alt Hacker NewsNope. Smaller more affordable homes would be a better solution. Most people who rent cant afford to buy, but rent is a worse deal long term.
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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.
It’s actually quite hard to definitively quantify if renting or owning is better in a given area/scenario.
Obviously the case near me where the mortgage payment on a house would be $2600/mo but the rent for the identical one next door is $2000 is going to swing heavily toward renting, but there’s more to it than just that.
Maintenance is huge and real and people just seem to ignore it on the “own” side, but 5-10% of the value of the house a year in maintenance isn’t unheard of.
This is only true for two reasons:
1. House prices have risen consistently for the past ~50 years. This is an anomaly (various theories why, my favourite is because women entered the workforce so the income per household increased and we spend as much as we can afford on housing). If/when house prices stop rising consistently then buying doesn't look much better than renting from a financial perspective.
2. Existing laws tend to favour the landlord over the tenant. In countries where this is not true (e.g. most of Europe) and the tenant is favoured, then renting is not so precarious and has lots of advantages.
I lived in rented accomodation in Berlin and it's a completely different experience from renting in the Anglosphere (UK or Australia for me, I don't know about the USA).