████████ ██████ ██████████ ██ ████ ██ ████ ██████████ ██. ███ ███ 

 ████████ ██ ████ ██ ████  ██ ████ ██ ██████ ████ ██ ████ ██████████

██. ███ ███  ██ ████ ██ ████  ██ ████ ██ ████   ██ ███

 ████████ ██████ ██████████ ██ ████ ██ ████ ██████████ ██. ███ ███ 

 ████████ ██████ ██ ████ ██ ████ ██████████ ██ ████ ██ ████ ██████████

██. ███ ███  ██  ██ ████ ██ ████  ██ █████ ████

████ ██ ████ ██ ████ █ ██ ███ ██ ████ ██ ████ ██ ████ █ ██ ████ ██ ████

 ████████ ██████ ██████████ ██████████ ██. ███ ███ 

to own a home, or do they really only want a nice place to live for as long as they choose to?  Having been a homeowner many times I know the feeling of security of having a place to call home for my family.  But I also know the stresses of repairs, taxes, insurance, and assessments that pop up all through the year.  I also know the feeling of watching the value and anticipating if my community is going to prosper or if we had better bail before it hits the skids.  Did I really just want a nice place to live?  At the time I was using the house to speculate, which worked out great.  For low leverage (a down payment), I was able to control a lot of equity appreciation.  That is pretty cool.  But it still does not answer the question as to whether I just wanted a nice place to live.  When property values are stagnant, and look to stay that way for a decade to come, I favor just having a nice place to live.  The problem is that when everyone else feels that way, the supply becomes scarce and buying becomes the way to get that nice place.  Hence the real estate ownership cycle.   

people need room to bounce around in private, within the walls of their own home.  When I was a boy we moved onto a 36 foot powerboat.  There is not much space in a boat that size.  A few steps and you are in the galley (kitchen) and one more you are in the restroom.  It is similar to living in a trailer, and for me it was a step up from the 22 footer we had lived in before.  The whole idea of subjecting your child to living in something that small is beyond me, but I’m not going to digress into that.  Having an affordable, small home is a need for a lot of folks,  and I think it can be accomplished with not only storage, which I have pointed out in an earlier post, but with indoor-outdoor living.  Shaping the house in a “U” for instance, and having a “great room” or open covered space that the living area and bedrooms open too, then having smaller covered private patios off each bedroom is a way the mid century designers gave expanse to smaller spaces.  Living on a boat as a kid I learned to spend the majority of my life outside, and the marina provided a “Mayberry” small town atmosphere and safe haven for me.  In a development of small homes it would be crucial to provide a lot of outdoor living spaces close to clusters of homes and secure from public view.  

the feeling a kid gets when there is a home that his parents have have bought and that can be claimed for the rest of childhood.  I would think there would be a fantastic sense of accomplishment for the builder who made that home affordable enough for people to settle into.  The need for affordable housing that feels and lasts like quality housing should will always be a factor in any society.   The challenge is fitting that housing into the framework of an existing center of commerce, making it accessible for residents of congested areas and alleviating the long commutes required to set up home life in most suburban communities.  It’s easy to design a house or a community tract, the challenge is figuring a way to make urban living feel private and keep it within the reach of middle class income.  And the other challenge is to have a floor plan that will allure a middle class family by quality and design rather than solely by space.  

was telling me the other day that his father had built prefab homes from around 1908 until 1940, when they got out of the home building business and began making surfboards.  His company, Pacific Ready Cut Homes, built an estimated 40,000 homes during the 32 years it served the West coast and parts of South America.  William Butte found a need for low cost housing and filled it with a comfortable, attractive do-it-yourself dwelling,  Read about it - click on the source below…

(Source: homepage.mac.com)

with the garage space.  I think it is crucial to have an oversized garage with storage capability in order for people to live a minimalist life in a small to medium sized house. The garage should include a workshop space for fixing stuff, with enough room for tools and saws so they are easily accessible.  I like the idea of having a “clean room” off the garage, where a family can leave stuff that usually goes with them, like school backpacks and sports equipment, along with an area for the laundry with a folding table.  This room would have to be insulated like the house and be a secure storage area.  Having a room like this with shelving dedicated to each family member would enable the family to live clutter free.  The garage and workshop would be the least expensive structure to build, and the storage area would be no more than 25 square feet.  

people want great quality and will give up some quantity to get it.  That was not the case 5 or ten years ago, from around 2001 to 2006.  Easy credit and crazy home lenders made it possible to buy massive mac mansions on almost no income.  If a farm hand in Bakersfield could fog a mirror he could buy a $750,000 house.  (That actually happened.)  I remember reading during the first few years of the 21st century about some guys building very high quality manufactured homes, so well made that they gave the potential resident the feeling of being in a luxury car.  I never heard anymore, since they just did not offer the square footage that “everyman home buyer” with the young wife and 2.3 children wanted. I think folks these days, those who have had enough of air conditioning bills on 3,000 square foot trophy houses, would bite at the chance of buying an affordable, 1400 to 1700 square foot home with lots of light and simple interior finishing.    

got to thinking…  I don’t want to build homes and hassle with the cities and counties about land allotment and all the intricacies that go along with it.  That just does not work for me.  I’ll leave that work to others who are more adept to it.  I like to create, on a massive scale if possible, so I would rather have the factory building the homes to fill the orders of all those developers.  And I want to be in control of the build quality.