Quote from: Nearings Fault on Nov 16, 2023, 09:51 AMHow about viewing all this from an energy lens. Maybe the era of the 1 bedroom apartment with kitchen, bathroom, living room for every single person, the least efficient mode of housing, is an artificial product of the age of cheap energy.

Actually, the opposite is true.  Because 1 bedroom units are usually built in large buildings, they are more efficient than rooms in single family homes.  Fewer units have exterior facing walls.  In fact when I lived at Creekwood Park, because my unit was surrounded by units on either side and had one above it, I actually almost never had to turn on my own furnace, enough heat came through the shared walls with my neighbors and little leaked out the ceiling to keep my unit warm enough.  The bigger the building, the more floors and less roof space/unit, the more efficient in use of heat.

You could think of my current SNIF as just a very big one family house with 102 tiny bedrooms for the extended family of grandparents.  All our little bedrooms surround common areas that17 of us share, like a big living room.  All the cooking is done in one kitchen in large pots and ovens, saving energy from individually cooking meals, or even for meals for a big extended family like the Waltons.

A really efficient building for single people would have individual bedrooms and shared kitchens for a communal style of living.  A well run old folks home like this one is a good model.  The only thing wrong here is the medical industry and overpriced staffing  administration and insurance costs.  If it was reorganized so young healthy people could get a free room in exchange for helping out the old folks and old folks like me who still can do stuff were put to work we could run the place ourselves.  I would love to run the kitchen here, it would be a blast.  I actually met laast week with the chief cook to discuss some ideas and ways to change the menu and choices available.  I could also easily handle the front dest and transportation scheduling, etc.





The single family home model is actually the least eefficient building method for energy efficiency.  Bigger buildingss housing more people are much more efficient.

RE