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

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The shift is a response to conditions that are found in cities across America: Neighborhoods that used to be affordable are being gentrified, while new condominiums and subdivisions mostly target the upper end of the market, endangering the supply of “starter homes” in reach of first-time buyers.

The iconic Cape Cods in Levittown, N.Y. — often considered the model post-World War II suburb — were typically about 750 square feet, roomy for a one-bedroom apartment but small for a free-standing house with two bedrooms.

Driving through the downtown on a snowy afternoon recently, Deborah Flagan, a vice president at Hayden Homes, pointed left and right at storefronts that used to be boarded and are now part of a vibrant ecosystem of retailers that includes numerous high-end coffee shops, a “foot spa” and a bar where people drink craft beer and throw axes at wall-mounted targets.

The upscaling extends well beyond downtown to adjacent neighborhoods, where the small-footprint “mill houses” that once served a blue-collar work force now sit on land that is so valuable they are being slowly erased by two-story moderns with seven-figure sales prices.

Toward the end of the snowy driving tour, Ms. Flagan pointed toward one of those old mill houses — a compact, ranch-style home with fading yellow paint and a white picket fence pocked with broken boards.

Its business model is to deliver middle-income housing that local workers can afford, Ms. Flagan said, and it does this by skipping larger cities like Portland and Seattle in favor of lower-cost exurbs like Redmond (where the company is based).

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Enough fucking sprawl.

We don't have enough surface for homes, hoarded greenspace lawns, all the roads, plus wild space plus farms plus plus plus...

Build up. Tax the hell out of anything single-family or single-storey.

Tax credits if density builders buy a home adjacent to wild space or farmland, and hold it through its rezoning back to something beneficial so it's removed from the sprawl machine.

This looks exactly like what some urbanists have complained about, a lack of "missing middle" housing between apartments and large single family dwellings. Sounds good with me.

I’m not terribly against this kind of thing, houses are huge

I wish they showed more of the interiors, and you know, those tiny side yards could probably be squished down, or even removed, to build row houses that increase living space and density.