Every time things like this come up, people rightly mention multigenerational households.
But then someone else brings up the lack of privacy and imposition of having multiple generations under one roof.
What I never heard people talk about, though is changing our architectural practices to support multigenerational households. There are "mother-in-law suites" you see sometimes (though these days they seem to be mostly for renters). But I think there is a huge opportunity to innovate in how we design homes to balance the need for community with larger families against the need for privacy and solitude.
I wish we'd at least go back to putting walls in houses. These open floorplans that look so nice in real-estate photos and have that "wow" factor when you walk through the front door suck to live in, but it's most of what gets built these days. Give me rooms with doors, damnit.
They don’t suck to live in. I would much rather live in an open floor plan. Maybe your needs are different and you need privacy within the common areas of your house, but not everyone has those same needs.
They're fine when you've got a huge amount of square footage to spare, for the number of people in the house. A common time to realize how much nicer some walls and doors would be is after having kids. Walls and doors let you have a larger number of occupants living in a given space without sacrificing comfort.
Our house has an open kitchen + living room + entryway + stairway, and that's not so bad—because we also have a huge basement, four bedrooms for 2 adults + 3 kids, two extra rooms that are walled off with doors (we had to add the doors, though...), et c. So that open space is OK, because we have way more house than we'd need to be similarly-comfortable if it were better laid out, including having more walls and doors.
We have an open floor plan in our main living area. It's a "give" in that I am able to watch my children playing in the common area from the kitchen. It's a "take" in that if I am cooking with the exhaust fan on, there's no way you can hear the TV.
It's also a take in the sense that when people come over, they see the mess in the kitchen if there is one. Sometimes a door is nice that way.
We had a small bungalow with so many doors. Literally every room except the common room had them. I removed a few, but once kids arrived it was clear why it was built that way.
> changing our architectural practices to support multigenerational households
This is true about so many things. Infrastructure and architecture around us lead to a majority of emergent properties in the way society interacts.
In the 3rd world, it is fairly common to purchase an apartment for your parents in the same neighborhood as where you settle in. The free daycare itself makes up for the mortgage and the old people sitting by benches on evenings serve as communal protection while the kids play seemingly unsupervised.
At this point it's a topic beaten to death, and it's edgy to say, but I really believe the suburb/highway model 95% of America is stuck with is the root of all evil. Whether people voluntarily seek it out or they're trapped in it. Every bad thing I can think of seems to stem from it in one way or another. Physical, mental, financial, environmental, and political health all considered.
It's sad that that when a big enough part of a population reaches the obvious conclusion, it is considered edgy because the magnitude of the damage that was caused is so large, and is finally recognized as such.
> suburb/highway model 95% of America is stuck with is the root of all evil
There are very few mono-causal absolutes that I actually agree with and this is one of them.
>but I really believe the suburb/highway model 95% of America is stuck with is the root of all evil.
I think you're mistaking "occasionally challenged" for edgy. People who believe what you believe are dominant on HN. You're basically just bemoaning that you're not so dominant that you never see criticism.
One common objection I hear is that there's clearly a revealed preference for that kind of housing in North America, because it's still relatively in-demand.
But by that standard there's also a revealed preference for airline food on airliners.
Excellent analogy. And pretty much no one who advocates for allowing more flexible housing wants to forbid suburban single family detached homes. Buy that, if that's what you want. Just stop limiting everyone else to that.
Some I've discussed this issue with eventually reveal that they like the status quo because it gives them more options for their preference, others' preferences be damned.
In my limited experience (I immigrated to a developing country in Asia 10 years ago) it's more common to inherit your sole home from your parents, and live with them in it your whole lives. It's not unusual to have three or four families living in a 20 square meter home -- although these properties thankfully usually have 2-3 floors. So you're never alone, ever -- for better and worse.
Wealth here is primarily inherited, not earned. It is uncommon for people to afford to buy an apartment over the course of their lives. In my city at least, an OK apartment is around USD 200k-300k (not even close to the city center). An OK salary is about USD 500 a month.
The free daycare aspect is absolutely critical so that both parents can work, and maybe bring in enough to send their children to university. It's not uncommon for one or both parents to additionally have a side gig evenings or weekends. Later on, maybe when one parent can afford to work less, you care for your parents.
Also as an additional thing, there's always a family shrine. You still cook meals for ancestors. You leave a place for them at special occasions, and celebrate their death anniversary. It's not unusual for someone to stand up in front of the shrine and talk to them for a long period. I'm not a spiritual person, but that frequent shared connection to the past, and its interaction with grief, is interesting.
Anyway, I thought you would appreciate that small slice of life here.
> changing our architectural practices to support multigenerational households
Yes this. Our house has a mother in law suite. While we have tiny kids it's my office and my partner's art studio but it converts nicely into a guest suite. When my kids are grown I expect at least one of them will want to move to the MIL suite on a semi-permanent basis.
I met someone who was recently retired and who had built their dream. The guest bedrooms were immediately the left and right of the entry, at the end of whi h a giant open living room dining room and kitchen. Opposite the entry is another set of double doors which separated the garage+masterBd.+distillery, with another door to the master at the end
Guests could come and go and you wouldnt even need to acknowledge them if you didnt feel like it. And you wouldnt hear them.
I remember thinking how odd it was that I was looking into a bedroom as soon as i entered and ive only ever thought more and more how great an idea it was for intermittent visitors.
"Granny flats", they're called here, but they fell out of fashion because:
(a) New houses tend to be built in housing estates as either terraces or semi-detached without the land to add on a granny flat like in a lot of the pre-1950s houses that had them added on later.
(b) A lot of them were rather shoddily built.
(c) The end of single-income households for most of the populace means that even if someone was living in a granny flat, the younger generation would not be around to offer company/assistance because both are working.
The main reason is that zoning makes it impossible to build them in most places. That has recently changed in CA and the amount of permits submitted for ADUs has increased by multiple magnitudes in the last 5 years (in certain locales, LA being one).
I know this isn't the discussion but felt relevant to add - I think they should be legal to build and live in as a primary residence, but if the plan is just to rent it out then I think there should be restrictions. That seems like it would incentivize people to do more rent-seeking and build multiple smaller houses instead of selling the land to someone that wants to actually live there.
Not sure how popular this opinion is on here but I generally think we should be disincentivizing rental properties as long as we have a shortage in the housing market. Otherwise land and rental prices just rise because it makes more sense to rent than to sell. My naïve solution is something like "You pay 60% property tax on your primary residence and add 40% for each additional one". Then if you wanted to own and rent 8 houses you could but you'd be paying 300% property tax on the 8th house, which would change the incentives so it makes more sense to sell than to buy up properties and plan to rent them out
You don’t have to do any of that. Rentals provide a huge value to society. There is a large portion of the population in any given city that would prefer renting over buying.
To fix our housing issues we just need to make it easier to build homes. That is it.
Some restrictions might be appropriate, but a lot of people don't have the savings to buy even a small house and need inexpensive places to rent, so more in-law apartments in cities would help a lot.
Unless this was paired with some serious house building incentives, I think this will enable the 20th-40th percentile by wealth to buy houses, at the cost of preventing the 0th-20th percentile from ever moving out of their parent's house.
So you'd have the bottom 20th percentile unhappy because of the limits to their living situation, and the 80th percentile upwards unhappy because of the reduction in their rental income. I can't see it being politically viable.
Definitely agreed it's not politically viable haha, just seems like a good solution to the issue of housing affordability.
Also as some others said it would need to be paired with building incentives to also make it easier for people to build homes, but in the short term the benefit would be incentivizing people to sell rental properties at a lower price and promote home ownership.
I agree people won't be happy about reduction in rental income, but I don't think we should be incentivizing people to use housing as a way to make money - that's basically going to guarantee that prices are higher than they should be because the whole goal is to profit from it.
They didn't _quite_ "fall out of fashion" - they were made illegal by a certain group of people, in order to reduce the relative power/independence of other groups of people.
In India, some families do follow this type of setup. My neighbor was asking me if I wanted to sell my apartment because he wanted to combine his apartment with mine so that his parents could stay with him. In my neighborhood there are few families, who could afford, have bought 2-3 apartments and combined them so that three generations can stay under one roof.
> ...opportunity to innovate in how we design homes... @munificent
This sounds like a statement made by someone that's never gone through the US process of purchasing a new home.
New homes have floorplans that are not designed to be 'consumer usable.' The floorplans and layout of the development are designed to maximize profit. That means squeezing tiny spaces into tiny plots in order to make several million more dollars per development, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars.
These generic plans are drawn up by the lowest-cost bidder, and then sold to buyers who can barely afford those.
The entire market is complicit in this, and it is by design.
Want a multi-generational house? It won't be in a development, and it will cost more than two houses that are in a development.
You can have a custom home built. In general they are 10-20% more expensive. Because any savings in economies of scale a developer might see get converted to profit, not savings. Architects are a thing and do take on SFH projects when asked.
You're absolutely right that I've never bought a new house because exactly as you note, the floorplans of new construction are built to maximize profit and wow naïve buyers when touring the house.
That doesn't change the fact of my statement: The way we design houses is worse for our psychological health. Therefore, there is an opportunity to improve our mental health by designing them different. There may be economic problems in the way of that opportunity, but the opportunity is still there.
By "opportunity" I don't mean "easy thing we can do" I mean "understood problem that is possible to solve".
People generally pick a location, set some criteria (must have X bedrooms, Y bathrooms, Z square footage, parking), see the small integer number of houses in the market in that location satisfying those criteria in-budget, and go with the one whose maintenance seems least daunting.
There aren't even really enough options to be picky about floor-plan most of the time, especially if the house with the wonderful floor-plan hasn't had the roof replaced for 15 years.
Looking to buy a home soon. Our checklist on location wipes out most of the market. IE not in floodzone, near enough to work, train station, reasonable schooling, shops.
Get a solar sensible(not passive, not perfect, just vaguely right) house with those requirements? "Tell him he's dreamin'!"
I haven't even got to caring about the floorplan being open or not...
It could be a classic information asymmetry (people don't know what they want until they've lived with it, or even know that something better is possible).
The same process that has turned most store-bought strawberries into freakishly-large flavorless blobs.
But then someone else brings up the lack of privacy and imposition of having multiple generations under one roof.
What I never heard people talk about, though is changing our architectural practices to support multigenerational households. There are "mother-in-law suites" you see sometimes (though these days they seem to be mostly for renters). But I think there is a huge opportunity to innovate in how we design homes to balance the need for community with larger families against the need for privacy and solitude.