By Connor Dougherty
The New York Times
Feb. 17, 2024

Robert Lanter lives in a 600-square-foot house that can be traversed in five seconds and vacuumed from a single outlet. He doesn’t have a coffee table in the living room because it would obstruct the front door. When relatives come to visit, Lanter says jokingly, but only partly, they have to tour one at time.

Each of these details amounts to something bigger, for Lanter’s life and the U.S. housing market: a house under $300,000, something increasingly hard to find. That price allowed Lanter, a 63- year-old retired nurse, to buy a new single-family home in a subdivision in Redmond, Oregon, about 30 minutes outside Bend, where he is from and which is, along with its surrounding area, one of Oregon’s most expensive housing markets.