The skilled working people of North America have lives, skills, hobbies, and interests that extend far beyond the confines of an apartment cubicle. Their future productivity, pretraining for new jobs, development of diverse skills, indeed their very hope for self-sufficiency in retirement is contingent upon “suburban sprawl”, a rambling house full of stuff, and a big garage. Why do you want to turn them into battery chickens?

Otherwise I agree with your arguments and prefer to rent myself. Owning a home is a huge commitment to one place and financial situation, in an otherwise very mobile world.

I don’t quite get your argument about leasing a car though, but I’m the type of person who doesn’t mind driving an old beater. As long as it’s four wheels, an enclosed cabin, and an engine, it’s fine with me. Plus the insurance is cheaper on old cars you own outright.

Donall – I too am shocked by the lack of design in new construction. It is beyond appalling, truly frightening. So it makes sense that folks would get increasingly interested in rennovating older homes. One thing that I would love to see is more interesting new design in urban infill situations. One place I’ve seen more interesting stuff is Miami Beach and its environs both in new apartment construction and in single family renovation and restoration.

Michael – I concur. When you purchase a house, you really need to think not about the structure but the land and location. That’s where the value is.

John – of course the US has loaded up single family housing with incentives, not just tax incentives but subsidies to mortgages, artificially low interest rates, look-the-other-way regulations, and a massive subsidy in terms of transportation and highway building. Heck, the single family home was the fundamental tool which fuelled fordist industrial expansion by driving up consumption of durable goods. The ultimate Keynesian stimulator.

But what role does this play in the creative economy? Brian is on to part of it, a great energy sink and environmental problem. Then add in the time costs, commuting costs, opportunity costs.

The single family home is a romantic relic, and one I personally like, as I live in one. But from a system level, it is poorly “articulated” to the demands of the creative age.

New forms of housing tenure will come along to replace it. They already are. It’s just a matter of time.

Anyone care to speculate on what they think the kinds of housing options/ tenure make sense for a creative economy of ideas, innovation, intangibles, mobility, speed and continuous mobilization of human intelligence?

The neighborhood issue is very important; I’m thinking of the home I owned in DC, which was tiny and not a dream house – but was an acceptable space that I could afford in a neighborhood I wanted to be in, which seemed like a better trade-off to me than a better, bigger home in a place I did not want to live.

What the houseprice slump will do to building trends remains to be seen but i feel that there is change on how people are wanting to live with a mood swing to Art deco/Modernist house styles.

Unfortunately the number of people who design their own houses is small and the housing developers are designing houses that are antiquated and hark back to traditional styles e.g. every new house i have seen has a chimney pot because that’s what people see as being an integral part of a house whether it is needed or not.

In cities, we don’t just live in houses, we live in neighborhoods. Buying an existing single family house in a neighborhood is different than building a new subdivision of oversized car-oriented mansions. Portland and Seattle are cities fairly high on the density list that have lots of single family homes in close-in neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs talked about the necessary mix of longtime residents and turnover for healthy neighborhoods.

As an investment houses may not perform as spectacularly as stocks, but even if values go down you still have a place to live. Some people like my wife love to garden and decorate without having to get permission. Home ownership might tie you to a place you can’t afford to leave like Detroit or Cleveland, and therefore lower income and higher unemployment — but in the “Superstar Cities” with high creative class rates this isn’t generally a problem.

On the other hand, the boom in Portland and many other places now is high-rise condos which give ownership without the homeowner hassles, and close in to downtown. The high end ones give you a loft or floorplan, then let you decide what you want to have in terms of kitchen, etc. One of my best friends sold their house a couple of years ago to rent and I worried, but maybe it wasn’t such a bad move.

I think you’re onto something about the market for more choices, in design, in ownership/leasing forms, in usage. Group living and extended families are making a comeback partly driven by immigrants who have different housing traditions and maybe 3 families buy a large house together, and partly driven by adult children and declining parents moving in with middle aged couples. The land-trust concept where you buy the house but the trust owns the land. Maybe primary home time-shares, not just for vacations? I suspect there will be more innovation and forms we haven’t thought of yet.

Two other thoughts. There need to be new forms not just for the creative class, but for lower income people who are being squeezed out and paying huge parts of their income for housing. Bringing HUD funding back to 1960’s levels would help a lot, but so would different forms of housing, including renting and ownership methods. Second, for the creative class, it probably makes a difference if you’re 25 or 60.