Comment by Retric
5 days ago
For single family homes square footage alone has a fairly modest impact on housing prices.
Land, driveway, number and quality of fixtures, electrical hookups, cabinets, countertops, doors, clearing land, water, sewage, etc can be nearly identical costs for a 1,000 sf or a 3,000sf home. Many things like wall insulation and heating demand increase sub linearly with square footage.
Which is why home builders so heavily favor large homes by historic standards. This is slightly less true of high rises, but making the building wider doesn’t require more elevators, internal hallways, etc.
A 1000 sqft, 3BR, 1 Bath, basic kitchen unit will be cheaper than a 3000 sqft 4BR, 2.5 Bath, fancy kitchen unit. Builders (and most everyone else involved in real estate) make a lot more money on the latter than the former, though.
Cheaper sure, but a large fraction of the difference is that extra 1.5 bathroom and fancy kitchen. Plus all the other little difference like more larger and nicer windows.
Exactly; those are the things that are needed to turn "smaller more affordable homes would be a better solution" into reality.
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