Real estate for single people

It seems like real estate for the long-term really isn’t designed to accommodate single people. For families with children, it’s a no-brainer: buy or build a house of the appropriate size for your family. For couples, renting an apartment is reasonable. But apartments for single people are only a little bit cheaper than apartments for couples, and about the same size, meaning we have to pay almost double the rent per person if we want to live alone. Buying a house and living in it alone is even more expensive (because of the opportunity cost of investing the money you would spend on the house). Many single people end up sharing a house or apartment with strangers, even though they prefer to live alone, simply because that’s the only way to pay the same low rent per person that everybody else pays. We often have money to invest in a house or would like to build equity in something we own but there isn’t anything to buy that’s practical for single people.

So I started looking into whether I could build something that’s practical for single people. The obvious practical answer would be a tiny house, because that’s the amount of space that a single person needs. But it seems you’re not allowed to add a second dwelling on a someone’s property in most cities. So of course, just buy a plot of land and build a tiny house on it, right? No – apparently the minimum house size allowed in Fredericton is 70 square metres, which is as big as an apartment, i.e. an appropriate size for at least 2 people to live in. Next I got the idea of building a house divided into 2 units, with one unit being the right size for a single person (“granny suite”) and the other one the right size for a family, so I could live in the small one and rent out the big one. But apparently most of the residential land for sale in Fredericton is classified as R-2, which means duplexes aren’t allowed on it. No wonder there aren’t many options for single people – they’ve mostly been outlawed!

Any other ideas would be welcome, but anything practical seems to involve jumping through hoops. I guess the best I can come up with at this point is to buy land, build something that is indeed 70 square metres, but make some of that floor space be a greenhouse which is unheated, plus maybe an unheated garage or storage area. The glass from the greenhouse and the fact that it’s attached to the house would actually transfer some heat to the house too and save energy compared to its absence. The actual heated floor space would be small. This idea seems like quite a stretch just to get a small living space, and I strongly suspect that the stupid city still has some stupid law that would disallow even this idea. Plus, a single person would still be needlessly occupying a whole plot of valuable city land, when you could easily fit 2 such small houses on the same plot of land.

More to the point, there’s just no good reason for this mess. You can physically divide space into whatever size each person or group of people requires. Why should single people have to pay for twice as much space as they need? Why should the environment have to suffer the heating up of a bunch of empty, wasted space? Why should the law be trying to /prevent/ me from reducing my carbon footprint to a sustainable level, let alone do nothing to try to stop climate change?

I’ve spent years trying to think of solutions to this problem, when the government could easily solve it by fixing its stupid laws. At one point I thought a mini-home was a good solution, but they’re still the same size as an apartment and still end up costing the same amount, so again are more appropriate for 2 people. I’ve considered building a smaller and more efficient house in the country, but why should single people be pushed out into the country, and what if there are still things we want to do in the city? I’ve even considered moving to a poorer country where appropriate-sized houses are commonplace. There’s simply no other word for it: such laws are discrimination against single people.