By Reenita Malhotra •
September 23, 2008
As the government begins to unleash a highly criticized bailout plan for Wall Street’s toxic mortgage backed assets, it is worth taking a step back to understand how the problem actually arose.
Investing In Real Estate
It all started with real estate investing which involves the purchase, ownership and sale of real estate for profit. Real estate is an asset form with limited liquidity relative to other investments, it is also capital intensive (although capital may be gained through mortgage leverage) and [...]
Smaller homes are more energy efficient generally, and consume fewer resources for their construction. In the United States, the average house size has been skyrocketing in the past few decades from 983 square feet in 1950 to almost 2,350 square feet in 2004.
Smaller buildings are potentially more affordable, are better suited to livable neighborhoods, and serve the needs of smaller families (while our houses have more than doubled in size since 1950, the size of the average family has actually decreased in that same period). There are already developers who understand this, but sometimes, the municipalities make it impossible to build smaller homes.
Marty Pieroni, a developer in Kuna, Idaho was turned down on his request to build some houses smaller than the 1,400 square foot minimum set by the city. With rising energy costs and the current housing credit crunch, there is an increasing demand for smaller, more efficient houses. But the city government (whose tax base is determined by the value of the developed property within its bounds) does not want to allow smaller properties and has turned down the request.
