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’m in Massachusetts, and we kinda have a mix of everything. I live in a condo on a concrete slab that was built in the 70s as a neighborhood of duplexes rather than what people think of today when they think of condos, while my parents’ house has an unfinished, root cellar style basement in a flood zone, and a friend of mine recently moved back into his mom’s furnished basement a stone’s throw from where I live. There’s a house near my parents that even had to put their front lawn up several feet with a concrete foundation so that they could put in the septic system above the aquifer.
As for rowhouses, I don’t know much about them, but I assume that they’re usually on a slab with no basement because they usually have 2 households in them with 2 separate entrances for them. The more fancy townhouses you see, like the brownstones in NYC or the ones in Boston, might have basements since they were built for the wealthy and are single family homes that even had servant’s quarters, but I’ve never been in one to see. There’s a cool section of Boston with townhouses that was originally built to attract the wealthy, and there’s streets behind the buildings simply named Alley #1, Alley #2, etc. because they were only built to allow the servants to move out of sight of the wealthy.