Quote from: RE on Nov 16, 2023, 11:35 AM

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

I won't argue that too much. So basically the dorm room model would be the most efficient. I would not be surprised if you start seeing some of that with the underused office space. In my own research one of the stumbling blocks of the transformation of office space turns out to be plumbing. Office buildings tend to have centralized plumbing which does not work when you want to turn it into 12 one bedrooms each with bathroom and kitchen. Dorm model? Much more doable. Individualized plumbing and cooking facilities are very inefficient and expensive. In defense of the single home in my world of rural living large buildings are very uncommon and a move to more centralized structures would take decades. Large underused homes though are very common here. A move to shared housing could be done relatively quickly and at very little cost. Right now I see the stumbling block to it being people being unwilling to give up their sense of entitlement to that space and lowering expectations of rentors. Lack of money to keep an apartment or home should alter those feelings in time. I don't feel bad about our space. There are 4 of us, it's a very efficient house and when the young things leave we have already discussed either creating an apartment downstairs or downsizing. We have to travel too much, we could probably pack a few more in here, grow more food ourselves etc. but I too suffer from my energy rich delusions.
I've often thought about the medieval town surrounded by fields often with common walls between houses. Very efficient space wise, not much travel to get your resources. Maybe in our futures again.
Cheers,  NF