Another article about the recent house 3D printed in Russia. I hadn’t realized that the Russian company was partnered with an American one:
Yeah, I’m sure this is going to really help with the housing shortage in San Francisco. Nice proof of concept, but they’ll need to hire a real architect to make this palatable to the general populace.
The company is in San Francisco. The fact that their first house is in Russia suggests that there are markets far beyond San Francisco.
Or that the requirements in Russia are easier?
Building codes, cost vs size, available materials?
Impressive. It is getting better and better.
@Nathan_Walkner - 400 sq. ft. is a reasonably sized house in most parts of the world. A little on the small side for a developed country, but not terribly so.
You just have to keep in mind that in America we have to build larger, more expensive houses to maintain segregation, by way of separating neighborhoods by class rather than by race. Many local jurisdictions have minimum house sizes for this purpose, to make sure they can exclude those who can’t afford a larger house. 1500 sq. ft. seems to be a popular minimum size, but if you look at older houses in older neighborhoods you will find that they are much smaller.
@Nathan_Walkner - sure, out in the countryside you can build smaller - but most people want to live near their work, and consequentially people tend to live in or near cities, where frequently small houses are prohibited by zoning or other laws. This sets a social expectation of how large houses must be for other places.
Of course, it is nice to have a larger house, not only for the social status it signals but just because it’s nice to have some more space, and those who live in rural areas but commute to an urban center tend to be able to afford a larger house as well - frequently at a lower cost than a much smaller place would cost inside the city. But that doesn’t change the fact that 400 sq. ft. is more than enough room than is necessary, or that it is a quite normal size in most of the world.
@Nathan_Walkner - Various reasons, having to do with not wanting to deal with your neighbor’s noise, or just valuing green space.
BTW, there are many historic neighborhoods where the average lot size is 4000 sq ft or less, and that includes a garden. That’s 10 houses to an acre, rather than 3 1/3 by your recking - meaning three times the density in an urban area, meaning more amenities in walking distance, etc.
Of course, those smaller lot sizes also mean lower costs for the land.
Seriously - nothing wrong with wanting a bigger house, but nothing wrong with a smaller house either. And you can look up the facts: many jurisdictions have both minimum lot sizes and minimum house sizes, and although they are seldom explicit about it, it is definitely intended to create localities segregated by income, which of course is an imperfect proxy for segregation by race.
@Alan_Light : “many jurisdictions have both minimum lot sizes and minimum house sizes”
It’s called zoning, and it’s done to parcel out the infrastructure in areas of a municipality, not for racism or any other kind of -ism that you feel the need to conjure up in your head which has no basis in reality. Lot size and house size regulations figure into a number of other aspects that affect a community, including the need to provide schools to children who live in the houses, the amount of water, sewage and electricity used by houses in the neighborhood, and property values among others. Building a tiny house amongst larger houses in a neighborhood throws off all the equations used to approximate those services. And these kinds of services are only reliably provided to the citizens in Western countries which is why you only see these kinds of regulations. It isn’t discrimination which defines the regulations, it’s the services provided to neighborhoods within these countries.
@Alan_Light : “Of course, those smaller lot sizes also mean lower costs for the land.”
The value of a piece of land is affected by a large number of properties, and size is only one of them. The following criteria are also primary factors which affect lot prices:
- location (the primary factor for real estate value)
- number of improvements to the property
- proximity to good schools
- proximity of emergency services
- landform
@Nate_T - it’s far cheaper to provide services to people in a densely settled area than a sparsely settled area. Exceptions if you are not going to provide water and sewer at all - then you DO need minimum lot sizes, probably in the half acre range. You can always add schools and such.
And if you’d ever sat in on a city council meeting where they were talking about denying an application to build an apartment building in the city because the likely residents would not be able to pay much in taxes but the state would require the city to provide expensive services to them, you would know that most zoning is, in fact, about segregation.
@Alan_Light I also would not want an apartment complex built near my house. They bring down the property value, people in apartments are not invested in the community (and pay no property taxes), and their children are demonstrably less prepared for school, do worse on standardized tests, cost more in free lunch programs and their parents are the least likely to participate in their children’s education. I most definitely would vote against having an apartment complex built near my neighborhood. Again, it has nothing to do with race, it’s a matter of statistics.
@Nate_T - I find it curious that you admit that you want segregation, even while denying that you want segregation or that there is segregation.
And as Nathan noted, renters do pay property taxes via their rent, just as corporate taxes are really paid by the consumers who purchase goods from those corporations at a tax-inflated price.
@Nathan_Walkner - I don’t think you can really separate those things, especially in our system where schools are linked to geographic districts.
While I partially agree that racial segregation is not done intentionally - certainly not in explicit terms by a majority of the population - it is the direct result of intentional acts that are effectively racist, even if usually not intentionally so. However, I have myself witnessed a city government intentionally engaging in economic segregation - that is, intentionally implementing policies to prevent low income people from living in their town. In effect, they were discriminating against minorities - but considering that a majority of the city council were themselves black, I don’t know how consciously they were doing so. What they did understand was that if they allowed more poor people to live in their city, they would be required to provide them services which costs could not be made up for by taxes on these new residents.
Again, you are looking for racism in a situation where it probably doesn’t exist. Poor people don’t generally make decisions which are good for the community over the long term. Breaking demographics down by income is not racist, it’s classist. And for the record there are more poor WHITE people in the US than any other racial group. By excluding poor people from your community you avoid the problems they normally bring with them: crime, need for more social services, bad school test scores, etc.
Poor people in this country receive many services which I can see a community not wanting to provide. Some of them include:
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Section 8 housing (at a drastically reduced rental rate) - businesses who own apartment companies are forced to lease out a percentage of their properties at a substantial discount, losing revenue, and it generally brings down the class of people renting in the establishment and leads to more crime - so the business owner is forced to subsidize the living expenses of the poor
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Social services for children of poor people - this includes free lunch (and breakfast) programs, free afterschool programs, pre-k paid for by the community, etc. - the community subsidizes the care of poor children through taxes
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Welfare - this one is obvious. In Texas it comes in the form of Lonestar cards. - again the community is subsidizing the cost of living for poor people
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Healthcare - the community subsidizes the health insurance of the poor through Obamacare, Chip, and Medicaid
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“Earned Income Credit” - this is a “refund” which people who make under $25k receive instead of paying taxes
The poor of this country are a tremendous burden on the system, and the cost of maintaining them is a continuous drag on the system. It is not racist to want to avoid having to include the burden of them in the community, it is a matter of survival. And while the Left is constantly complaining about how these people are marginalized and discriminated against in this country, they completely fail to accept that US, and the West, provides more for the poor (by far) than anywhere else in earth. And those of us who actually pay taxes (property and federal taxes) are sick to death of the never ending burden which the multigenerational poor represent.
People in this country have the same access to education, and the opportunities which having an education provides. Sure, some schools, and school districts, are better than others, but a child in this country is guaranteed 12 years of education, and if you are non-white and non-Asian you have an easier route into college and are afforded many more opportunities for financial aid.
Conflating systemic racism for situational classism wielded to protect the community is wrong headed. There is no racist white man at the head of all organizations doing everything he can to keep “blacky” out. Communities are organized by like minded people who share similar values and are of a similar class for the purpose of protecting their families and their property. If you aren’t a member of a community it’s most likely because you don’t share the same values of the people in the community, not because of the color of your skin.
@Nate_T - Same difference. So it’s “classist”, but of course the class you are segregating out includes maybe 20% of whites and 95% of blacks. No, race has nothing to do with it… Just use the fact that that there are about five times as many whites to claim that the total number of whites is higher even though the percentage is much smaller. No, race has nothing to do with it. It’s racist to say there is such a thing as race. Race is a social construct. It’s a microaggression to claim there is no such thing as race.
I’ve seen it all, but I know what is going on.
Actually, I’m not opposed to segregation, providing government has no part in enforcing it. That was the real crime of Jim Crow - no one was allowed to opt out. Restaurant owners weren’t allowed to seat their black customers.
Now, we still have de facto racial segregation, it’s just that wealthy whites accomplished this by throwing poor whites under the bus. They force poor whites to live next door to poor blacks and deny both groups the right create communities of like-minded people for themselves, all in the name of racial harmony, even though the clash of cultures is not beneficial to anyone, and of course they would never accept poor blacks living in their own neighborhoods. For the middle-class, this situation forces them to spend a greater percentage of their income on housing, to ensure that they can live in a safe neighborhood with decent schools. This also helps limit social mobility - when you are spending all your money just to keep your head above water, you don’t have the time and money for anything else.
But you’re not allowed to discriminate against someone who might want to move into a neighborhood. This hurts blacks too. I know plenty of law-abiding, intelligent, hard-working black folk who would just like to live in a safe community - but they are not permitted by law to create any system by which they can decide who will live in their neighborhood - so if a known criminal has the money and there is a house for sale, they have to sell it to them. Any covenants by which a neighborhood can decide whether to accept a newcomer into the community are null and void.
So the only way remaining to ensure that one lives in a safe community is to make laws demanding large lot sizes and large houses, because this will ensure that poor people - most of whom are law-abiding but some of whom are not - are not able to live next door. Most poor people aren’t criminals, but most criminals are poor. Same with black people - most poor people aren’t black, but most black people are poor. The end result is that poor people are excluded from society and put in harm’s way, middle class people are forced to spend money on things they don’t need and therefore have decreased social mobility, and rich people, almost entirely white, are able to pat themselves on the back for being such good people while maintaining and even expanding a system of racial segregation and attacking poor whites for their own sin.
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