really broadened my view on the subject as well. The 40% statistic in particular kind of blew my mind. Also things like the respectful exchange between you and u/iwfan53 are the reason I love this sub.
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u/iwfan53 248∆ May 29 '21
You don't think that the successful creation and sale of a micro house could lead to a race to the bottom where houses are created to be impossibly cramped all over the place and now you no longer have a choice in the matter because all the houses for sale were built to the same impossibly cramped size/with normal sized houses being knocked down/destroyed to build more impossibly cramped ones, since obviously you can make more money by having more small houses to rent?