The future of housing
Apr. 29th, 2019 07:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talkswithwindCharles Stross asks the question, how will residential architecture change in the next 100 years? Complete with context around how it changed in the last 300 or so.
Being a USian, my answer to that is focused on the US.
By my read of it the major influences for changes will be driven by:
Second, the current generation of condos will face code-challenges in the coming decades. The current style has a name I've forgotten, but has one or two stories of concrete framed retail (the podium), topped by 3 to 7 floors of stick-built residences. These things are everywhere, and constitute nearly all of urban infill right now. They're also put up by real-estate wealth and management operations. Fires in these places can get pretty bad, which I estimate will cause them to deal with updated building-codes that will require extensive behind-the-walls renovation (2030 to to 2060 timeframe) if not outright urban-renewal demolition and replacement (2040+ by my guess). By 2119, those that survive will be seen as bad places to live.
As the urban rental-dominated megaplexes get larger, new urban communities will come into existence. These will be existing municipalities, but with radically increased population due to things like high-capacity transit stops allowing connectivity to the urban core driving high intensity urban in-fill. Which will change the nature of these previously 'sleepy' communities.
The current trend where the distribution of children on the wealth-curve has the higher numbers weighted at the bottom of the chart means that child-raising oriented architecture will not be wide-spread. New condos and suchlike target middle and higher income families because the margins are better, leaving older depreciated and code-challenged architecture to the lower income people. Housing targeted at higher-income people will be convertible to child-friendly (bathtubs vs. showers, separate bedroom vs utility rooms), but will not be built that way from the outset.
In the dense urban cities, time-share car usage will begin to dominate versus car-ownership. There will be separate classes of time-share, where you can opt into a level where you get the luxury cars as rentals versus the budget kind the rest of the classes can enjoy. People living where transit isn't great will continue to be car-owners.
Given all of this context, how will that drive the floorplans of the residences of 2119? Because of all of this, how housing looks will change depending on where you're looking. That said, there are some things we can continue to trust will not change, like fire-code requiring exterior access in all rooms where people sleep (no windowless second-basements using full-wall display tech to emulate windows).
Dense rental-dominated urban core
New housing here will be built targeting the 2 adult household with room for 1, maybe 2 children. It will be transit oriented, since managing cars is too expensive for most in this market. Entry level homes will have a single bathroom, with a second bathroom (give your guests something private / give the kid their own) as an upgrade. This is a slight shift from now, where the 'master' BR always has a private bath. But I expect 2-bath places to continue to the master-suite trend we've had for the last 40 or so years. Kitchens will be one-person kitchens, be appended to the communal space, and probably won't contain a full 4-burner cooktop and an oven big enough to roast a chicken; 2 burner, and an oven sized for a loaf of bread. If parking is even offered, it will be a bid-system and definitely not specced out for 1 per unit.
Square-footage will be compressed, as that makes more profit for the builders, so there will be little call for 'useless' space like corridors. Bedrooms/utility-rooms will open directly into the central communal/kitchen spaces. Master/guest separation will happen by having those spaces on opposite sides of the communal space. Televisual changes will probably converge on an entire wall dedicated to display surface. These will be fully sprinklered due to the higher risk of fires in dense housing (already happening).
Renovated housing (old housing brought up to code and marketability) will focus on bringing these units into parity with new-build as a way to eek out more profit from these depreciated capital investments. The older more spacious floorplans will be replaced with denser ones, leading to odd-looking compromises. Unit layouts will be highly variable, but continue the new-housing trend as much as possible. Parking may have been converted into more housing, but will still be offered.
Old housing still in service will be following older layouts. The master-suite concept will very much be a thing, and square-footage will be bigger. Double-baths will be more common. Set-off hallways isolating the master-suite will be more common than in new-build. Parking will be offered and possibly more extensive than new-build.
Detached single-family housing will be the playground of the rich. Much of this was platted in the late 1800's and early 1900's, and some of the housing stock may actually date from then. But most will have been either gutted and rebuilt inside, or outright torn down and replaced with something that maximizes the allowed building footprint (possibly several times in the coming century). Share-car services will likely dominate these spaces, with a few continuing to own their own.
Floor-plans will emphasize space and autonomy. Master suites ("retreats") will be very separated from the rest of the house and the size of new-build units themselves. Hotelling rooms will exists, and so will dedicated utility rooms like home-offices. The extravagance of a full kitchen will be present, as entertaining is part of the point of these houses (and hire-chefs will find it easier to work) The stairs will provide the main corridor of the house.
Satellite urban centers
This class are urban-core style, but detached from the major employment centers in some way. Or are secondary employment centers themselves (company HQ towns, etc), but with transit connectivity to the main ones.
New-build will follow the urban-core style, with somewhat more emphasis on the presence of home-offices (with closets, in case that needs to become a bedroom when kid number 2 gets old enough) due to telecommuters.
Renovated housing follows the urban-core style for this type, but with a substype of 'affordable' housing.
Old housing will continue to be maintained in minimum-viable way, as this is the closest that service-workers can likely get to the core. Floorplans here will reflect earlier decades, and will occasionally be bought out and replaced with new-build as owners make exits.
Commuter-towns
This class are communities where most people are going somewhere else. Local businesses are mostly service-oriented towards those that live there and small businesses hoping to become big businesses one day. Somewhat transit-oriented, but car-ownership is definitely higher than any of the previous types; these people sometimes need to go places harder to do on transit.
New-build of the urban-core style will show up once in a while as builders still make money on that style. But property values will be enough that new-build dorms for service workers will be profitable. These will be made for larger families where home-cooking is an economic incentive. So, more bedrooms and a kitchen that is nice to use 3+ times a day.
Renovated housing may include single-family-detached, but only in areas that are currently well separated from their urban core in 2019. And such housing is likely to be the entry level to single-family-detached ownership near a city, and a sign of wealth.
Old housing... is hard to estimate.
Rural towns
Places that are not transit-connected to big cities, or the transit-connections require a big investment in time. Car ownership will be very common, especially for those driving to a transit-hub. Some, especially teleworkers, can stay car-free relying on share-car services for in-town errands. For others, like ag-workers, off-road capable vehicles will actually be needed.
New build is fractured here. In towns with a local industry, such as college/university towns, the urban-core pattern will be present and likely built by the same real-estate investors building in the satellite communities.
Student housing will be bare bones and designed to pack 4 co-renting adults into as tight a space as possible. Four small bedrooms, one bathroom, a breakfast-kitchen, and a shared living-room.
But here there will be some new-build of single-family-detached focusing on people who can work displaced from coworkers. This will be the first single-family-detached home people can own, but to do so they need to live far away from a big city. Floor-plans will be spacious as compared to the urban-core pattern, with extras since this will be the 'upgrade' house from previous dense city-living. Dedicated guest-bedrooms will be standard, but so will dedicated office-spaces (a room w/o a closet) because these workers will be working in the home.
Renovated housing will also service transplants from the cities looking for more room. Unlike the urban and satellite areas, this housing may not have been fully gutted and replaced, so will echo floor-plans going back two centuries. Which will seem like luxury space, even though such styles generally put windows everywhere leaving not much space to put the whole-wall A/V setup.
Old housing goes back two centuries and is beginning to seriously rot. This stuff is cheap, though; so some service-workers will be making the drive into the edge of the transit networks every day.
-------------
You may notice that I'm leaving out whole swaths of the marketplace. Namely, those with special housing needs unrelated to elder-care (disabled). Since accommodating edge-cases isn't how you make money, we're on the hook for enforceable regulation cramming it into the marketplace as a condition of entry. I honestly can't predict if the US of 2119 will be any better about that than the US of 2019. I'm guessing not.
Being a USian, my answer to that is focused on the US.
By my read of it the major influences for changes will be driven by:
- Demographic changes.
- We'll cross the miniority-majority line between then and now, which will drive the white supremacists into high gear.
- Population growth will be driven by immigration, not birth rate (we may be past that line now).
- Deepening of the rental-dominated city vs. owner-occupied suburb/rural divide.
- The economic factors that drive residential architecture in rental-dominated cities will be stable income for retiree-shareholders, not the occupants of the units.
- Rural areas will see renovations if not new-build from new/continuing residents, driven by the occupants.
- Structural wealth inequality
- Wealth inequality is as American as slavery (14th amendment included) and gun-ownership (2nd amendment), baring a true revolution it isn't going away. And the parameters of Charlie's question rule out revolutions.
- The rules for people who can afford to not only buy their own home, but build what they want to spec will continue to be very different than the rest of us.
- The wealthiest 1% will continue to be very white.
- Built infrastructure
- The flat/condo boom we're undergoing now will still be there for much of the coming century.
- Underground infrastructure (water, sewer, electrical, telecoms) and its age will play a role.
Second, the current generation of condos will face code-challenges in the coming decades. The current style has a name I've forgotten, but has one or two stories of concrete framed retail (the podium), topped by 3 to 7 floors of stick-built residences. These things are everywhere, and constitute nearly all of urban infill right now. They're also put up by real-estate wealth and management operations. Fires in these places can get pretty bad, which I estimate will cause them to deal with updated building-codes that will require extensive behind-the-walls renovation (2030 to to 2060 timeframe) if not outright urban-renewal demolition and replacement (2040+ by my guess). By 2119, those that survive will be seen as bad places to live.
As the urban rental-dominated megaplexes get larger, new urban communities will come into existence. These will be existing municipalities, but with radically increased population due to things like high-capacity transit stops allowing connectivity to the urban core driving high intensity urban in-fill. Which will change the nature of these previously 'sleepy' communities.
The current trend where the distribution of children on the wealth-curve has the higher numbers weighted at the bottom of the chart means that child-raising oriented architecture will not be wide-spread. New condos and suchlike target middle and higher income families because the margins are better, leaving older depreciated and code-challenged architecture to the lower income people. Housing targeted at higher-income people will be convertible to child-friendly (bathtubs vs. showers, separate bedroom vs utility rooms), but will not be built that way from the outset.
In the dense urban cities, time-share car usage will begin to dominate versus car-ownership. There will be separate classes of time-share, where you can opt into a level where you get the luxury cars as rentals versus the budget kind the rest of the classes can enjoy. People living where transit isn't great will continue to be car-owners.
Given all of this context, how will that drive the floorplans of the residences of 2119? Because of all of this, how housing looks will change depending on where you're looking. That said, there are some things we can continue to trust will not change, like fire-code requiring exterior access in all rooms where people sleep (no windowless second-basements using full-wall display tech to emulate windows).
Dense rental-dominated urban core
New housing here will be built targeting the 2 adult household with room for 1, maybe 2 children. It will be transit oriented, since managing cars is too expensive for most in this market. Entry level homes will have a single bathroom, with a second bathroom (give your guests something private / give the kid their own) as an upgrade. This is a slight shift from now, where the 'master' BR always has a private bath. But I expect 2-bath places to continue to the master-suite trend we've had for the last 40 or so years. Kitchens will be one-person kitchens, be appended to the communal space, and probably won't contain a full 4-burner cooktop and an oven big enough to roast a chicken; 2 burner, and an oven sized for a loaf of bread. If parking is even offered, it will be a bid-system and definitely not specced out for 1 per unit.
Square-footage will be compressed, as that makes more profit for the builders, so there will be little call for 'useless' space like corridors. Bedrooms/utility-rooms will open directly into the central communal/kitchen spaces. Master/guest separation will happen by having those spaces on opposite sides of the communal space. Televisual changes will probably converge on an entire wall dedicated to display surface. These will be fully sprinklered due to the higher risk of fires in dense housing (already happening).
Renovated housing (old housing brought up to code and marketability) will focus on bringing these units into parity with new-build as a way to eek out more profit from these depreciated capital investments. The older more spacious floorplans will be replaced with denser ones, leading to odd-looking compromises. Unit layouts will be highly variable, but continue the new-housing trend as much as possible. Parking may have been converted into more housing, but will still be offered.
Old housing still in service will be following older layouts. The master-suite concept will very much be a thing, and square-footage will be bigger. Double-baths will be more common. Set-off hallways isolating the master-suite will be more common than in new-build. Parking will be offered and possibly more extensive than new-build.
Detached single-family housing will be the playground of the rich. Much of this was platted in the late 1800's and early 1900's, and some of the housing stock may actually date from then. But most will have been either gutted and rebuilt inside, or outright torn down and replaced with something that maximizes the allowed building footprint (possibly several times in the coming century). Share-car services will likely dominate these spaces, with a few continuing to own their own.
Floor-plans will emphasize space and autonomy. Master suites ("retreats") will be very separated from the rest of the house and the size of new-build units themselves. Hotelling rooms will exists, and so will dedicated utility rooms like home-offices. The extravagance of a full kitchen will be present, as entertaining is part of the point of these houses (and hire-chefs will find it easier to work) The stairs will provide the main corridor of the house.
Satellite urban centers
This class are urban-core style, but detached from the major employment centers in some way. Or are secondary employment centers themselves (company HQ towns, etc), but with transit connectivity to the main ones.
New-build will follow the urban-core style, with somewhat more emphasis on the presence of home-offices (with closets, in case that needs to become a bedroom when kid number 2 gets old enough) due to telecommuters.
Renovated housing follows the urban-core style for this type, but with a substype of 'affordable' housing.
Old housing will continue to be maintained in minimum-viable way, as this is the closest that service-workers can likely get to the core. Floorplans here will reflect earlier decades, and will occasionally be bought out and replaced with new-build as owners make exits.
Commuter-towns
This class are communities where most people are going somewhere else. Local businesses are mostly service-oriented towards those that live there and small businesses hoping to become big businesses one day. Somewhat transit-oriented, but car-ownership is definitely higher than any of the previous types; these people sometimes need to go places harder to do on transit.
New-build of the urban-core style will show up once in a while as builders still make money on that style. But property values will be enough that new-build dorms for service workers will be profitable. These will be made for larger families where home-cooking is an economic incentive. So, more bedrooms and a kitchen that is nice to use 3+ times a day.
Renovated housing may include single-family-detached, but only in areas that are currently well separated from their urban core in 2019. And such housing is likely to be the entry level to single-family-detached ownership near a city, and a sign of wealth.
Old housing... is hard to estimate.
Rural towns
Places that are not transit-connected to big cities, or the transit-connections require a big investment in time. Car ownership will be very common, especially for those driving to a transit-hub. Some, especially teleworkers, can stay car-free relying on share-car services for in-town errands. For others, like ag-workers, off-road capable vehicles will actually be needed.
New build is fractured here. In towns with a local industry, such as college/university towns, the urban-core pattern will be present and likely built by the same real-estate investors building in the satellite communities.
Student housing will be bare bones and designed to pack 4 co-renting adults into as tight a space as possible. Four small bedrooms, one bathroom, a breakfast-kitchen, and a shared living-room.
But here there will be some new-build of single-family-detached focusing on people who can work displaced from coworkers. This will be the first single-family-detached home people can own, but to do so they need to live far away from a big city. Floor-plans will be spacious as compared to the urban-core pattern, with extras since this will be the 'upgrade' house from previous dense city-living. Dedicated guest-bedrooms will be standard, but so will dedicated office-spaces (a room w/o a closet) because these workers will be working in the home.
Renovated housing will also service transplants from the cities looking for more room. Unlike the urban and satellite areas, this housing may not have been fully gutted and replaced, so will echo floor-plans going back two centuries. Which will seem like luxury space, even though such styles generally put windows everywhere leaving not much space to put the whole-wall A/V setup.
Old housing goes back two centuries and is beginning to seriously rot. This stuff is cheap, though; so some service-workers will be making the drive into the edge of the transit networks every day.
-------------
You may notice that I'm leaving out whole swaths of the marketplace. Namely, those with special housing needs unrelated to elder-care (disabled). Since accommodating edge-cases isn't how you make money, we're on the hook for enforceable regulation cramming it into the marketplace as a condition of entry. I honestly can't predict if the US of 2119 will be any better about that than the US of 2019. I'm guessing not.
