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What isn't?

That it's dirt cheap to slap on more square footage, or that cost plays into people's decision to buy single-family homes vs a condo in the city?

The part she quoted.

Yes covid muted to rebound .
We got lucky it didn’t mutate in something worst .
Doesn’t means it was wrong because we got lucky …

It’s just incorrect. The cost per square foot typically decreases as the size of the project increases but it’s incremental to scale, and the cost estimate is still entirely based on square footage. So if you wanted to add 150% more size to your house you can still expect to pay about double for 2500 vs the 1000. And this takes no other variables into account.

So yeah, no what Inso is suggesting is not based in reality in any geographical location in the Us.

Because public transportation is useless with how most American cities are laid out. In the time it takes me to get to the train station in Milwaukee and take said train to Madison, I could've driven there myself and have the freedom of my own personal vehicle on both ends.

With the money it would take to put up high speed rail from Milwaukee to Madison with sufficient stations to make it not feel absolutely terrible to use, you could pay limo drivers $100k/year to take 3 passengers at a time with door-to-door service for wherever they're coming and going, replacing the vehicles with new ones every 4 years.

A 15 minute car trip from one end of the City to another will take more than 2 hours by bus. I just checked Google maps and a trip from the Milwaukee Art Museum to the Stadium is 7 minutes by car and 37 minutes by transit. You'd think that those two locations would be easily accessible to the mass transit system. You can almost WALK from State Fair Park to the Stadium faster than you can get there by bus, and they're on the same goddamned street! 35 min vs 55 min, but you might wait 20 minutes for the bus to come.

You might argue that we could improve infrastructure and spend more money on buses and drivers, but unless these buses pick people up within 1000 ft of their homes and drop them off right at their destinations, people aren't going to be happy. We're not this fat because we like walking, and good ****ing luck bringing your Costco haul onto a bus.

AS a homebuilder INSO is wrong . With your logic it would not cost more to build a 10,000 sq ft house than a 1000 sq ft house

The savings may be in foundation costs but you will still need all the materials and labor .

It decreases rapidly, which was my point. I promise you that if you could even find a builder to quote you a price on a 1000 sq ft home, 19 out of 20 of them will not be half the price of a similarly finished 2500 sq ft model. I can't use our own houses as a fair comparison because they're 100% custom, but I glanced at a reputable mass-builder in my market and their smallest house is $580k for 1700 sq ft. The largest one they have prebuilt and ready for sale is 3300 sq ft and it's $779k, which is roughly the sort of ratio I figured when I wrote my original comment, though will admit I could've chosen a better word than "slightly".

I'm also not talking about the cost to the buyer. I'm talking about cost to the builder, which is extremely pertinent to my original comment about what builders spend their limited resources on.

I'd be shocked if you brought them a 1000 sq ft plan and they gave you a price under 500k to build it. It's just not worth tying up limited resources.

Car culture makes cities be built around cars > public transport becomes less efficient > car brained nimbys use the way they wrecked cities as proof that public transport sucks

Also idk if you know this but they do have costco in other countries

I have no idea where you’re getting your information but it has the same vibes as going to Zillow to find out what your house is worth. That’s just not how it works.

How rapidly cost decreases per square foot depends on a multitude of factors. Your assertion that adding square footage is a negligible cost is just nonsense.

It’s hilarious how Inso jumps from “better public transportation” to “no one has a car at all.”

As if it wouldn’t be wonderful to use the single household car for a once-per-month Costco trip, and then not need to use said car for literally anything else. Less time spent driving = no freedom. ****ing lol.

This is probably a larger factor than people think. In England & Wales about a third of all households are now single-person. The conversion of period family houses into flats adjusts for this to an extent, but in 'good' areas there's a reverse trend, with houses long ago divided into flats being done over and becoming one-family homes again.

Not to mention the potential for more green space once the parking lots are not needed and the environmental and cooling impact that has on urban environments

lol

Zillow will provide you with recently sold comps, I think.

I genuinely don't understand why you guys are fighting me so hard on this. The 1000 sq ft starter home like were built in large numbers after WW2 are simply a thing of the past. Wood is cheap. Drywall is cheap. The HVAC guys are going to duct 1000 sq ft in roughly the same amount of time as they'll do 2000 sq ft in terms of overall project cost.

My project managers are making as much as lawyers and they'll spend just as much time dealing with a client on a small home vs a large one. Unless you're going with exotic finishes or went insane with your rooflines, it's just not very expensive to go bigger.

Maybe I'm all wet on this because we only do full-custom and none of my subs are pricing based on the square foot.

How many 1000 sq ft homes have you built, lozen? I can't fathom there being a market for that type of house in 2025 with how insanely expensive it is to simply start the process. There are only so many hours in the day, and you should sell each one for as much as you can.

Victory is another reputable builder in SE Wisconsin and the literal smallest plan they advertise is 2400 sq ft. Who are these people willing to spend limited time and resources building tiny starter homes?

Edit: In hindsight, we're not even talking about the same thing. The discussion can't even be about single-family homes. They're too expensive to build no matter the size. If you want the government to fix the housing supply issue, they need to slap down giant towers of generic grey boxes. Still pretty expensive, though, and I wouldn't ever want to live in one.

My guy…

I think this is more of a preference thing for you than a universal belief. Public transit needs to be improved in big cities but I would never voluntarily move into a big city and be forced into taking PT unless i had a really good paying job that put me there.

As more poeple started working from home, more poeple voluntarily left those areas for what seems like very good reasons that isnt predicated on the quality of the transit. I dont want to drive to costco, I want amazon to deliver that ****. I just want to be able to take the boat to the lake, go snow skiing and about 50 more enjoyable things.

Public transit is just there to make a shitty situation less depressing.

You know more about it than I do. In Wisconsin, we have https://wihomes.com/ which is direct access to the MLS. I just looked my own house up on Zillow and it's about 5% higher than I think is probably accurate, but they DO show recently sold comps, so not sure what the 'my guy' is about.

I don’t understand how you’re not getting this. No one is forcing you to use public transportation. But if you have better infrastructure for it, then more people will use it. Again, this is not YOU. You are still free to take your boat to the ****ing lake or whatever. Your drive to the lake will actually be way safer and quicker because there will be less people driving with you on the road. Your Amazon deliveries will be more reliable.

Drivers should want to support public transportation just as much as non-drivers. It literally benefits everyone.

Also, your last line is hilarious considering the first line of your post. You’re just projecting your beliefs about something you’ve never experienced. I was born in a bum**** town where owning a car was a necessity, and I now live in a city where public transport functions well enough to see the obvious benefits for people who use it as well as those who don’t.

Yes, thank you. There are plenty of other benefits as well, such as you mention here.

Okay I went back and read the entire context and I mostly agree with you. I literally said this about public transit ...

But until that happens, people are going to continue to leave congested cities for urban areas when the jobs are not the key driver anymore for reasons that include not having another option besides taking public transit.

Not to pile on, but this framing is weird and is true of literally every public service? My local library makes my shitty situation less depressing. Doesn't mean it's a bad thing at all!

For a while I was in a living situation where I walked two blocks to the Metro and took that to work everyday, it was a much better and less stressful experience than driving my own car, I could read a book or do a crossword for a bit. Sure, having a private limo might have been more cozy, but the Metro was perfectly fine. Also, the car-centered suburban strip mall scene has been the poster child for depressing, soulless existences for a generation.

I mean, yeah. I don't think it's a knock on public transit. It's more of a knock on overcrowded cities not being able to function as well + not being a desirable way of life once their job isn't tied to the area anymore.

But maybe there are a lot more people who prefer that lifestyle than I had assumed.

Some people like living in the city, and it would be nice if we didn’t build city infrastructure around the ones that don’t.

USA is just blowing up poor fishermen for fun now. oh and probably profit.