Small Houses Preferable to Larger Ones – Crisis Reducing Living Space in Developed Countries, Serbs Already Used to Living in Small Apartments

(Illustration) If you told an average American family from Texas several years ago that a time would come when their family house would not have 6 rooms with just as many bathrooms and a huge kitchen (in which the microwave is most frequently used), they’d see it as a nightmare and a scenario from a horror film. However, the “Texas massacre” is happening right now in the American real estate market – the prices have grown 35% since the beginning of the pandemic, so not even the upper middle class can afford an “American dream” home.

That is why construction companies are increasingly turning to a kind of minimalism in architecture and the construction of smaller residential units, according to specialized American magazines in this field, which write about the new trend of building “affordable houses”, in which, on a much smaller area, Americans can still have a guest house and an office and a gym. It could be said that TV channels have also been preparing them for it for some time now, promoting the harmony and functionality provided by these “tiny houses”.

The trend of small houses, however, according to experts, is something we will see in the upcoming years, and maybe even decades, because that construction style is conditioned, not just in America, but also in the whole world, on an unjustified increase in the price of real estate, which, those in the know claim, will not be able to last for much longer, considering the global economic events, which started with the outbreak of the pandemic and are now continuing with the crisis caused by the conflict in Ukraine.

The shortage and the price increase of energy, the growth of the prices of construction materials and the general uncertainty, but also the overpopulation of the planet, the reduction of the resources and pollution are the main reasons why, in the future, the real estate offer will increasingly frequently consist of small, but functional apartments and houses.

People used to laugh at the Japanese for living in so-called “matchboxes”, but all things considered, it’s something that awaits us all.

The architect Sanja Velisavljevic of the Belgrade-based design company SV Design&Development confirms that this trend is emerging in the world:

– Architecture is a multidisciplinary science, which depends of geopolitics and the overall global circumstances. There is definitely a trend of reducing the living space, but it has to be a multifunctional space. That means that one space can accommodate several different activities taking place in that space. Designers are helped in this by pieces of furniture such as wall beds, which also serve as cupboards, or a table in the living room, which is at the same time the bedroom, or an office merged with the interior of the kitchen or the bedroom, which is increasingly the case due to the pandemic and remote work.

According to our interviewee, partitioning the rooms which are supposed to look as a single unit is achieved by sliding elements and glass walls and partitions, which make the space appear bigger and enable a better lighting and sound insulation.

When it comes to our country, this trend has of course not yet taken root, because our fellow citizens, to be honest (with several exceptions) have never been megalomaniacs when it comes to living space, although a kind of a boom in the construction of closed settlements and luxury villas is becoming apparent now, which eKapija has already written about.

– It could be said that, in Serbia, living in a small space has always been the trend. We have never had a too-high living standard and, here, there’s always a demand for two-room apartments to have 40 square meters and for three-room ones to have 60 – Velisavljevic says.

Also, everyone is familiar with the years-long lack of small apartments in the Serbian real estate market.

– In the Serbian market, small apartments are the most difficult to find. They haven’t been built in the past decades in sufficient numbers, and even now they are not being built that much and they are expensive precisely because there are not a lot of them. For example, a studio apartment of 33 square meters in Belgrade center costs EUR 85,000. Simply, their construction is not profitable for investors – for them, it is cheaper to make a large apartment than three studio apartments in which they then have to make three bathrooms and three kitchens, which makes the construction more expensive. They haven’t been built and not a lot of them are being built now either – Nedeljko Malinovic of the Belgrade-based real estate agency Legat says for eKapija.

He adds that, in Serbia, there are no mini multifunctional apartments either, of the kind that is frequent in Japan, and points out that he doesn’t expect to see that kind of trend here any time soon.

– The standard demand here is for medium-sized apartments, of 50-60 square meters, as well as houses of around 100 square meters – our interviewee says.

Diaspora buying houses in Serbia in droves

Talking about real estate prices, Malinovic says that, lately, they have jumped not just because of the foreigners, but also because of the increased interest of the diaspora.

– Our diaspora now buys apartments here in large numbers. The estimate is that around 100,000 of them have bought real estate in Serbia. Things are uncertain in the West, the energy crisis and the overall global crisis will leave many without jobs and people have to secure themselves, to have something to live from and a place to come to – says Nedeljko Malinovic.

B. Petrovic