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Question for Americans: how important is housing space to you?
I am quite aware that Europe is considerably poorer than the US, a topic that comes up frequently in US-Europe discussion, other through Americans triumphantly explaining this fact to Europoors. There are quite a few indicators that can be used to show this, from incomes to wealth levels to various owned appliances.
However, one of the most common things to come up is something that seems less important than all those: Americans consider Europeans to live in pitifully cramped houses with little space. Take this tweet and its reactions, for instance.
I, personally, live with my wife and two kids in an apartment that's a bit smaller than the average size of housing for Finland. If I had the choice I'd take those few extra square meters and put them in the kitchen, since I like to cook and a bit more space for appliances and shelves would be nice. Other than that, I don't really have a problem with the size: there's four rooms and a kitchen, enough for the kids to have their own rooms and for me to work quietly in the bedroom when I'm working from home.
When living in America for a few months in 2008, I visited ordinary American houses, and it was of course evident already then that the house sizes are indeed bigger than here. However, this particular difference aroused no envy in me; I mostly remember thinking that it's just more room to vacuum and mop. There are, of course, people who bitch about how houses are too small, but they are mostly concerned with the amount of rooms, i.e. "Why are they building all these two-bedroom places where you can't fit a family?", rather than the square meters, as such.
Is it one of those things where if you are used to comparatively compact houses, the bigger houses don't really seem that different, but if you are used to bigger housing, the compact houses and apartments immediately come off as hopelessly cramped?
I lived for a bit with my wife and kid in a smallish apartment. It was just for a few months while moving and finding a house to buy. It was very hard to find a house given the wild housing market. It is so vastly better to be in a big suburban house rather than an apartment. We were cramped in that apartment.
Also many apartments are excessively dark and have low ceilings. It is so open and bright in my house.
In my very American opinion personal space is valuable and I'll bear slightly more time spent sweeping than floor in order to get more space.
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It depends. There are times when having a larger house is really nice. Like, you can host the entire extended family to sleep over on holiday vacations (which require a lot of long-distance travel). Much better than making them stay in a hotel or filling up the floor like a flophouse. It's also nice if you have hobbies that need a lot of space.
But yeah, too often the space just is either filled up with junk by hoarders, or not used for anything at all. A lot of people end up low on cash because they're paying for a much larger house than they really need, and stressed out from having to clean and maintain it all. Also a lot of houses are designed only to maximize space, so they end up with kind of an awkward layout and thin walls. In @f3zinker's example of "why not rent out the basement," well, it would probably be very awkward. You'd be stuck sharing the kitchen and maybe a bathroom with these strangers, and there's only one door to the house, and you'd fight over garage space because you all need your own car, and you'd have to agree on what temperature to set the thermostat, and you'd hear all the noise they make in the basement because it's not well insulated, and yadda yadda yadda.
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It's certainly possible to have too little space. My first daughter was born in a 500 sq ft section of duplex, and that was too small. My current house is something like 2,000 sq ft, and that is larger than necessary. 1,000 sq ft seems like an alright amount of space for a family of four if it's well designed. All else equal, I would rather a slight smaller place with thicker walls, a better layout, or architectural details than a larger space built as cheaply as possible, but when house searching in America, all else was never equal.
I have trouble telling other people's preferences because all else has never been equal for anyone I've ever known well enough to ask -- there's always a school they want to go to, something about the yard or neighborhood, a subsidy, or something else involved that's more important than the square footage.
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It’s not super important, but it is quite nice to have space for extra stuff.
A lot of what you are seeing is that big houses are a status/wealth symbol in America. That’s why it was so easy for the banks to get people to sign up to buy mortgages they couldn’t afford.
It does seem to matter less now that everything is online.
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As a non American I am absolutely shocked at the size of the suburban houses everytime I visit. You can fit an entire goddamn apartment in basements. I always ask why don't they just clean up the place and rent it out and it's always a "eh, I guess I could do that, but eh, Im fine".
Anyways, I don't relate to your last part at all. I lived most of my life in a rather cramped apartment sharing a room with my brother. When I got my own room, it felt like I became royalty. Perhaps, you are just not cramped enough.. It absolutely makes a big fucking difference both ways. Losses always hurt more than equivalent gains because that's how human brains are, but the gains do feel good.
My wife and I have looked into finishing our basement. We don't have the skills to do a good job of it ourselves, so we would need to hire a contractor. We found out that it would cost us about $40,000 to hire a contractor to do that project. That's not an insurmountable amount of money, but it's not easy to come by either. So our basement remains untouched.
Basements are stupidly expensive to retrofit, and there are loads of hidden variables that can make the job even harder. Guys tend to quote 40-60k sight unseen.
For example, when you work on someone's basement you have no idea of the drainage situation, and that makes everything else precarious.
One of my friends has a finished basement that flooded twice. Not fun, not easy to fix, very frustrating for both the contractor and home owner who each can't tell if the other is retarded or trying to scam them.
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Being a landlord in the US generally seems somewhat high risk and high responsibility. Better not to if you don't need the money.
Eh, renting rooms out of your house is very much a working class thing in the US- and renting those rooms is very much a poor person thing.
Letting poor people live with you comes with problems, so people prefer to avoid it. Landlording isn’t the issue; I can go on Craigslist and find people wanting to share an apartment with a random stranger right now if I want to, and that has even more headache. It’s not wanting to be around poor people.
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Perhaps cramped was the wrong word, I absolutely do understand how different having one's own room is to not having one's own room. I was strictly talking about the square meters/feet as a metric here.
Area is a good enough proxy. I do think room layout is a very underrated metric, I've been in 1500 ft^2 homes that feel larger than 2000 ft^2 homes.
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