Really? Because it has been quite typical in my experience across three states.
Just measured my bedroom. It’s roughly 200 square feet. Actually, my preference would have been a smaller bedroom and more space in the “front room” or kitchen, but no one asked me. The front room is slightly bigger, around 250-300 square feet. The rest of it is divided between kitchen, bathroom, and walk-in closet.
One of the key things that walkable, mixed-use multi-family housing can do to a neighborhood is make it a lot more economical. The simple fact is that car-centric suburban development is heavily subsidized and ends up costing the people who don’t live there who end up paying the freight for those who do.
And particularly when people think of their living arrangement as their retirement savings, they’re going to hold on to it no matter who it hurts.
Seems an odd thing for an avowed libertarian to say when that “meddling” just consists of other people exercising their rights over their own property…
Never forget the definition of a “conservationist”: somebody who built their cabin in the mountains last year. 
Although @Sam_Stone has a legitimate point.
When you (any you) buy real property you are also buying into the bundle of goods, services, and taxes represented by the local government boundaries, local zoning standards, etc.
While nobody has an absolute right to assume nothing about that will ever change, one also expects a certain amount of stability in things which are, after all, meant to provide exactly that certainty and stability which promotes long term investment in long-lived real property assets.
In the absence of zoning you might be more caveat emptor and have no one to blame if Fate later decrees that somebody builds a hog farm right behind your house. But in the presence of zoning, you’re expecting the hog farm people will be told to build elsewhere. Sucks when somehow the zoning board suddenly finds in their favor, not yours.
All that is true, and I hope Sam takes the barb about libertarianism as more of a wry comment, as was intended, rather than as an attack.
Because I’m living the solidly suburban life myself - detached, single family ranch house (though not on a cul-de-sac) and I do appreciate the stability that it has afforded us raising a family lo these twenty years.
But I do recognize that I’m living as a parasite right now - the taxes we pay simply aren’t enough to cover the cost (ongoing and infrastructural amortization) that we are incurring by our living here. And I’m uncomfortable with this, and would like to see things change in a way that would make me a positive contributor rather than a net negative. And that’s going to require some serious changes - both for me and for the city around me.
So I’d like to be YIMBY, and as tough as it might be on me to make those kinds of changes, it would be even worse on a lot of my neighbors - I know why a lot of them are NIMBY, and it would hurt them in real terms to lose a lot of the housing equity that’s a significant chunk of what they think of as their retirement savings.
To attempt to de-hijack my post, I would note that much of the housing cost increase (since the 50’s & 60’s) cited by earlier posts has a lot to do with the prevailing patterns of suburban subsidy and subsequent increase in the value of the land that houses are on. In effect, our tax and growth policies have turned suburbanites into small-scale land speculators, and there’s enough of us - and our equity is tied up with our livestyles as well as our livelihoods so much - that the bubble is going to keep reflating every time it threatens to burst. Graduated phaseout of the mortgage interest deduction and the addition of a land-value tax would do wonders for our current economy; it’s a shame those measures aren’t anywhere near the Everton window.
Overton?
Yeah. My fault for browsing Premier League scores while composing the post.
Maybe the Everton window is some hypothetical future USA construct where what other nations consider to be centrist ideas are near the right edge.
Actually, that’s more like the “Foreverton” window, as that’s how long we’re going to have to wait to see it.
I am totally okay with a city that decides not to have zoning laws, such as Houston. I’m also okay with a city that embraces zoning as a way to maintain consistency. I am free to choose which type of city I want to live in.
What I’m not okay with are cities that bait-and-switch homebuyers by guaranteeing a neighborhood through zoning laws, then changing those zones whenever they feel like it, after people have purchased their property.
Libertarians believe in personal freedom, but they also believe in contracts as necessary for long-term planning.
Our city is also busy planning to become a ‘15-minute city’. Ridiculous for one of the most spread-out and coldest major cities in the world. It’ll never work, but they could do a lot of damage trying. And they’ll have to re-zone a lot of it in the attempt. Our city council is full of idiots.
The average NEW apartment in the USA is between 800 and 900 square feet, and that includes apartments with more than one bedroom, and is purely newly built units. (Apartment size actually peaked in the USA about 10-15 years ago but was smaller going back from there.) 200 square feet is a pretty generous master bedroom in an apartment; that’s essentially a 14-by-14 space.
Apartments back in the day could be pretty small, and the standards of what you got were not as uniformly good as now, in part due to building codes.
Your posts in this thread are full of numbers without cites, and I am deeply suspicious. It would be helpful for you to cite your claims.
For example, is this “standard work week” only for paid jobs, or are you including homemaker jobs? This is a crucial distinction if families have gone from single-income to dual-income in this same time period, since it may indicate that a family in the 1950s could live off of 44 hours of paid work a week whereas today it takes 70 hours of paid work each week. If, in the 1950s, one member of a family was spending 40+ hours doing all the cooking, cleaning, finances, and childcare, and today that member is working 35 hours a week outside of the home, the total work the family needs to do is vastly increased.
But without cites, it’s difficult to know what’s included in your numbers.
In general, without cites for numbers in this thread, most posts aren’t especially persuasive. I would love for folks to give credible cites for their claims.
Edit: I also looked up the retirement information. I worry that you’re cherry-picking your years.
Then you don’t want cities to ever change their zoning laws, since there is always going to be someone who bought under the old ones. I mean unless there was 100% agreement, which is unlikely.
Zoning laws which made sense when there was plenty of room in a city no longer do when the city is pretty much build out and houses are so expensive that lots of people can no longer afford them. If opposition was only to building apartment on every corner, I could kind of see it, but in California there is a state push to forcing cities to allow taller buildings near transit centers, and there is opposition to that too, even from those who don’t live anywhere near them.
I’ve seen this opposition come from people whose house price has appreciated a million bucks easy, but who act as if even a slight lessening of the craziness is going to bankrupt them.
What contract? It’s a city, not a HOA, they made no promises to you. You get a vote, same as everyone else.
Yeah, and I can and do vote with my feet if I don’t like it. I never tried to stop them, I understand they can do it if they want. Understanding that does not mean I have to approve of it, or accept my fate. I have the right to move somewhere where people aren’t constantly meddling and telling me how to live if I find it intolerable.
All of that is completely compatible with libertarianism.
Cite for percentage of people working past age 65:
This is a different cite than the one I used the first time. That one only went to 1950, and we were talking about the 50’s somI used that. This one goes to 1850. Have a look at the graph on page 9. It shows the 47% number in 1950 Imquoted before, but it should be clear that I didn’t do any ‘cherry picking’ since the curve declines all the way from 1850, when over 75% of men over 65 still worked. That came down to approx 50% by 1950, and by 1990 on this chart it was down to around 20%.
The problem with your cite is that it IS cherry picked in that it includes all workers. In 1950, most women did not work, so when you include them in the stats you get artificially low numbers compared to today. By looking at just men you get a clearer picture because there is less confounding.
As for the work week, here you go:
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
According to that, one study found that among all workers, the average hours worked in 1947 were 44.7, and by 1953 were still 44. Going by U.S. Census, the number was 42.7. Both sources agree it had dropped to 39.1 by 1988.
According to Statistica, in Jan 2023 the average work week was 34.7 hours, which represents a recovery from the covid low of 34.4. So I was being generous saying it was 37.5-40.
Any other cites you’d like?
Yeah, and you can see opposition from people who have their life savings invested in their home, can’t afford to move, and are seeing the value of their only asset decline. Won’t you think of the poor retired people? Many of those people are minorities and the disadvantaged, being abused by rich property developers with the ear of city hall.
In fact, around here the ‘rich’ often seem to be excluded from this rezoning, probably because they have too much economic and political power. The people who typically take it on the chin are middle class folks in average middle class neighborhoods. The working class, as usual.
I’ve heard people say their house prices were going to plummet if their house got redistricted to a not as great high school. They didn’t. I see my HOA say that our house prices will plummet if we have the nerve to paint our trim in an unapproved color. They haven’t.
My point is that the opposition is not necessarily from valid economic reasons. The people opposed to rezoning or some reasonable changes to density laws may be retired, but they bought their $1.5 million houses for $200 K or something, and pay diddly in property tax thanks to California Prop 13. If they have no money except what’s in their houses, that’s on them.
Those who just bought, at the top, have maybe some reason to be concerned, but they are guaranteed to be rich if they could afford houses these days. Almost none of us retired people could afford our houses now. Yes, first world problem.
In any case, if there is a lot of room to build, why would people push for higher density housing? Maybe to push affordable housing? Where affordable means only crazy high, not insane high?
And like I said, allowing taller buildings near transit is not going to crater my house price. High density does not mean low prices. Take a look at Hong Kong.
I recommend looking to the top paragraph when considering the bottom. Something like two thirds of part time workers are women. So their change in labor force participation will affect hours worked.
Yeah. If the proportion of part-time to full-time workers increases because more women are entering the paid-labor force and women are more likely to work part-time jobs, then obviously the average number of hours worked per worker is going to decrease, without necessarily implying any increase of leisure for the average worker.
True. But that’s often (not always) because people have gotten richer. Now, your job, which used to be at the 80% marker, is at the 65% marker because a lot of new jobs exist that didn’t before that pay a lot more. And even crap jobs pay better that old crap jobs sometimes. This is something that came up with some 19the century jobs I looked at. Over the course of a generation (one fictional fellow), his job went from being a top 10th percentile job to a decent bit lower. Yes, more women in the field probably stopped upward pressure on wages. But more importantly, despite the rampant inequality of the gilded age, people, were on the whole, getting richer. They could afford more. Lower paid workers were getting more work (work in the mid 19th century being far less full-time). Those lower paid could afford to buy more themselves, because it was a deflationary time period. Though they still were very unhappy about it because the richest were getting more rich more quickly, and we know inequality brings social issues even when everyone is getting richer. But the fellow who was upper middle class, though he could afford almost everything he could before (servants got more expensive where he was, as there were more options for employment), and could afford to buy things he couldn’t get before as new things were invented as mass production got cheaper, he still wasn’t as close to the top of the heap as he used to be.
Only way to keep him in “his place” in rank would be to keep others from moving up or keep everyone moving up at exactly the same rate (locking in permanent socioeconomic status for every family even more so than forces do today). Which is fine, I guess, if your “place” was near the top. Not so good if it was near the bottom.
I will say that (last I looked, and it has been a few years), the middle class (in terms of income) was getting smaller. Both the upper and lower classes were getting larger, but the upper class group was growing more quickly than the lower class one. Which doesn’t help if you are in the lower one. And, of course, this “upper” is not just the extremely rich.
Though this talk of the “middle class” is kind of making me think of how the term changed. I don’t mean in the “so broad it’s useless” way, but in how it came to be used for a entirely different level of income and type of work in the US. Did that happen post-WWII or early 20th century or when?
There are different ways to define it. Obviously if you keep it fixed at the middle quintiles, the size can’t change. Pew, for their studies, defines it as two-thirds to double the median income, normalized by the square root of household size. That definition matches with the trend you describe in the first paragraph I quote.