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Economy|The Great Compression

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/business/economy/the-great-compression.html
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Many small houses sit side by side in the Elm Trails subdivision from Lennar
Homes in San Antonio.Credit...Josh Huskin for The New York Times
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THE GREAT COMPRESSION

Thanks to soaring housing prices, the era of the 400-square-foot subdivision
house is upon us.

Many small houses sit side by side in the Elm Trails subdivision from Lennar
Homes in San Antonio.Credit...Josh Huskin for The New York Times

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By Conor Dougherty

 * Feb. 17, 2024

Robert Lanter lives in a 600-square-foot house that can be traversed in five
seconds and vacuumed from a single outlet. He doesn’t have a coffee table in the
living room because it would obstruct the front door. When relatives come to
visit, Mr. Lanter says jokingly, but only partly, they have to tour one at time.

Each of these details amounts to something bigger, for Mr. Lanter’s life and the
U.S. housing market: a house under $300,000, something increasingly hard to
find. That price allowed Mr. Lanter, a 63-year-old retired nurse, to buy a new
single-family home in a subdivision in Redmond, Ore., about 30 minutes outside
Bend, where he is from and which is, along with its surrounding area, one of
Oregon’s most expensive housing markets.

Mr. Lanter’s house could easily fit on a flatbed truck, and is dwarfed by the
two-story suburban homes that prevail on the blocks around him. But, in fact,
there are even smaller homes in his subdivision, Cinder Butte, which was
developed by a local builder called Hayden Homes. Some of his neighbors live in
houses that total just 400 square feet — a 20-by-20-foot house attached to a
20-by-20-foot garage.

This is not a colony of “tiny houses,” popular among minimalists and aesthetes
looking to simplify their lives. For Mr. Lanter and his neighbors, it’s a chance
to hold on to ownership.



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Mr. Lanter, who is recently divorced, came back to central Oregon from a
condominium in Portland only to discover that home prices had surged beyond his
reach. He has owned several larger homes over the years and said he began his
recent search looking for a three-bedroom house.


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Robert Lanter outside his 600-square-foot home in Redmond, Ore.Credit...Ivan
McClellan for The New York Times


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Conor Dougherty is an economics reporter and the author of “Golden Gates:
Fighting for Housing in America.” His work focuses on the West Coast, real
estate and wage stagnation among U.S. workers. More about Conor Dougherty

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 18, 2024, Section BU, Page 4
of the New York edition with the headline: The Shrinking of the American Home.
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