One of the biggest demerits of suburban living is how they can have an isolating effect on people who live in them. When most suburbanites leave home, they enter a car that’s usually in an enclosed garage where you often.
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Somewhere between now and 1950 (or thereabouts) something went wrong with American housing. Back then, car-fueled sprawl hadn’t yet driven people so far from city centers. At 983 sq ft, the average home was just about right sized for the.
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We’ve long extolled the virtues of high density, urban living. By keeping things close, you can walk or bike most places, which is better for both physical and planetary health. Density leads to more social interaction, easier distribution of goods.
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Whether manufactured or the reflection of a genuine desire, the American dream has long been a process of settling down with your family in your own single family house (ideally with white picket fence). To some extent, there is a.
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In December we posted about Walsenburg, Colorado, a tiny town that created a building ordinance to allow for the construction of a tiny house subdivision. As we’ve long noted, zoning is the biggest hurdle for tiny houses taking off as.
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There was a time when American single family homes weren’t so absurdly large. In 1950, the average household had 3.83 people and the average new single family home was 983 sq ft, making for a pretty reasonable 291 sq ft.
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There’s an ideal we promote on this site about the perfect edited life. Here’s how it goes: live in compact apartment without much stuff in walkable, culturally vibrant city. Work and friends are just a quick walk/bike/subway ride away. Because.
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Pocket neighborhoods prove that an edited home can take on many shapes and sizes and be located most anywhere. The term, coined by architect Ross Chapin, refers to clusters of houses that share common, car-free outdoor areas like gardens, joined backyards.
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We love ADUs. They have the power to do the near-impossible: pack more housing into suburban and other low-density areas that were not designed to be dense. And given that they’re typically wedged into a backyard, they err on the.
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One of the biggest barriers for the proliferation of smart, compact single-family housing is zoning. Many municipalities require certain lot sizes, FARs (floor area ratios) and setbacks (distance from house to road) for homes to be deemed suitable for occupancy..
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