John at Uneasy Rhetoric has an interesting thread going about affordable living, including some discussion of what the breaking point is between livable and just too small.

My own input on this is that of course it depends on who you are. I’ve had buyers bake me cookies and weep for joy over an 840 square foot first time home purchase, and other buyers who considered anything less than 3,000 square feet to be too confining.

When my wife and I bought our first home, we moved from a two bedroom 700 square foot apartment into a three-bedroom, 1700 square foot home, and we felt like royalty in all the space. Of course, we’ve since then managed to find enough stuff to fill up lots of the space, so it seems small.

I do believe that so long as Sacramento’s prices stay somewhat high, we’ll continue to see the estimate of what’s livable revised downward.

To be really philosophical about the whole thing, one might quip that there’s some constant, say 400 square feet, of livable space. The only thing that changes is how much stuff there is covering up the remaining square footage of floor plan, and how much debt one has to take on to pay for the structure and the stuff covering the structure. This is why life expectancy keeps increasing — if it didn’t, everyone would die before they finished buying their house and their stuff.

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