People are living in pod houses, only due to metropolitan convergence and the consequent increase in the cost of land they've been stacked on top of one another, called condos and are sold for multiples of the proposed Futuro.
Last winter my wife and I took our daughter sledding at a nearby hill. There were a bunch of other kids and parents with, as usual, a variety of things used to ride on.
One of the fastest "sleds" was a mildly curved fibreglass oval, just the right size for an adult or a couple of kids to sit on. It was a Futuro window, from the factory that made them! More precisely, I think it was part of a mold for a window, since the inner surface was pretty rough, and as I said it was fibreglass. So while the Futuro never took off as a ski lodge, or otherwise, it's at least good for getting downhill in a hurry.
The factory that manufactured the elements back in the day was apparently somewhere nearby, and if you know people in manufacturing, some of them are the type to never throw anything away...
Pre-fab houses exist, even pretty affordable ones. But as long as land is worth as much as it is, it makes no sense to have the house on said land cost less than a certain percentage of the total value. Hence why homes still cost what they do.
In many urban and suburban parts of the USA there's specific ordinances against manufactured housing, because of shoddily built singlewide and doublewide "mobile homes" that people who already own property in the area don't want put in place, for fear of driving down property values.
Unfortunately this also tends to encompass the definition of many higher end manufactured homes, or even prefab/modular housing that might cost more than a stick built 1600 sq ft bungalow.
Excuse the stereotypes in this observation but it's kinda funny that (some) Americans firmly believe that they have the right to own whatever guns they wish, that if my neighbor doesn't have health insurance that's his problem but woe betide him if he dares live in an ugly home.
There are more civilian-owned guns than people in the US. The exact number isn't known but let's ballpark it very conservatively at 400,000,000. There are about 13,000 homicides by firearm each year, including justified ones but let's also conservatively ignore those. Now to be extremely conservative let's make the ridiculous assumption that those homicides are evenly distributed throughout gun-owning population, and not correlated to any particular individuals, demographics, or social circumstances.
So then having assumed guns are the problem in the first place, and not say, violent urban gangs, your neighbors' still only have at most a 0.00325% annual chance of being used to kill someone. I don't know what your threshold is but to me that's firmly in "not going to kill anyone" territory. A trailer next door being ugly, though, is guaranteed!
I wasn't trying to start a gun control debate. I just found the contrast between the defense of personal rights and restricting the rights of others interesting in this case.
You're right, in general a lot of people pay lip service to higher principles when it's convenient, but as soon as the issue is something they don't like then there are all kinds of vague second-order reasons why the mere potential of another person's rights are harmful and must be restricted.
Zoning laws and gun regulation are both great examples. But as another commenter pointed out I suspect that there's actually more overlap between these particular issues than otherwise, they're both hallmarks of well-off suburbanites who want protection from the rabble.
I think you're mixing and matching political sub groups to find a contradiction that mostly doesn't exist.
One of the places that gun control is popular is affluent suburbs. This is also where regressive zoning is popular. The major exception I can think of is the Southeast where gun control really isn't very popular at all outside the inner city but many affluent neighborhoods are HOA'd to hell and back.
I assure you, the hardcore libertarian "my tactical nukes are none of the government's business" types have no love for zoning.
Yeah, I think that's a good point. While the contradiction may exist when taking the country as a whole; there are few individuals for who that contradiction actually applies.
It's intended to exclude low cost housing, with the intent of excluding the poor, especially racial minorities. "Shoddiness" is just an excuse. See also: zoning.
For what it's worth, the nicest house I ever lived in was a modular home on a hillside in San Luis Obispo. Zillow has it over $600k atm.
In other places, there can be discrimination and prejudice - mobile homes are a favoured accommodation of Irish Travelers and it's illegal to use a mobile home for non-temporary accommodation in Ireland.
An interesting twist on this is in rural areas or the exurban fringe, it's common to see large multimillion dollar estates next to decaying mobile homes and middle class 3+2 ranch style homes. There seems to be very little friction between the different housing types.
This is actually the situation I'm living in. I live out in the country and while my house isn't a mobile home, it is more than 3x smaller than my neighbor's gigantic palace across the street.
I think tha market segment essentially fills a leading edge or marginal case for expansion. Ie they’re most likely to make sense where the cost of land matches their cost of manufacture. Overtime the surrounding area may get developed and this increase in value - incentivizing further improvements to the land the original manufactured homes sit upon.
Homes cost what they do because we have a wide number of policies designed to keep housing expensive (how many politicians celebrate falling house prices, after all?).
Mobile/Manufactured homes are often de facto illegal (even if they're allowed in theory they're hard to get planning on) though it depends a lot on the area. If you were allowed to buy a plot of land and plop a mobile home on it for $50k what's going to keep you working yourself to the bone? (though zoning is a somewhat different consideration from mobile homes, and there are practical reasons for not wanting a bunch of scattered houses on big lots in the middle of nowhere).
Mortgages can be difficult to obtain for mobile homes. Part of the reason is that mobile homes tend to decay and lose value over time. After a certain number of years almost no moving company will accept the risk of moving one. As a result, mortgage loan rates can be higher with less issuers to choose from. Also due to changes in regulations from the Great Recession, smaller mortgages can be very difficult to obtain. Banks don't like making home loans under $150k due to fixed costs they're not allowed to adjust for the size of the loan.
All true, not to mention that a mobile home can be stolen if you're in possession of a tractor-trailer. A bank sending someone to their now-repossessed empty site might decide not to lend on mobile homes again.
Of course, if we had a constrained supply of mobile homes like we do stick or block-built homes, the mere existence of mortgages would drive the price up. There's a weird bifurcation in the housing market between "banks will lend on this" and "you'll never get a mortgage on this" - the latter is shockingly cheap in part because it can be dodgy, but ALSO because without the availability of mortgages you face far, far, far reduced competition. This is how I ended up buying a house (stone cottage, thatched roof, needed work) for hardly more than the deposit I'd saved up before giving up on my dysfunctional city.
The cost of a house seems to always adjust to the amount of debt available to purchase it. Sweden had an average mortgage length of 140 years until recently - now capped at 105 (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/personal-banking/mortgages/swede... ) - and of course anyone who thinks "I'd like to pay my house off in 30 years" has to compete with someone who will take out a 4-generation mortgage.
But that's separate from whether or not mobile homes should be permitted - hell, I can't build a yurt without planning permission (which I'd never get).
I'm a lefty greenie type at heart and actually think a bunch of one-off houses on big lots tend to be terrible for auto-dependence, service delivery, social isolation, etc. but when we started allowing the government to restrict where people are allowed to build AND didn't ensure that it at least meets population growth (not to mention letting asset owners vote on whether to create more of said asset) we laid the seeds for our current housing predicament.
Because land usage is maximized with rectangle shaped plots, not rounded ones so pod or dome will never be popular. Same reason why they made cube shaped watermelons in Japan I I guess, to stuff as many of them as possible in containers.
Circular homes minimize the required material and the surface through which heat is lost or gained.
In normal places, there is no need to think about maximizing the land usage. People typically put a 2000 square foot house on a 10000 square foot lot. For a circular home on a square lot, that is 51 feet in diameter on a 100x100 lot. Each side has more than 24 feet to spare.
We really don't care too much about minimizing lot size. In most places, it isn't even legal to have a tiny lot. The excess can be trees or whatever, and most of us like it that way.
yeah the "pod house" was like the tv dinner of houses, a novelty product with little intrinsic value.
others like fuller's dymaxion home were explicit about why the odd shape was chosen: structural integrity in a natural disaster, maximize ratio of livable space to raw materials, economize the physical footprint, mix/max it so you can mass produce it cheaply and house the world.
The one major drawback I find in structures like these is that I miss right angles. They help me orient myself in a space. A spheroid may provide maximal volume for its surface area, but if your residents are going to be ill at ease for any reason, they'll never choose it for their home.
My late father, Malcolm Wallhead, designed an igloo-shaped hut in the 1970's, ideal for setting up in remote places to escape the pressures of city life. Even though it's rarely purchased for that purpose, they're still quite popular for short-term accommodation.
I grew up in Michigan and we would have loved having these as a kid! We built our own igloos from time to time, but this would’ve have been the ultimate winter club house. Closest we had was old ice fishing shacks.
Trivia: The Swedish Air Force bought a couple of Futuro houses, placing them on top of concrete towers to serve as observation posts on bombing ranges. Here's a document (in Swedish) with several photos, including one of a Futuro being transported by a Boeing Vertol 107 helicopter: https://docplayer.se/97545516-Futurohusen-pa-norans-fore-det...
> The bank took their house and sold it at auction for very little money. So they lost everything.
Perhaps it's a bit of an off-topic tangent but this sentence caused my ire. Why do banks always throw people under the bus when it comes to foreclosing on someone?
I can imagine that it's often about reclaiming a residual fraction of a mortgage so even a firesale auction can turn a profit but why can't they bloody damn sell a property at market rates, cover the debt and leave the rest to the debtor? Heck, even take commission for the sale!
Because everything is bound to power and not to morals or law. The latter two are only sometimes and to a varying extent hurdles to the first.
This is true in every social and political climate. Socialism doesn't make it better (actually may make it worse IMO).
That's why I believe that the only correct individual motivator should be to be free and strong. And never rely on the government, banks and other parties that can and will make you dependent. Take on as little debt as you can. Pay as little tax as possible and/or move to countries where this is possible. Possess as big and as diverse investment portfolio as you can. Reside in countries where it's allowed to possess guns and do so. Make friends with like minded individuals. Yes, I am a libertarian.
Property, physical gold and other valuables, appreciating or slowly depreciating physical goods. Financial instruments in various countries (I am not US based) etc. Of course, also on Wall Street
> And never rely on the government, banks and other parties that can and will make you dependent. [...] Reside in countries where it's allowed to possess guns and do so.
How do you obtain bullets? And food? Do you make and grow your own, and from what materials?
Quick cash. Selling at auction means guaranteed money in a matter of days. When the house is sold on the market, it can take months to sell it. In those months the bank is losing money as it's tied up in the house and not actively generating revenue. If the home owner has a mortgage of 50% against the home, it only has to sell for 50% market rate for the bank to recoup their investment fully.
The process stinks. In the case of ARM mortgages, the bank often goes through this because a balloon payment comes due. The bank essentially moves from a situation of getting money on their investment to getting nothing simply by forcing people from the home. It’d be better for everyone if the parties involved just renegotiated the deal to keep people in the house and paying their mortgage.
Many bank owned properties are listed for sale with a realtor. This is not uncommon at all. Foreclosed properties are usually listed at below market value for quick sale though. Not sure why they chose auction in this case. It might be because it was an unusual property. Any time you have an unusual structure or property it can be difficult to sell and difficult to appraise.
I would imagine that's a fairly small "market" and doesn't really reflect the broader market. It's "a" market rate.
And it sounds like this isn't a case of what people are willing to pay for it, but rather what I'm willing to sell it for: that is, the bank just wants to get rid of the house for something, even if it's highly innefficient and people were willing to pay more.
The instant cash price is going to be less than list it wait for months price, by approximately the cost of having the house sit empty for months (including the interest on the money tied up in the empty house).
If the instant cash price was less than that, savvy people looking for bargains would bid it up to that.
The recession in the early 90s in Finland was partially the result of the collapse of the USSR (Finland had exclusive access to this market, despite being a Western democracy, since WW2) but also due to a banking sector that was liberalized too quickly in the 1980s without proper legal oversight and was giving out loans and mortgages like free cocaine to a citizenry who had no real experience of managing serious debt.
People took out huge loans using their homes as collateral - either to support unviable businesses or buy that new summer cottage or boat - and were dangerously overexposed, a bit like the subprime crisis in the US in 2008. The banks of course went into panic mode and clawed back what they could. I personally know quite a few people who lost their homes in this recession, and the country took years to recover.
I'm not an economist and so this is just a second-hand account of this period but it seems similar to what happened in Iceland in the early 2000s - too little oversight from government and too much greed and naivite from the people.
because it's a bank, not a real estate agent. they want to issue loans, not sell houses. the bank typically doesn't want to foreclose a mortgage if there's any chance you could continue making payments. if they do, the best they can hope for is just getting their money back. putting the house on the market for an extended period of time (and possibly paying an agent) just increases the chance that they don't get their money back.
if you go with a smaller lender you might be able to negotiate better terms for foreclosure, but anything you require of the lender that increases their risk will be reflected in your interest rate.
When a house goes to auction and sells for very little money that says something about the house: the previous owners destroyed it. They probably took the stove, carpet, light fixtures and so on. They cut the pipes to get the sink out and left the water on while doing so: the resulting flood and the water bill are the bank's problem. Of course by the time the bank knows this the damage is done and the house is worthless.
If the owners know they are in trouble and have options and sense they will contact that bank. There are programs to skip payments (the bank makes a lot of money off these in the long run - but this is your best way to get out of a temporary problem). There are programs where the bank will let you "short sell" where the bank counts the house paid in full when you sell it for less than you owe (you lose your down payment so it isn't a good for you but it is better than the alternatives). The bank often knows of assistance for people in life trouble. None of these are possible though if you don't try to work with the bank.
Banks want their money back. They do not want to own houses. They do it - but only when they have no other options.
This may not be the case in Finland but in the US the vast majority of mortgage loans are pooled into investment vehicles/bonds that separate the loan & mortgagee from the mortgagor with the day to day servicing and rehab decisions made by a third party lowest bidding servicer having incentives different from that of the bondholders. But for the intermeddling servicer the bondholders would almost certainly come out ahead by doing workouts with struggling homeowners but the servicers lack those incentives and often make money putting the loans into forced sale forclosures. 11 years ago we in the US went through this mess without learning the lessons that would have been learned had the powers that be decided to let everyone sleep in the bed they made rather than foaming bondholder runways with the bodies of mortgagors.
A popular app for pod dwellers would be "furniture tesselator": given a selection of standard square furnishings it works out an arrangement in your curvy-walled room that maximises free floor space / minimises dust-bunny farms from the segments trapped behind the backs.
Could we also look into a roundhouse revival? Having the range in the middle heat the whole house, while grilling steak and baking bread. Perhaps find time for a cask of ale. That was the life...
You know, I wonder if this had just been a little more modular if it could have sparked something longer lasting?
Apartments are arguably this same line. You build a lot of units to maximize the number of residencies in a parcel of land. In the process, you make the units as uniform as possible. I could imagine the entire units being manufactured off site being beneficial. (Granted, I seem to recall some modern apartment complexes being built exactly this way.)
A case where something done slightly different would have leap frogged to something modern.
There's already a lot of work in "modular housing" and various sorts of "pre-fabricated" construction. It has something of a bad reputation, dating from the very early days. The UK had something of a plague of concrete panel houses that turned out to be defective: https://www.peterbarry.co.uk/blog/houses-of-non-traditional-...
There is a guy on youtube designing his own container-house in the california desert. Turns out with all the regulations etc it cost more than a 'normal' house.
That thing looks like it will lift off and fly away in any kind of windy weather. That's a huge red flag in any part of the world that has hurricanes and tornadoes.
While I think domed houses like this one, or e.g. the "Flintstone House" in Hillsborough, are very cool to look at, they strike me as rather impractical to live in, because no straight-backed furniture can be placed flush against any wall. No standard bookshelves, desks, closets, the TV needs to be curved just right, etc. No hanging paintings on the wall.
Look at the www.monolithic.com floor plans. Because the domes are large, typical rooms will have 2 or 3 straight walls. It's only the exterior wall that is curved.
The reason we're not living in pod houses or geodesic domes or yurts is probably zoning laws.
A friend of mine was able to build a geodesic dome (maybe in the 80's?) on unincorporated land. Soon afterwards a nearby city swallowed the area he lived in, and if he hadn't built it when he did, they wouldn't have allowed him to put it up.
73 comments
[ 1692 ms ] story [ 1400 ms ] threadOne of the fastest "sleds" was a mildly curved fibreglass oval, just the right size for an adult or a couple of kids to sit on. It was a Futuro window, from the factory that made them! More precisely, I think it was part of a mold for a window, since the inner surface was pretty rough, and as I said it was fibreglass. So while the Futuro never took off as a ski lodge, or otherwise, it's at least good for getting downhill in a hurry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house
Unfortunately this also tends to encompass the definition of many higher end manufactured homes, or even prefab/modular housing that might cost more than a stick built 1600 sq ft bungalow.
So then having assumed guns are the problem in the first place, and not say, violent urban gangs, your neighbors' still only have at most a 0.00325% annual chance of being used to kill someone. I don't know what your threshold is but to me that's firmly in "not going to kill anyone" territory. A trailer next door being ugly, though, is guaranteed!
Zoning laws and gun regulation are both great examples. But as another commenter pointed out I suspect that there's actually more overlap between these particular issues than otherwise, they're both hallmarks of well-off suburbanites who want protection from the rabble.
One of the places that gun control is popular is affluent suburbs. This is also where regressive zoning is popular. The major exception I can think of is the Southeast where gun control really isn't very popular at all outside the inner city but many affluent neighborhoods are HOA'd to hell and back.
I assure you, the hardcore libertarian "my tactical nukes are none of the government's business" types have no love for zoning.
In other places, there can be discrimination and prejudice - mobile homes are a favoured accommodation of Irish Travelers and it's illegal to use a mobile home for non-temporary accommodation in Ireland.
Mobile/Manufactured homes are often de facto illegal (even if they're allowed in theory they're hard to get planning on) though it depends a lot on the area. If you were allowed to buy a plot of land and plop a mobile home on it for $50k what's going to keep you working yourself to the bone? (though zoning is a somewhat different consideration from mobile homes, and there are practical reasons for not wanting a bunch of scattered houses on big lots in the middle of nowhere).
Of course, if we had a constrained supply of mobile homes like we do stick or block-built homes, the mere existence of mortgages would drive the price up. There's a weird bifurcation in the housing market between "banks will lend on this" and "you'll never get a mortgage on this" - the latter is shockingly cheap in part because it can be dodgy, but ALSO because without the availability of mortgages you face far, far, far reduced competition. This is how I ended up buying a house (stone cottage, thatched roof, needed work) for hardly more than the deposit I'd saved up before giving up on my dysfunctional city.
The cost of a house seems to always adjust to the amount of debt available to purchase it. Sweden had an average mortgage length of 140 years until recently - now capped at 105 (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/personal-banking/mortgages/swede... ) - and of course anyone who thinks "I'd like to pay my house off in 30 years" has to compete with someone who will take out a 4-generation mortgage.
But that's separate from whether or not mobile homes should be permitted - hell, I can't build a yurt without planning permission (which I'd never get).
I'm a lefty greenie type at heart and actually think a bunch of one-off houses on big lots tend to be terrible for auto-dependence, service delivery, social isolation, etc. but when we started allowing the government to restrict where people are allowed to build AND didn't ensure that it at least meets population growth (not to mention letting asset owners vote on whether to create more of said asset) we laid the seeds for our current housing predicament.
In normal places, there is no need to think about maximizing the land usage. People typically put a 2000 square foot house on a 10000 square foot lot. For a circular home on a square lot, that is 51 feet in diameter on a 100x100 lot. Each side has more than 24 feet to spare.
We really don't care too much about minimizing lot size. In most places, it isn't even legal to have a tiny lot. The excess can be trees or whatever, and most of us like it that way.
http://hexayurt.com/
others like fuller's dymaxion home were explicit about why the odd shape was chosen: structural integrity in a natural disaster, maximize ratio of livable space to raw materials, economize the physical footprint, mix/max it so you can mass produce it cheaply and house the world.
The one major drawback I find in structures like these is that I miss right angles. They help me orient myself in a space. A spheroid may provide maximal volume for its surface area, but if your residents are going to be ill at ease for any reason, they'll never choose it for their home.
I, for one, hope it can be saved.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower
[1] https://icewall.com.au/
Perhaps it's a bit of an off-topic tangent but this sentence caused my ire. Why do banks always throw people under the bus when it comes to foreclosing on someone?
I can imagine that it's often about reclaiming a residual fraction of a mortgage so even a firesale auction can turn a profit but why can't they bloody damn sell a property at market rates, cover the debt and leave the rest to the debtor? Heck, even take commission for the sale!
Why the ruthlessness? It's abominable.
That's why I believe that the only correct individual motivator should be to be free and strong. And never rely on the government, banks and other parties that can and will make you dependent. Take on as little debt as you can. Pay as little tax as possible and/or move to countries where this is possible. Possess as big and as diverse investment portfolio as you can. Reside in countries where it's allowed to possess guns and do so. Make friends with like minded individuals. Yes, I am a libertarian.
How do you obtain bullets? And food? Do you make and grow your own, and from what materials?
The process stinks. In the case of ARM mortgages, the bank often goes through this because a balloon payment comes due. The bank essentially moves from a situation of getting money on their investment to getting nothing simply by forcing people from the home. It’d be better for everyone if the parties involved just renegotiated the deal to keep people in the house and paying their mortgage.
That's what my mortgage contracts have specified. I didn't add the clause, it was a standard boilerplate contract.
BTW, buying a house at auction is selling it at market rate - the market rate being what people are willing to pay for it.
And it sounds like this isn't a case of what people are willing to pay for it, but rather what I'm willing to sell it for: that is, the bank just wants to get rid of the house for something, even if it's highly innefficient and people were willing to pay more.
If the instant cash price was less than that, savvy people looking for bargains would bid it up to that.
People took out huge loans using their homes as collateral - either to support unviable businesses or buy that new summer cottage or boat - and were dangerously overexposed, a bit like the subprime crisis in the US in 2008. The banks of course went into panic mode and clawed back what they could. I personally know quite a few people who lost their homes in this recession, and the country took years to recover.
I'm not an economist and so this is just a second-hand account of this period but it seems similar to what happened in Iceland in the early 2000s - too little oversight from government and too much greed and naivite from the people.
Short selling is another possibility, where the bank lets the borrower off the hook for some fraction of the principle.
if you go with a smaller lender you might be able to negotiate better terms for foreclosure, but anything you require of the lender that increases their risk will be reflected in your interest rate.
If the owners know they are in trouble and have options and sense they will contact that bank. There are programs to skip payments (the bank makes a lot of money off these in the long run - but this is your best way to get out of a temporary problem). There are programs where the bank will let you "short sell" where the bank counts the house paid in full when you sell it for less than you owe (you lose your down payment so it isn't a good for you but it is better than the alternatives). The bank often knows of assistance for people in life trouble. None of these are possible though if you don't try to work with the bank.
Banks want their money back. They do not want to own houses. They do it - but only when they have no other options.
Apartments are arguably this same line. You build a lot of units to maximize the number of residencies in a parcel of land. In the process, you make the units as uniform as possible. I could imagine the entire units being manufactured off site being beneficial. (Granted, I seem to recall some modern apartment complexes being built exactly this way.)
A case where something done slightly different would have leap frogged to something modern.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA5fh29rhLs
A friend of mine was able to build a geodesic dome (maybe in the 80's?) on unincorporated land. Soon afterwards a nearby city swallowed the area he lived in, and if he hadn't built it when he did, they wouldn't have allowed him to put it up.