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.
Understandable, but they could’ve built detached rowhouses and got like 50% more space by getting rid of those gates to the backyard and building up to the edge of the lots. And if developers didn’t cheap out on the construction (asking for a lot, I know), it wouldn’t be an issue anyways. I live in a condo that’s a duplex built in the 70s and I hear people out on the street, noise from a nearby construction yard, and gunfire at the range a quarter mile from here far more often than I hear my neighbor.
Its not just noise.
These are some of the kinds of things your neighbor can do that will affect your life or your property when you share a wall. Even 6 feet or a couple of meters separation between houses can save you from every single one of the things I listed above.