Should I Buy Closer to Work or Farther Out for More Space in Minnesota?
A buyer called me from his home office in Saint Paul on a Friday afternoon with a question that had been the central tension in his home search for about two months and that had become more rather than less clear the longer he had been thinking about it. He was thirty-nine years old and worked as a civil engineer at a firm in downtown Minneapolis. His commute from his current Saint Paul rental was about thirty-five minutes on a good day and forty-five to fifty minutes on a bad one. He had been making it work for two years and had not loved it but had tolerated it. His home search had opened up a specific and clarifying tension. Homes closer to his downtown workplace, in Minneapolis proper and the first-ring suburbs, were in his budget but were smaller than what he wanted. He had been looking at homes with roughly fifteen hundred to seventeen hundred square feet in those closer-in communities. When he extended the search radius to communities like Lakeville, Prior Lake, and Savage, his budget bought homes in the twenty-two hundred to twenty-five hundred square foot range with garages, larger yards, and significantly more space across every dimension. The price of the additional space was a substantially longer commute. His estimate was that the outer-ring communities would add between twenty and thirty-five minutes to his daily commute each direction, depending on conditions. “I keep going back and forth,” he told me. “When I think about the space I think I want the bigger house. When I think about the commute I think I want the closer location. How do I actually make this decision in a way I will not regret?” His question was one that thousands of Twin Cities buyers face every year and that deserves a framework for answering rather than a simple recommendation, because the right answer genuinely depends on specific individual factors that vary by household. Here is the complete framework. The Commute Math That Most Buyers Do Not Do The most important starting point for the closer-versus-farther decision is doing the actual arithmetic of what a longer commute costs in time over the realistic duration of ownership, because most buyers think about commute in terms of daily inconvenience without calculating the cumulative life cost of that inconvenience. A commute that is thirty minutes longer each direction than the alternative produces sixty additional minutes per day spent commuting. For a buyer who commutes five days per week for fifty weeks per year, this is two hundred fifty additional hours per year spent in a car rather than doing anything else. Two hundred fifty hours per year is ten and a half full twenty-four-hour days, or approximately thirty-one full eight-hour working days. Over a ten-year ownership horizon, which is roughly the median homeownership duration in the United States, this accumulates to twenty-five hundred additional hours spent commuting. Twenty-five hundred hours is more than one hundred four full days or roughly three and a half months of continuous time. For the civil engineer in Saint Paul, adding thirty-five minutes each direction to his commute to access the outer-ring communities would produce approximately two hundred ninety additional commute hours per year. Over ten years of ownership, this is approximately twenty-nine hundred hours, or more than four months of continuous time spent in a car. The question of whether the additional space is worth four months of your life over ten years is a genuinely personal values question. But most buyers who have not done this calculation have not been asking the question in those terms, and the terms matter. What the Research Says About Commuting and Wellbeing The academic and psychological research on the relationship between commute time and personal wellbeing is among the most consistent in the social science literature, and its findings are directly relevant to the closer-versus-farther decision. Research consistently finds that commuting is among the least enjoyable activities in the typical daily life of working adults. Survey studies that ask people to rate their moment-by-moment enjoyment of different daily activities consistently find commuting near or at the bottom of the enjoyment scale, below paid work, below household tasks, and dramatically below leisure activities, social time, and time with family. The relationship between commute time and life satisfaction has been studied specifically and the findings are striking. Research suggests that an additional hour of daily commuting has the same negative effect on life satisfaction as a significant reduction in household income. Effectively, commuting longer produces a measurable reduction in reported wellbeing that is comparable in magnitude to earning significantly less money. For buyers who are weighing the additional space against the additional commute, the research provides a clear directional finding. Space produces a relatively modest and often adaptation-dependent increase in satisfaction. Commuting produces a persistent and large reduction in wellbeing that does not fully adapt over time. People habituate to their living space. They do not fully habituate to their commute. The Space Question: What Does the Extra Space Actually Buy The other side of the equation deserves equally specific examination, because the additional space of an outer-ring home is not uniformly valuable and what it actually provides varies significantly depending on how the buyer’s household uses space. For a household with multiple children who actively use separate bedrooms, a playroom, an outdoor yard for sports and play, and the other spatial resources that family life with children demands, the additional square footage of a larger outer-ring home produces a genuinely significant and genuinely daily quality-of-life benefit. The space is used, it is needed, and its absence in a smaller closer-in home would be felt every day. For a single buyer or a couple without children whose primary spatial needs are a comfortable bedroom, a functional kitchen, a home office, and a living area, the additional square footage of a larger outer-ring home may be largely unused. Guest rooms that sit empty for fifty weeks per year, living rooms that are