This may work if you are used to small places (e.g., for students). But going from a big place to a small place is probably not such a good idea. I could be wrong though.
1. The couple of weeks before you make your move, where you sort what you need and what you don't need, so you can get rid of the latter.
2. A few weeks/months after you move, when you realize you only use 25% of what you kept and purge once again.
After that, it's really quite pleasant. The biggest change is spending more time out of the house in public spaces, since you no longer have the space to maintain separated individual little worlds in your home.
"Purging" stuff is a pain in the ass. How do you responsibly and efficiently get rid of your crap?
My living room is a quarter full of shipping supplies for selling my things on eBay, and I am getting sick of it. It's not even that I want the money, but that I don't want to just toss things in the landfill.
Depending on where you live, you can put it in the street and people who want it can pick it up. Come back the next day or two and throw the remainder in the garbage.
I'm not in a city, but where I live, if you want to dump large items, you have to take them to a dump site yourself, and pay a fee. Some towns around here will take limited large items from your curb free, but only on specified days, usually around once a month.
No garbage containers just generally available. And putting trash out on the street will at best get me very angry looks from my neighbors and worst a fine from the police.
The correct way to get rid of any garbage that I can't fit into the garbage chute is to take it to the dump (which is a bit tricky without a car).
Don't know where you live, but here anything left curbside on a pleasant weekend morning will be gone by evening. Also look for local goodwill/Salvation Army locations that might take donations and consider having a yard/stoop sale for anything non-donatable, or even bring it to a flea market. Use Craigslist to sell anything that has value, with a "must pick up" requirement. Finally, there are people who EBay professionally and are generally willing to sell batches of stuff for you on commission.
Last fall I did a major cleanup of my apartment. I trashed things that weren't useable by anyone (damaged, too worn, etc.). I recycled everything that could be recycled. Everything else that I got rid of went to Goodwill. If you don't care about the money, thrift stores are great places to take your unwanted stuff (clothes and furniture in my case). If you have books in good repair, your local library may take donations. If not them, then a local used bookstore.
Well, students often come from their parents' home, not necessarily that small.
But small is good for students or bachelors indeed, because as he said he's not often home, and he doesn't need to have separate rooms to isolate himself from family members and get some "alone" time.
> They offer living spaces of less than 46.5sq metres (500sq foot)
Ha, try living in The Netherlands!
I live in 24sq meters in a reasonable large city, my brother lives in 8sq meters in Amsterdam. We pay about the same and really, given how much the city offers neither of us complains. We both have a 5-10 minute commute by bike.
I have all the stuff I need and very little of the stuff that I don't need. We both live pretty close to a park, I can rent a place in a coworking space for 100 euros/month (including unlimited good coffee!) and given that I do things outside of the house most evenings anyway this works out perfect.
I couldn't imagine sharing my place with someone else but then again a friend of mine is living together with his GF on 28sq meters and they rarely complain about lack of space.
It's a bed and a desk, they even had to cut up the bed otherwise it wouldn't fit into the room. He custom made his desk for the small space. They have two other bedrooms in that house, a shared kitchen and a small garden. No living area, although they often use the largest bedroom room as one.
He has been living in Amsterdam for almost two years now, if you're young, don't want to spend a lot of money and you want to live in "de ring" (the inner city) it's your only option.
It sounds like a small space, but since it is a shared unit, saying he only has 8 sq M is misleading.
Instead, it is 3 people living in ~40 sq M.
I did the same thing when I first moveD to Boston. I got a bedroom in a four bedroom one bath townhouse, and the rent was quite reasonable split four ways. The shared kitchen and bath were not a problem, and I had plenty of space for one person with just a bed, desk, and dresser.
Now I pay more than that entire place for a 60 sq M place for my wife and me, that is only a 15 minute bike ride from work.
Ok for a short time. Essentially vertical trailer parks. I would rent one but I would never buy one.
When I worked CBD jobs I always made the trade off of living space to commute time. Years later you forget your small place but the hours of commuting in packed trains leaves a tear in your soul.
It takes a real commitment to anti-hoarding and ruthless effiency to live in a small place.
It's when I read articles like these that I have to take a step back, realise that my situation is so much better than most people, stop complaining about the little things and just get on with it. Commute time is something that for me is non-negotiable. Those are hours of your life you'll never get back, and the whole process feels so draining. I don't know how people who commute 2 or more hours a day have the energy to go to gym, make food, read books, etc. I'd just want to get home, eat and sleep.
(144sq meter house, living on my own, 7 minutes to work, yeah I even drive cause why not, 10 minutes from work to gym, another 10 home, total travel = ~30 minutes per day).
Many reasons. There's simply not a bike-friendly culture here, there are no special lanes, I'd have to drive in the road. Now I have to carry my lunch, gym clothes, etc. in a bag on my back, if it rains later in the day it's going to be inconvenient. Some days I need to go somewhere during lunch, or after work I want to buy groceries, then I'm constrained by how much I can fit on my bicycle.
Driving is just infinitely more convenient if the roads you're using are not congested.
If I was single, I could actually swing something like this.
However, in reality, I just moved from a 1600 sq foot house to a 3200 sq foot house. Commute is 40 minutes, best-case, each way in and out of West Houston.
Your lifestyle, great as it is for a single guy working hard, is going to hit a brick wall if you meet a woman who wants children, a big house, to live in a good school district etc.
ething that for me is non-negotiable. Those are hours of your life you'll never get back, and the whole process feels so draining. I don't know how people who commute 2 or more hours a day have the energy to go to gym, make food, read books, etc.
Well, generally they don't go to the gym, they eat microwave meals or have their partner cook, and read on the train.
My current commute is just under 1h each way, but that includes 20 minutes of walking, and as such feels fairly leisurely. Long ago it was 1h45 each way, on the underground; that was gruelling.
This article made me extremely unhappy. It's like a letter from the rich baby boomer generation living in big houses, and with multiple "investment" properties jacking up the prices for the rest of us, then telling us well you'll actually be happier living somewhere smaller!
The article hit the nail on the head pointing out, repeatedly, that this wasn't a choice so much as something that had been forced upon these people who were simply making do with what they could. And yet it comes up with the wrong conclusion and title.
Ummm... If you don't earn that much, yet still want to live in the center of a big city, isn't small housing a good solution? Unoccupied investment homes are making the space problem worse, but fitting lots of people into a small area requires small housing. In everyday physics, space is conserved.
Zoning laws and neighborhood associations actively fight vertical density which would bring down cost for new owners/renters all in the name of preserving "character."
Space isn't conserved, it's increase is being opposed.
Size is relative. There are definitely cultural factors that influence what we consider small or large. For example, London has the London Housing Design guide which recommends a one bedroom flat for two people to be a minimum of 50 square metres. I don't think that’s palatial or excessive. It's still less than what many other European countries recommend (it’s 20% less than what Germany recommends which is 60 square metres for a one bed flat for two people [1])
In the article, it states that UK developer Pocket Living are building 38 square metre one-bed flats. 38 square metres is fine for one person, but not for two people in my opinion. These apartments may have high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows, but they are usually single-aspect and narrow in length (with the windows at the narrow end) in order to fit as many units into the available plot of land.
I'm not a fan of this micro apartment trend. Housing lasts for decades and future generations will have to take over and live in this micro-housing stock. Is this the housing legacy we should leave future generations?
> Housing lasts for decades and future generations will have to take over and live in this micro-housing stock.
Italy - where I live - has a lot of old housing stock. Some of it is very old. When something isn't right for the inhabitants, they modify it. Adding plumbing, combining apartments, adding or removing walls... you can do quite a few things.
I agree. But having enough space is what lets you adapt in the first place. You can't, for example, partition a space into two rooms when there isn't enough space to do that.
This is an excerpt from the last national housing space standard published in the UK in 1961 (the national space standards were scrapped in the 1980s by the Conservative government). This report was written over 60 years ago, and yet what is says is still relevant today (at least in the UK)
"…a good house or flat can never be be made out of premises which are too small...additional space is also an important long-term investment, for if a house or flat is large enough it can usually be brought up-to-date as it gets older; but if there is not enough space the improvements can be impossible, or at least unduly expensive. Homes are being built at the present time which not only are too small to provide adequately for family life but also are too small to hold the possessions in which so much of the new affluence is expressed...Such places cannot be expected to meet the needs of their occupiers today, still less hold their value in the long term."
(From a government report called Homes for Today and Tomorrow, published in the UK in 1961)
You can't, for example, partition a space into two rooms when there isn't enough space to do that.
Quite often in modern steel-frame construction the only real constraint is the external walls and the support pillars. You can knock down all the plasterboard walls and turn it into an open-plan office if you want.
You're right about old buildings, brick houses and external walls. I think in the UK the property industry sneaks round the Parker-Morris standards by expressing things only in terms of number of rooms, never total floor area.
As long as people are allowed to build enough, it seems like a problem markets are pretty adept at taking care of. If no one wants a super small place, the price will drop until someone finds it interesting.
The space itself being extremely expensive is - in some cases - possibly a symptom of people not being able to build enough.
It's not baby boomer telling younger people that they'd be happier living in smaller places, it's today young adults who choose to live in a smaller appartement rather than be far from their city center.
You can live in a house for the same price as a small appartement if you accept to go outside of your city's downtown.
Perhaps the difference is that today's outskirts are impractically far away. 2 hours commute per day? That's more than 10% of my awake time. i.e. Fuck that.
There are two ways a commute of 2 hours a day of commuting can work out. One, if you can actually get work done while commuting. (That has a couple implications -- usually it means a train, not a subway, so you can get a little Internet, and there's a minimum commute length before you can actually get productive.)
Two, if a substantial portion of that commute doubles as your daily exercise, and you can enjoy it and improve your health. (Usually this means a bicycle, which brings along certain weather-related implications to its practicality. Think it works better in Silicon Valley with its mild mild climate and utterly predictable rain.)
The problem with this in London (my city), at least, is that transportation (commute) costs[1] go up fast as you move further away, assuming workplace is not something you can easily change. This means costs don't go down as fast as you might expect, after the initial sharp drop.
[1]: and this is completely forgetting the time involved.
I can get a 1BR flat around the corner for 15K GBP or a 1BR flat 1.5 hours away via metro for 10K GBP + 3K GBP travel costs.
3 hours commuting daily for 2K GBP saved? Not even minimum wage.
(Driving is impossible, by the way. Parking costs would be 20GBP a day or more. A motorcycle could possibly work.)
I actually think that commuting is broken as a concept, at least considering cost savings. It's likely easier for me to find a way to stuff in an extra hour of work, freelance or whatever, and do that instead of commuting.
Cheap credit continues to drive property prices into the insane, especially in Vancouver. This is a failure of monetary policy more than anything. You can now get a variable rate mortgage for less than 2%, which is the rate of inflation, so it's essentialy free money. This of course massivly inflates the bids people put on houses. It also does not help that the media repeats the R/E frankenumbers the R/E associations claim are fact, but are wildy out of step with reality.
I think that's more media spin. The actual sales stats show a TINY fraction of sales are to foreign owners, but more often for very expensive properties ($2M+), which can make things appear differently. Over 99% of homes, even in Vancouver, are sold to Canadian buyers.
But the spectre of "foreign buyers" does help the real estate industry by adding pressure to increase bids. I'm not suggesting there's a conspiracy, just that it's a narrative many actors independently have a monetary incentive to push.
There will be no "collapse" the way some of these people think of it. It's not going to be like the movie "Dawn of the Dead" or whatever where one day suddenly shit hits the fan and prices skyrocket and everyone begins to riot and the SS comes marching down the street to kill everyone. There will be no "happening". It's far more insidious than that. Read the poem "The Hollow Men" by TS ELiot and you'll understand.
You'll just notice that every day simple things will become a little more expensive. Everyone's homes and apartments will start to get smaller. your work hours will get longer, but your pay will decrease. You'll see family and friends less, and find that in time you care less about them. Every day you'll find yourself lowering your standards for everything: work, food, relationships, etc. Job security will no longer exist as a concept. You'll notice houses and apartments shrinking. People will start hanging on clothing longer and longer. Less people will get married, even less will have children. People will engross themselves in technological distractions and fantasy while never truly experiencing the real world.
Whatever dream people used to have about what their lives were going to be will become for them a distant memory. The only thing left for them will be the reality of their debt and their poverty. And every minute of every day they will be told: "You are stupid, ugly and weak, but together we are free, prosperous and safe."
That is the collapse. The reduction of the American man into a feudal serf, incapable of feeling love or hate, incapable of seeing the pitiful nature of his situation for what it is or recognizing his own self worth.
Granted, you don't want to eat out every evening, but one of the things I love about life in Italy is going out to have a few drinks with my friends and or family.
Older public spaces and other third places were less consumerist though. Churches, clubs, parks, beaches, hunting/fishing cabins, etc. Not so aligned with urbanization.
But there's a distinction between date of invention and impact in everyday life. City populations used to be a very small minority of people, until recently.
Thank you for providing the name for that concept ('Third Place'). It's been on my mind that these are becoming particularly important for people who work remotely and therefore don't even have a 'Second Place'.
Depends where you live. The relative costs of restaurants and similar food-preparation services vary wildly around the globe compared with the cost of buying food and preparing it in the same city.
I guess if the worlds young population wants to live and hang out in the centre of trendy cities (London, NY, SF etc) then the only options are packing them tighter or excluding more.
I think the tight packing thing can work if with some downsides.
I live in a rural community 15 minutes from a larger city. Numerous entertainment options; scores of coffee shops and restaurants; international foods in great variety. My house is > 2000 sq ft. Also a garage and two outbuildings - an old cattle shed and a pole barn.
Big cities are a trap. Thousands of shops and theaters, sure, but how many does a person need? Try a smaller 'big city', of 100,000 or so people, and things get much, much better.
Cynical, but not actionable. What will the extra people do? Make it a 200,000 person city? Still not 13 million, still an order of magnitude less expensive.
In fact, this did happen. I looked over this area one year - all the houses were < $100,000 which I could swing. Moved a year later - all the houses were > $100,000 which was harder. I asked the agent what had happened. She said "All those people from California moved in" which was ironic since I was moving from CA myself.
Quite cynical yes, lots of CA/NY transplants around here as well, housing prices are rising and things are changing at a rapid clip. It's less that the changes concern me but more that our local governments seem a bit too starry-eyed. Growth isn't always guaranteed so you have to be careful what you approve and spend on today.
Very true. Our rural population is now all urban folks living in the country. The county elections are no longer dominated by pragmatic farmers. Its city folk with no history of land management etc. So that changed the political landscape.
I grew up in an area like that. Thirty years later, I left that same area because all of the folks fleeing the big city had moved there. It's just a matter of time.
I cleverly settled in the country in the direction of town that has the airport, fairgrounds and cement plant. Nobody wants to live by all that; no new developments have gone in there for 20 years now. Town has doubled in that time, but in other directions. So a good call by my younger self!
Developments like this seem to generally support the idea that we are returning to the gilded age. Reminds me of tenements[0], with the exception that the apartments seem to have a higher construction standard.
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[ 31.0 ms ] story [ 483 ms ] thread1. The couple of weeks before you make your move, where you sort what you need and what you don't need, so you can get rid of the latter.
2. A few weeks/months after you move, when you realize you only use 25% of what you kept and purge once again.
After that, it's really quite pleasant. The biggest change is spending more time out of the house in public spaces, since you no longer have the space to maintain separated individual little worlds in your home.
My living room is a quarter full of shipping supplies for selling my things on eBay, and I am getting sick of it. It's not even that I want the money, but that I don't want to just toss things in the landfill.
How do you fit furniture into a garbage chute?
The correct way to get rid of any garbage that I can't fit into the garbage chute is to take it to the dump (which is a bit tricky without a car).
The opposite happens too, when you realize that you actually need a tool or an adapter that you just gave away, and they're actually quite expensive!!
But small is good for students or bachelors indeed, because as he said he's not often home, and he doesn't need to have separate rooms to isolate himself from family members and get some "alone" time.
When you get kids, that's a different story.
Ha, try living in The Netherlands!
I live in 24sq meters in a reasonable large city, my brother lives in 8sq meters in Amsterdam. We pay about the same and really, given how much the city offers neither of us complains. We both have a 5-10 minute commute by bike.
I have all the stuff I need and very little of the stuff that I don't need. We both live pretty close to a park, I can rent a place in a coworking space for 100 euros/month (including unlimited good coffee!) and given that I do things outside of the house most evenings anyway this works out perfect.
I couldn't imagine sharing my place with someone else but then again a friend of mine is living together with his GF on 28sq meters and they rarely complain about lack of space.
Let put some perspective around this. That could be 2 metres wide and 4 metres long. Did he rent a bedroom and share a living area with others?
He has been living in Amsterdam for almost two years now, if you're young, don't want to spend a lot of money and you want to live in "de ring" (the inner city) it's your only option.
It's perfectly livable though!
Instead, it is 3 people living in ~40 sq M.
I did the same thing when I first moveD to Boston. I got a bedroom in a four bedroom one bath townhouse, and the rent was quite reasonable split four ways. The shared kitchen and bath were not a problem, and I had plenty of space for one person with just a bed, desk, and dresser.
Now I pay more than that entire place for a 60 sq M place for my wife and me, that is only a 15 minute bike ride from work.
When I worked CBD jobs I always made the trade off of living space to commute time. Years later you forget your small place but the hours of commuting in packed trains leaves a tear in your soul.
It takes a real commitment to anti-hoarding and ruthless effiency to live in a small place.
(144sq meter house, living on my own, 7 minutes to work, yeah I even drive cause why not, 10 minutes from work to gym, another 10 home, total travel = ~30 minutes per day).
TLDR: Health benefits of cycling are believed to significantly outweigh health risks on average.
Driving is just infinitely more convenient if the roads you're using are not congested.
However, in reality, I just moved from a 1600 sq foot house to a 3200 sq foot house. Commute is 40 minutes, best-case, each way in and out of West Houston.
Your lifestyle, great as it is for a single guy working hard, is going to hit a brick wall if you meet a woman who wants children, a big house, to live in a good school district etc.
Well, generally they don't go to the gym, they eat microwave meals or have their partner cook, and read on the train.
My current commute is just under 1h each way, but that includes 20 minutes of walking, and as such feels fairly leisurely. Long ago it was 1h45 each way, on the underground; that was gruelling.
The article hit the nail on the head pointing out, repeatedly, that this wasn't a choice so much as something that had been forced upon these people who were simply making do with what they could. And yet it comes up with the wrong conclusion and title.
Space isn't conserved, it's increase is being opposed.
Size is relative. There are definitely cultural factors that influence what we consider small or large. For example, London has the London Housing Design guide which recommends a one bedroom flat for two people to be a minimum of 50 square metres. I don't think that’s palatial or excessive. It's still less than what many other European countries recommend (it’s 20% less than what Germany recommends which is 60 square metres for a one bed flat for two people [1])
In the article, it states that UK developer Pocket Living are building 38 square metre one-bed flats. 38 square metres is fine for one person, but not for two people in my opinion. These apartments may have high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows, but they are usually single-aspect and narrow in length (with the windows at the narrow end) in order to fit as many units into the available plot of land.
I'm not a fan of this micro apartment trend. Housing lasts for decades and future generations will have to take over and live in this micro-housing stock. Is this the housing legacy we should leave future generations?
[1] The Case for Space report (PDF) from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) published in September 2011: http://www.architecture.com/files/ribaholdings/policyandinte...
Italy - where I live - has a lot of old housing stock. Some of it is very old. When something isn't right for the inhabitants, they modify it. Adding plumbing, combining apartments, adding or removing walls... you can do quite a few things.
This is an excerpt from the last national housing space standard published in the UK in 1961 (the national space standards were scrapped in the 1980s by the Conservative government). This report was written over 60 years ago, and yet what is says is still relevant today (at least in the UK)
"…a good house or flat can never be be made out of premises which are too small...additional space is also an important long-term investment, for if a house or flat is large enough it can usually be brought up-to-date as it gets older; but if there is not enough space the improvements can be impossible, or at least unduly expensive. Homes are being built at the present time which not only are too small to provide adequately for family life but also are too small to hold the possessions in which so much of the new affluence is expressed...Such places cannot be expected to meet the needs of their occupiers today, still less hold their value in the long term."
(From a government report called Homes for Today and Tomorrow, published in the UK in 1961)
Quite often in modern steel-frame construction the only real constraint is the external walls and the support pillars. You can knock down all the plasterboard walls and turn it into an open-plan office if you want.
You're right about old buildings, brick houses and external walls. I think in the UK the property industry sneaks round the Parker-Morris standards by expressing things only in terms of number of rooms, never total floor area.
The space itself being extremely expensive is - in some cases - possibly a symptom of people not being able to build enough.
You can live in a house for the same price as a small appartement if you accept to go outside of your city's downtown.
Two, if a substantial portion of that commute doubles as your daily exercise, and you can enjoy it and improve your health. (Usually this means a bicycle, which brings along certain weather-related implications to its practicality. Think it works better in Silicon Valley with its mild mild climate and utterly predictable rain.)
[1]: and this is completely forgetting the time involved.
I can get a 1BR flat around the corner for 15K GBP or a 1BR flat 1.5 hours away via metro for 10K GBP + 3K GBP travel costs.
3 hours commuting daily for 2K GBP saved? Not even minimum wage.
(Driving is impossible, by the way. Parking costs would be 20GBP a day or more. A motorcycle could possibly work.)
I actually think that commuting is broken as a concept, at least considering cost savings. It's likely easier for me to find a way to stuff in an extra hour of work, freelance or whatever, and do that instead of commuting.
But the spectre of "foreign buyers" does help the real estate industry by adding pressure to increase bids. I'm not suggesting there's a conspiracy, just that it's a narrative many actors independently have a monetary incentive to push.
Reminds me of post by anon about how there will be no "collapse".[0]
[0] http://i.imgur.com/DtpRs3r.jpg
There will be no "collapse" the way some of these people think of it. It's not going to be like the movie "Dawn of the Dead" or whatever where one day suddenly shit hits the fan and prices skyrocket and everyone begins to riot and the SS comes marching down the street to kill everyone. There will be no "happening". It's far more insidious than that. Read the poem "The Hollow Men" by TS ELiot and you'll understand.
You'll just notice that every day simple things will become a little more expensive. Everyone's homes and apartments will start to get smaller. your work hours will get longer, but your pay will decrease. You'll see family and friends less, and find that in time you care less about them. Every day you'll find yourself lowering your standards for everything: work, food, relationships, etc. Job security will no longer exist as a concept. You'll notice houses and apartments shrinking. People will start hanging on clothing longer and longer. Less people will get married, even less will have children. People will engross themselves in technological distractions and fantasy while never truly experiencing the real world.
Whatever dream people used to have about what their lives were going to be will become for them a distant memory. The only thing left for them will be the reality of their debt and their poverty. And every minute of every day they will be told: "You are stupid, ugly and weak, but together we are free, prosperous and safe."
That is the collapse. The reduction of the American man into a feudal serf, incapable of feeling love or hate, incapable of seeing the pitiful nature of his situation for what it is or recognizing his own self worth.
Modern? "3rd places" have been with us... for a long time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
Granted, you don't want to eat out every evening, but one of the things I love about life in Italy is going out to have a few drinks with my friends and or family.
No one says you have to go to bars if you prefer church socials or baseball games or whatever. But it's hardly a fad!
I think the tight packing thing can work if with some downsides.
Big cities are a trap. Thousands of shops and theaters, sure, but how many does a person need? Try a smaller 'big city', of 100,000 or so people, and things get much, much better.
In fact, this did happen. I looked over this area one year - all the houses were < $100,000 which I could swing. Moved a year later - all the houses were > $100,000 which was harder. I asked the agent what had happened. She said "All those people from California moved in" which was ironic since I was moving from CA myself.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenement.