The mall in this video dates to 1828. It was not the first mall ever built in the US but it is the oldest still standing and in use.
They can have a microwave oven, a fridge, a dishwasher and just about anything else you would want in a tiny kitchen for one person, but not a stove. The residents who were interviewed seemed to not really care about that detail.
Some of the people who rent them are grabbing breakfast at eateries in the very mall they live in. These are people with busy lives who live alone. They don't feel a big need to cook at home.
You need a big kitchen and the ability to cook at home when you are trying to make a nuclear family living arrangement work. One salary plus benefits can support a breadwinner, wife and kids if the wife cooks from scratch, shops sales, etc.
If you are a single adult living alone with no dependent children and working full time, feeding yourself at eateries and with microwave meals or similar is often the most logical way to take care of yourself. There are no efficiencies to be had with cooking big meals from scratch like you get if you have a nuclear family with multiple kids or an extended family living together that you are trying to feed affordably.
America was never actually "mostly" nuclear families but it's what we mostly design our housing for. This practice was fueled by events post WW2 when the soldiers came home and all of America bent its will to filling the enormous demand for this type of housing for a large swath of people with military housing benefits via the G.I. Bill.
In the decades since then, our population has diversified even further away from large families with four or more people in the household. It is vastly more common these days for a household to contain only one to three people, yet we have mostly torn down smaller residences, like SROs, and it's incredibly hard to find housing geared towards the needs of a small household.
Something they say early in the above video is that saving historic buildings often means finding some means to make them economically viable. This line immediately reminded me of my experiences with living in Germany in my twenties as a military wife.
One of our cheap family hobbies was visiting castles on the weekends. As an American, the most shocking and eye-opening detail was that most of them were still in use, just not as castles.
I had this idea that they would all be preserved as historic buildings and tourist traps and museums or just sitting there empty, like old haunted houses in movies. I was quite shocked to find they got used as hospitals, insane asylums, private residences et al.
The many castles in Germany persist because many of them are still being used as ordinary buildings. Many of them haven't been torn down or gone to seed because they remain in use in a relevant, economically viable fashion.
There are limits to how much of your economy can viably persist as tourist traps and museums. There is much more demand for such ordinary uses as hospitals and private residences.
If you want to save your historic buildings, you need to find some way to keep them in use and economically viable. Otherwise it's dead wood in your town. It's a burden and a vampiric leech on resources to try to preserve historic buildings without keeping them in use as part of the every day life of your town.
If you own a historic building and want to save it -- or have your sights set on some building but haven't yet bought it -- read through the zoning codes and try to figure out what use you can make work with a little creativity. Like the story told in the above video, you may be surprised at how well it goes over with modern peoples wanting to find alternatives to our current norms.
Oldest US mall blends old/modern with 225-sq-ft micro-lofts
They can have a microwave oven, a fridge, a dishwasher and just about anything else you would want in a tiny kitchen for one person, but not a stove. The residents who were interviewed seemed to not really care about that detail.
Some of the people who rent them are grabbing breakfast at eateries in the very mall they live in. These are people with busy lives who live alone. They don't feel a big need to cook at home.
You need a big kitchen and the ability to cook at home when you are trying to make a nuclear family living arrangement work. One salary plus benefits can support a breadwinner, wife and kids if the wife cooks from scratch, shops sales, etc.
If you are a single adult living alone with no dependent children and working full time, feeding yourself at eateries and with microwave meals or similar is often the most logical way to take care of yourself. There are no efficiencies to be had with cooking big meals from scratch like you get if you have a nuclear family with multiple kids or an extended family living together that you are trying to feed affordably.
America was never actually "mostly" nuclear families but it's what we mostly design our housing for. This practice was fueled by events post WW2 when the soldiers came home and all of America bent its will to filling the enormous demand for this type of housing for a large swath of people with military housing benefits via the G.I. Bill.
In the decades since then, our population has diversified even further away from large families with four or more people in the household. It is vastly more common these days for a household to contain only one to three people, yet we have mostly torn down smaller residences, like SROs, and it's incredibly hard to find housing geared towards the needs of a small household.
Something they say early in the above video is that saving historic buildings often means finding some means to make them economically viable. This line immediately reminded me of my experiences with living in Germany in my twenties as a military wife.
One of our cheap family hobbies was visiting castles on the weekends. As an American, the most shocking and eye-opening detail was that most of them were still in use, just not as castles.
I had this idea that they would all be preserved as historic buildings and tourist traps and museums or just sitting there empty, like old haunted houses in movies. I was quite shocked to find they got used as hospitals, insane asylums, private residences et al.
The many castles in Germany persist because many of them are still being used as ordinary buildings. Many of them haven't been torn down or gone to seed because they remain in use in a relevant, economically viable fashion.
There are limits to how much of your economy can viably persist as tourist traps and museums. There is much more demand for such ordinary uses as hospitals and private residences.
If you want to save your historic buildings, you need to find some way to keep them in use and economically viable. Otherwise it's dead wood in your town. It's a burden and a vampiric leech on resources to try to preserve historic buildings without keeping them in use as part of the every day life of your town.
If you own a historic building and want to save it -- or have your sights set on some building but haven't yet bought it -- read through the zoning codes and try to figure out what use you can make work with a little creativity. Like the story told in the above video, you may be surprised at how well it goes over with modern peoples wanting to find alternatives to our current norms.