Owning a single-family home is an iconic American aspiration. Yet acquiring a house is prohibitively expensive to all but the wealthy, those in line to inherit property, or someone able to secure a 30-year mortgage with a decent interest rate. Even then, “owners” can become akin to indentured servants to the house’s never-ceasing upkeep requirements, ever-rising utility costs, insurance, taxes, and special assessments.
The American dream is founded on securing personal space and possession of land, upon which one can garden or sit on a porch. The desirability of the single-family home over such alternatives as renting, condominiums, or mobile homes lies principally in its privacy, the fee-simple ownership of the property upon which the dwelling exists, and a separate entrance/exit.
A single-family home is a complex mechanism that requires skilled specialists to maintain it, and increasingly depends on a globe-spanning network of inputs for interior and exterior finishings. It often features more bedrooms or bathrooms than occupants, is expensive to heat and cool, and originally emerged from a long-gone period of low-cost labor and cheap land.
A few hundred years ago the predominant dwelling in San Francisco, one that’d been relied on for thousands of years, was the Ohlone thatched house, a modest-sized conical home with a circular base, several meters across. The residence effectively shielded its inhabitants from the elements and was inexpensively constructed from local materials. Without suggesting a return to the traditional abodes of our area, it’s time to consider decreasing the size, complexity, and cost of the residences being built today.
A November 2023 View article (“Publisher’s View: Homes”) noted that there are 18,000 parcels of un- or underutilized publicly-owned land in San Francisco, a subset of which would be suitable for constructing modestly sized homes. Additionally, there are many thousands of privately owned parcels which under current regulations are classed as “non-buildable” due to smaller-than-allowable lot sizes. Residences spanning 700 square feet or less could be developed on many of these lots. Such dwellings would be less expensive to build, service, and maintain than larger homes and would help meet the City’s requirements to foster 82,000 new units by 2031.
Deploying excess properties to build small homes would allow more people to achieve their American Dream, to have a fee-simple piece of land to cultivate and cherish. Our “machines for living” as the architect Le Corbusier insisted houses must be, can and should serve us better than they do today. Smaller, yet still dignified and solid dwellings, would be a step towards sanity in what has long been a profoundly dysfunctional housing situation in California and throughout the nation.
Sara Moss 
Paul McDonald