The thing is if you want to live in an area, where there a lot of your neighbors, who are more like you….talk like you (young working professionals, doctors, dentist, lawyers etc),you have to buy houses that are at least 3000sf. These people usually have a smaller sized family (wife, husband , 2-3 young kids). They don’t have a lot of cars and they don’t park them everywhere on the street. When every house has a 3 car garage and large driveway, you don’t see a lot of cars parked on the street either. I prefer to go home with a nice clean street in a nice neighborhood like this.
People who can only afford 2000sf (or less) tend to be lower income earners and there are usually more people living in the same house (to help pay the mortgages/rents). Some of these smaller houses may not have the owners living in them….some are occupied by renters. This is just my general observation. There are, of course, plenty of nice 2000sf houses that are in very nice and safe neighborhood. But I just don’t like an area that has a lot of cars parking on the street.
My wife and I love to invite friends over for dinner. To us, it’s a lot more fun to have friends over to chit chat than traveling…I don’t like long flight trips and most of the places that we visited are not as nice as our home town. That’s another reason for having a nice size house with large kitchen and backyard. Last year, we sold our 5400sf house. We wanted to downgrade to a smaller one story house (prepare for our retirement). But most of the 1 story house was built in the 70s…old, low tech, and ugly….. and the most of neighbors are much older than us…in their 70s. So we ended up buying another 2 story house but only has 3900sf of living spae. I guess when we become too old and can no longer move around, we will move into a smaller 1 story house and let one of the kids have our big house.
My son doesn’t use his car because he lives in college dorm. I am able to squeeze his car into my garage. Now my house has a nice unobstructed driveway again.
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