Robert Lanter lives in a 600-square-foot house that can be traversed in five seconds and vacuumed from a single outlet. He doesn’t have a coffee table in the living room because it would obstruct the front door. When relatives come to visit, Mr. Lanter says jokingly, but only partly, they have to tour one at time.
Each of these details amounts to something bigger, for Mr. Lanter’s life and the U.S. housing market: a house under $300,000, something increasingly hard to find. That price allowed Mr. Lanter, a 63-year-old retired nurse, to buy a new single-family home in a subdivision in Redmond, Ore., about 30 minutes outside Bend, where he is from and which is, along with its surrounding area, one of Oregon’s most expensive housing markets.
Mr. Lanter’s house could easily fit on a flatbed truck, and is dwarfed by the two-story suburban homes that prevail on the blocks around him. But, in fact, there are even smaller homes in his subdivision, Cinder Butte, which was developed by a local builder called Hayden Homes. Some of his neighbors live in houses that total just 400 square feet — a 20-by-20-foot house attached to a 20-by-20-foot garage.
This is not a colony of “tiny houses,” popular among minimalists and aesthetes looking to simplify their lives. For Mr. Lanter and his neighbors, it’s a chance to hold on to ownership.
I mean, isn’t that basically what a townhouse is?
Yes, except these have none of the advantages of townhouses (higher density, lower construction cost) and to make up for the cost of those shortcomings they are far smaller than a typical townhouse. These houses are the residential version of Elon’s Hyperloop — something that looks cool at fist glance but gets increasingly nonsensical the more you think about it.
Except this doesn’t even look cool at first glance.
At least these things are able to physically exist and function (though still not a great option), unlike Hyperloop.
I don’t like either one of them, but I feel like the distinction should be made.