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.
The issue is not the size but the price and rate of the loan. You could’ve always got a plot this size and built a kit house for 75k in the past.
I’m not sure where you live, but most of the areas I know about in the USA that isn’t true.
Single family home building permits usually require a minimum plot size as well as a minimum square footage.
Here’s Los Angeles which wouldn’t allow what you’re describing even with newly implemented reductions from 2005:
“The Small Lot Subdivision (Townhome) Ordinance is an amendment to the Los Angeles Municipal Code. The ordinance permits small lot developments in the form of detached townhouses. To accomplish this, the definition of “lots” was amended to specify that the 20-foot street frontage requirement would not apply to an approved small lot subdivision. Parking requirements were also amended; small lot developments are not required to provide parking spaces on the same lot, as is the case with all other residential zones, but are still required to provide two garaged parking spaces per unit.”
OPs article house would fail from the bolded part.
Just for the opposite end of the spectrum, here’s rural Ohio:
“Maximum building height: Forty-five (45) feet. H. Minimum main building size: 1500 square feet.”
So OPs article house would fail on minimum house size.
As far as the price ($145k) and rate, what the person in the article paid and their rate is likely close to the same as I paid for both in 2004 (for an admittedly slightly larger house).
If anything OPs article buyer paid less. The inflation adjusted I paid in 2004 would be $220k today.
If you’re still claiming that someone could have bought the land, the kit, paid the labor, and was able to obtain building permits to have this house in the past, I’m going to ask you to provide some data to back that up.