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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

'Accessory Dwelling Unit' is the most depressing way to talk about a home I've ever heard.

Welcome accessory citizens to your new neighbourhood. A dystopia like this is not just on the horizon it's all but here already. "Middle class" is not meaningful any more. Working class has slipped into actual poverty and the middle class are now accessory to the wealth hoarders.

Educated twenty-somethings don't have much of a future to look forward to. They can't even afford the land to put an Accessory Dwelling Unit on, they'll have to rent one from an existing home owner. They will be living on a salary that stalled in the 90s, dealing with ever rising food and environmental costs, and subsisting in a world where we have a perma-health watch reducing their freedom to socialize.

What's a "perma-health watch", and how does it the reduce ability to socialize?

Guess

I assume you are living in a time where a perpetual pandemic is something you've considered as becoming a reality[1]. With Covid mutations pushing countries back into lockdown you must see where we are potentially heading. Young people have had their university experience revoked. So many people go to university partly for the education and partly for the social experience. Finding love, new life long friends, and getting an education is what university used to mean to people. This is no more and may never be again. We are living in a time where our old life is being disposed and we don't even know it. I feel like most people think this is just temporary, well it's been almost a year and a half and we are still here. Life won't go back to how it was, ever. Too many paradigms have changed, and we have band aids for Covid that are just about keeping our hopes up. This hope will wane and we'll be work ourselves through to the final stages of grief as we accept our new lives in semi-isolation.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/1c7266b1-1fad-458e-8585-12dc3164f... https://nationalpost.com/news/postpandemic/its-only-the-end-... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/13/moderna-ceo-says-the-world-w... https://www.businessinsider.com/when-will-the-pandemic-end-d...

All right. Yeah, I don't fully disagree. I just never saw the expression "perma-health watch" before, and was unable to parse it. English is not my native language.

'Permanent health-watch' is the way to read it.

Ah, that makes sense. I read it as "permanent-health watch". English compound words always confuses me. Thanks!

Seems like an intentional misunderstanding of the term to me. The building is an accessory to the house, not the person living in it..

I don't see it that way at all. Perhaps I've been too immersed in this terminology (I built an ADU a couple of years ago), but it makes sense given typical property descriptions: it's a dwelling unit (i.e. a place where people live) that's secondary ("accessory") to the primary dwelling. Or is the depressing part the fact that it assumes single family residences?

'Dwelling' sounds deeply depressing to me - to 'dwell' somewhere sounds like to simply exist in a space rather than actually living and thriving there. To 'dwell' on a problem means to sit and think quietly. And 'unit' to me sounds cookie-cutter and impersonal. This is your unit, just like everyone else's. Sit in your assigned unit and dwell in silence, human.

I guess 'dwelling' and 'unit' don't have all those connotations to you?

Why not just say 'home'? Even 'Accessory Home'.

It's a legal/regulatory term so I guess the coldness is to be expected: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accessory-dwelling-unit...

Guess it comes down to your target audience. If you're market primarily consists of landlords looking to make rental income, ADU seems to fit the bill.

I don’t know if you’re a non-native speaker, but there is actually a popular magazine called dwell - https://www.dwell.com/

Great for people who work in Human Resources.

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