In Atlanta, in 1960, 5+ person households were 21 percent of all households. In 2014, they were five percent. Meanwhile, 1-2 person households jumped from 44 percent to 77 percent of households.Household size (number of PEOPLE in a home) has generally shrunk since the 1960s and yet our idea of what constitutes good housing is rooted in what worked to solve our LAST housing crisis: The creation of the modern suburb when "The Boys" came home from World War II.
Average household size -- again, number of PEOPLE in a home -- was larger in the 1950s than in the year 2000. In contrast, average new homes in the 1950s were about 1200 square feet and were more than twice that in 2000. So there were fewer people in the home in 2000 but the size of the house itself had grown.
I've seen mixed data post-2000 that supports the idea that PEOPLE would like smaller homes but the housing INDUSTRY continues to build larger homes generally speaking. One data point from a private conversation suggests that 2000 may have been the worst point about building overly large homes and homes MAY be trending a bit smaller these days, though commercial builders still seem to be building larger homes on average than individual families build when they can do so.
I've known people who bought four bedroom homes that made economic sense due to tax breaks and etc and because it was what was available WHERE they wanted to live. It's also a well-known and common phenomenon that older people often remain in "family homes" that no longer suit their needs because it's what is familiar and the house is paid for, so it works for them financially. In many cases, such people would LIKE to move, IF they could find something that worked for them financially and lifestyle-wise.
I was a military wife for a lot of years and got to see housing stock in various places. In the Tri-Cities of Washington state, I lived initially in a duplex from the 1950s which was wonderfully located but in part due to the age of the building it was hard on my health.
The Tricities goes through boom-and-bust cycles heavily dependent on Federal spending decisions because of the nuclear plant there and the Pacific Northwest National Lab. When I lived there, local governments were desperately trying to diversify the economy because of this huge impact on the local economy which they had no control over.
You could tell what decades got lots of federal funding and which didn't by going apartment hunting. Richland, Washington was a few hundred people until the federal government decided to build projects there for World War II:
The population increased from 300 in July and August 1943 to 25,000 by the end of World War II in August 1945.Having lived there and visited projects about the history while I was there, I can tell you the many duplexes there were built by the Army Corps of Engineers at that time, so they are DESIGNED for a 1950s-style nuclear family. Thanks to being a military family, this was more or less OUR lifestyle.
The last boom cycle before I showed up with a family of four with small kids had been during an era when it was still legal to build "bachelor pad" apartments that didn't allow children. The law changed and they now had to rent to families but the design was wholly unsuitable to our needs as a family, so we initially ended up in 1950s housing DESIGNED for a family like ours.
Due to my health issues, we moved after about a year and we moved into a brand new apartment complex that wasn't even finished. SOME buildings were finished but they were still building the complex and could NOT provide a year's worth of energy bills to estimate energy costs for the whole year. I think they had six months of data.
So I am keenly aware that trends in housing get influenced by policies, by popular ideas and by factors like greed (this is a factor in building bachelor pads: childless families tend to have more money and are easier on the property, BUT it serves SOCIETY poorly to build no housing for families with children).
There are federal tax policies aimed at making family homes affordable to ordinary families trying to buy in big cities and I have talked to people who basically bought a larger house because of that. The tax incentives made that make sense: IF you could afford to buy AT ALL, it made sense to buy a bigger house. It didn't cost more for the mortgage and you were likely to make more when you sold.
Tax incentives of that sort contribute to "house inflation" in terms of pushing up average home size but as far as I can tell fail to make a real dent in homelessness or housing security for the lower classes.
Notably, MY HOUSE -- a three bedroom, one bath "starter home" -- didn't qualify for such tax breaks AT ALL due to being located in a small town with lower average house prices. Such tax breaks generally are aimed at helping families buy a house in bigger cities and may do nothing for you if you are buying in a small town where housing prices are generally lower FOR THE SAME THING.
We currently have a terrible shortage of affordable housing nationwide and this is made worse in part by things like AirBnB, where if you are wealthy enough, you can afford to own a home and also go on vacation and rent a full house instead of a hotel room. Meanwhile, locals can't find anyplace to live AT ALL, much less affordably.
This is the latest chapter in a trend going back decades. At one time, you could reasonably afford to move to a small coastal town and buy a house and live comfortably. Then it became common for upper class families to buy vacation homes in such areas and it drove up housing prices and put a squeeze on availability, making it difficult to do that at all.
It also changes the kind of housing that gets built. Upper class families who can afford to own two homes usually want nicer, larger homes than ordinary families looking for a starter-home primary residence. This puts additional upward pressure on house size.
Monied families, tax policies and this American concept that "good housing" is a very NICE (aka LARGE) suburban family home have taken the modest homes of the Levittowns that were the birth of the American suburb and created family homes on steroids as our default. Meanwhile, average household size has actually SHRUNK in those decades, meaning most people actually need SMALLER homes, not larger ones.
This is currently driving trends towards the Tiny House movement, people living in trailer homes which are substandard and don't withstand the weather and don't appreciate in value -- they depreciate -- because trailer homes get exempt from some housing rules, people living in RVs and high rates of homelessness.
The concept of homelessness is a MODERN invention. Until relatively recently, evictions were somewhat uncommon and we had the concept of a "hobo" or "vagabond," who was a homeless traveling lone man, but the idea that entire families would just be out in the street was essentially unheard of.
I really want this project to succeed so I want to give very conservative estimates that will as much as possible guarantee success of early projects. If a few successful pilot projects get built, you will have real world data and likely changing perceptions of what constitutes good housing, and then you can more reliably take bets on larger figures of estimated demand.
Local number of households is NOT the only way estimates could be made. You could take ten to twenty percent of local population as a ballpark figure of potential demand.
If you are building units intended to house one to three people -- which is MY concept here -- and potentially eighty to ninety percent of people are in households of that size -- or COULD BE -- and might live in such units IF THEY WERE AVAILABLE, then the potential market is huge. ("Could be" because currently SOME households will be upper class families with a mother-in-law suite pushing up "family size" when the mother-in-law might move to something else IF she could find something else that worked for her budget and lifestyle as a retiree living alone.)
As with all NEW products, educating the public is a factor in success. The success of initial pilot projects will help this grow and if initial projects are overly optimistic for the conditions at the time, it becomes less likely for this to become a trend.
McDonald's: A revolutionary approach and a COMPLETE disaster -- until they did a grand reopening
Initial projects will have a lot of bugs to work out in terms of concierge services, getting local governments to APPROVE the projects and so forth. I really want this adopted and I want it to go big and so I am being very, very conservative in providing potential calculations for how many units to INITIALLY build.
Once there are a few SUCCESSFUL pilot projects that builders can POINT TO and say "Hey, they did this here and it was very successful and they are building MORE and can't put them up fast enough!" it will be easier to get such projects approved and successful projects will also give some clues as to what business challenges you will see and need to resolve that I can't predict.
There is such a huge national housing crisis that IF this works as well as I think it will and IF initial projects are successful, I would like to think this could be the Levittown of its era and blanket the country with a NEW form of housing.
But you only get one shot at making a first impression and if initial projects go badly, this idea may die on the vine.
Einstein's Theory of Relativity was proven by taking photos during a total eclipse of the Sun.
Eclipses occur at least twice a year but total eclipses occur only once every few years and initial attempts to get the photos failed due to World War I, bad weather and few teams of photographers, if I recall correctly. (There were more teams of photographers the second time around, which allowed ONE team to get good photos in spite of bad weather in MOST places.)
This may have been the difference between him going down in history as a quack and him going down in history as a genius who changed the world because between that total eclipse and the next one, he had time to catch a math error in his work, correct it and update his figures. Which means when they DID successfully get photos, his calculations were correct and not wildly off the mark.
My writing at this time is intentionally very, very conservative in terms of predicting potential demand. It's the best way to help INITIAL projects succeed, work out the inevitable bugs and lay the groundwork for more widespread adoption.