Monte Anderson opened a broom wardrobe in his kitchen and pointed out a handle near a mop and a garbage boat. Somewhere on the other side there is a small solution to the United States affordable housing crisis.
Mr. Anderson is a developer who rehabilitates commercial and residential buildings in Dallas and its surroundings, including the Rancho -style house where he lives, for now, with three rooms of children. The 2,400 square feet house has been divided into four studies. Each has an outdoor entry, but also connects to another unit through one in the closet of their kitchen.
The connection doors are blocked and hidden because they are designed not to be used. The main reason for its existence is that they allow Mr. Anderson to affirm that he lives in a single -family house, according to local zoning codes, when in reality the house contains four apartments in a country that needs more of them.
“This is a suburban modernization,” said Mr. Anderson, 66, Duration the Tour.
Economists estimate that the United States needs between four million and eight million homes. Your recipe is to build many new houses and apartment complexes. It is a remedy with which the politicians of both parties agree basically, but that will have decades to achieve.
Money is needed to buy land, time to ensure permits. Meanwhile, construction costs have exploded. That is why most new houses tend to be luxury rentals or high -cost houses, instead of something with a medium or lower income that can be allowed. However, these units of lower cost are those that are in the shortest supply.
This imbalance has turned those in charge of formulating policies and businessmen such as Mr. Anderson towards a large and underestimated market: the approximately 145 million houses that already exist.
Around two thirds of the US housing stock consists of single -family houses. Apartment buildings are essentially prohibited from large stripes in the main metropolitan areas, where most of the land is in areas for low density neighborhoods. Mr. Anderson is trying to find an escape by guiding single -family houses towards a new multifamily life.
There was a time when the big houses were what the United States needed. When Mr. Anderson’s house was built in the 1970s, American mothers had more than three children on average, according to the Pew Research Center.
Today that has changed: people marry older ages or not at all, have Feer children (an average of two for mothers in 2020, according to Pew) and live more and more with other adults in their families. The result is a housing mismatch where older people live in large houses with empty rooms, while single adults and families with few children look for narrower and more affordable places.
“The Roommate House”-Mr. Anderson’s name for his chopped ranch house is designed for this new world. A series Rehabber, Mr. Anderson has tasks in shopping centers, a film room and an old wax paper plant that now contains about 70 small businesses, including a microbey, a boxing gym and a mixture of artisans who sell things like jewels and household items.
All his projects are scattered by Dallas and his suburbs, a region where he has spent his whole life. But within that area, Mr. Anderson remains in motion or resolved in anything new that has just been built. For a while, he lived in a Boutique hotel, then moved to an apartment complex that had rebuilt. Now it is in the cut house.
“Sometimes I have to do it for financial reasons, but above all I do to see what I have done well and what I have done,” Anderson said. “To do the experiment, I have to live in it.”
The units in the house of the house rent for $ 1,800, including public service companies. At that price, it is not affordable for low -income tenants. But she is providing a shelter for a 27 -year -old woman who works in an assisted life installation, a 70 -year -old and Granddraugh of 20 years of Anderson, who is real estate agent. And to its way of thinking, the building is represents something: a proof of concept for a way of life.
Change, without interruption
During the last decade, cities and states throughout the country have tried to encourage ideas such as Mr. Anderson making it easier to add rent units to existing structures. Some have approved laws that allow rear patio houses and garage and basement units. Others encourage homes to subdivide their lots and sell a portion for development.
The objective is to add homes in existing neighborhoods without creating too much interruption, or provoking residents who do not like change. In many cases, efforts have yielded more significant results than attempts to gather entire cities or add apartment buildings to streets or single -family houses.
California California, home of the largest affordable crisis of nations. Since 2016, state legislators have proposed a snowstorm of housing laws, from forcing suburbs to allow the multifamily house to the elimination of cities from sexual authority if they do not approach more quickly. However, when observing the number of units that have leg constructions, the legislature began to focus on the house, the humble cabin of the rear patio, an “accessory housing unit” in the jargon of the city planners, is the main bright point.
In 2016, before California approved several laws that make ADU easier to build, local governments allowed around 1,000, which in a state of 40 million people is basically zero. In 2023, the State allowed around 23,000, while the number of new single -family homes and apartment buildings remained essential.
ADU laws created a business boomlet: a literal artisanal industry that helps housing owners to obtain permits, build units and use software to identify appropriate lots. Phil Levin, a technology executive from the Bay area who has become an evangelist for community life, recently began living near Friends, a company that helps people suddenly identify themselves whose size and regulations are for several families to live.
Ben Bear is the executive director of Buildcasa, an Oakland company founded in 2022 to take advantage of the new California laws that allow owners to subdivide their properties and sell their rear courtyards for development. The company is a hybrid real estate work that develops some properties, but mostly acts as a corridor that connects other developers with owners who want to add units.
Mr. Bear estimates that the State could add millions of units in this way while unlocking billions of value for initial companies. Until now, he said, many of the parents of their clients who divide their lots to build houses for their adult children or are home owners in search of income.
“It is the boomers who bought a long time ago and have paid their homes and have the largest lots,” he said.
Mr. Anderson, in Dallas, sometimes rents his Roman through Padplit, an Atlanta -based company that is essentially a version of Airbnb roommate: its software platform connects tenants who are looking for rooms looking for role.
HowHOUSHOLS are remodeled
Life arrangements have always changed with culture and economy. Duration in World War II, another shortage of grinding housing led Americans to carve houses and create accommodation hotels in the main cities. The shortage decreased the duration of the postwar construction boom, as developers build modern suburbs, often with modest two and three room houses.
At the same time, household composition changed multigenerational crops towards a mixture of nuclear and single -parent homes. That trend has begun to be reversed.
In a new book, he “doubled,” Hope Harvey, professor of public policies at the University of Kentucky, documents how high rentals, the precarious labor market and the need to take care of older parents or young children have made multigenerational houses.
This change is more frequent among low -income homes and reflects yawning inequality and a free security network, along with housing scarcity. But the trend has constantly increased on the income ladder as races and housing prices have increased.
“The real estate market is so expectation, the child care market is so expectation that thesis families feel that to pursue their goals to duplicate,” said Dr. Harvey in an interview.
In general, these are economic decisions: Dr. Harvey said that most of the people he had spoken for his book described living in another person’s house as a temporary agreement. Most people do not want to deal with grilles such as sharing a living room or immediately cleaning the dishes because they live with a monster. Some never like being alone.
Mr. Anderson said that his home from fourth classmates was designed with this aversion to the union in mind. He bought the house for $ 300,000 when it was an uninhabitable limit, a shattered kitchen, drained pool, with a leakage roof) and spent $ 1 million renewing it. Hi, he also added a house in the backyard that looks at a resurgent pool. A Woedden cover, gravel wallays and cactus landscaping give the land a desert atmosphere of the middle of the century.
“It’s not exactly where I want to live myself,” he said. “Although I like or like it.”
Including the apartment in which Mr. Anderson lives, rentals would bring a little more than $ 9000 per month, which is enough to cover the mortgage and expenses.
Why build something with such little financial increase? The hope of Mr. Anderson, he said, is that the project will inspire others and show cities that multifamily life can coexist in single -family neighborhoods. This, he argued, would generate more tax revenues, increase real estate values and inspire others to hire their company to develop more houses like yours.
In addition, although insignificant returns may not attract Wall Street, he said: “He is a financial winner if he has an elderly father who can live here instead of an assisted life.”
While we walked through a newly empty unit, a consultant who used to live there moved to North Carolina, Mr. Anderson said that his goal is to create a happy medium with units of less cost and a sense of community. But that community only works because it keeps the doors closed and ignores each other.
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