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In 2024, for the third straight year, the median size of a new single-family home in the U.S. has shrunk, to 2,150 square feet. That’s down from nearly 2,500 square feet back in 2013, and startlingly close to the roughly 2,100 square foot average seen in 2009 at the depth of the global financial crisis. It’s a downsizing that underscores just how hard it is for most people to afford to buy a home today, and the extent to which homebuilders are adjusting their offerings to meet demand. This telling figure comes from The State of the Nation’s Housing, an annual report just released by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. The report finds that affordability challenges are reshaping the housing market, right down to the square footage. Homebuilders are able to make adjustments to meet demand where it is, and what it’s showing is that there’s demand for lower-cost units, says Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies. Buyers look like they’re willing to buy slightly smaller homes in order to be able to afford them, given that prices have risen so high over the past three, four, five years, and interest rates remain relatively high as well. Since 2019, average home prices have risen more than 60%, according to the report. Historically, that average has been skewed by the cost of new homes, which tended to be more expensive than existing homes. But that gap is narrowing. In the 2010s, the typical new single-family home was about $66,000 more expensive than the median sales price of an existing home, McCue says. In 2024, the typical new home cost only about $8,000 more. I take that as a reaction to the lack of inventory and the tightness of existing housing sales markets, McCue says. Part of this price drop has been engineered by homebuilders themselves. McCue says many builders are trying to help buyers by offering more favorable interest rates and interest-rate buydowns through their own mortgage companies. They’re able to make some adjustments, and in doing so, we’re seeing the price points of new homes coming down to make those sales happen, McCue says. In addition to reducing the size of U.S. homes, these efforts have had some impact. New home sales in 2024 were up about 3% over 2023, and existing home sales have dropped to a 30-year low. [Homebuilders] have been able to kind of buck the trend by making these hard-fought gains in affordability, McCue says. But with interest rates hovering above 6% and a general sense of economic uncertainty tied to the Trump Administration’s trade policies, whether sales of new homes will continue to rise is unclear. One of the themes looking forward is how much of these adjustments, and how much of these hard-fought gains will be upended by rising costs due to tariffs, he says. Another way the shape of housing is changing is in growing numbers of townhomes on the market. The report found that in 2024, builders started 176,000 townhomes, a 59% increase compared to 2019. It’s one example of the way in which buyers and builders are focusing on products that are relatively more affordable, given the affordability constraints, McCue says. Those constraints don’t look to be going away any time soon, and that’s created a separate but connected boom in the housing market. According to the report, about 93,000 single-family rental homes were started in 2024, which is the highest number on record and more than double the 40,000 rental units started in 2019. As homeownership gets farther and farther out of reach for many Americans, homebuilders appear ready to build rental homes they can afford.
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E-Commerce
Tesla launched its Robotaxi service Monday in Austin, Texas, with a limited pilot featuring a small fleet of self-driving cars. Tesla has encountered challenges getting its Robotaxi service up and running, and now it’s facing a new hurdle of its own making: the Robotaxi logo. The self-driving taxis feature a “Robotaxi” logo written out in a graffiti style on the car’s front doors. The scrawled typeface is reminiscent of the branding for the video game Cyberpunk, and hearkens directly back to the Tesla Cybertruck logo (a puzzling choice considering how poorly the Cybertruck has been received). With its sharp edges and careening forward slant, the logo doesn’t exactly scream safe. And yet, that’s exactly what a new autonomous vehicle brand should be doing. AVs require a higher level of consumer trust than your average product or service, since you’re putting your life in its hands. A logo that looks spray-painted doesn’t communicate that, nor does the pilot program’s flat $4.20 ride fee. The logo looks sloppy and casual, not reassuring, Eben Sorkin, art director of the type foundry Darden Studio, tells Fast Company, calling it aesthetically anachronistic and out of sync with current cultural vibes. Would you board a flight with an airline logo that looks like this? he asks. [Photo: Tim Goessman/Bloomberg/Getty Images] The Robotaxi rollout represents a chance for the beleaguered electric vehicle company to change the narrative after CEO Elon Musk’s unpopular foray into government. And indeed, after the Robotaxi announcement, Tesla’s stock rose. From a branding perspective, though, the Robotaxi wordmark isn’t suggestive of a company moving away from the Cybertruck aesthetic that has now become associated with Musk’s DOGE efforts. Rather than using a visual identity that communicates safety, trust, or reliability, the logo is a sign that the company sees the graffiti-style cyberpunk aesthetic of its Cybertruck as the model for branding future products and services. A good logo always tries to convey the brand promise, says type designer and Hoefler & Co. founder Jonathan Hoefler. And this one definitely foreshadows the tragic collisions ahead.
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E-Commerce
It doesn’t matter how you spell ithomophones can get you sued for trademark infringement. The startup iyO has filed suit for trademark infringement against former Apple designer Jony Ive’s company iowhich spells its name differently but sounds the same. OpenAI acquired Ive’s io last month for $6.5 billion with the goal of creating a new family of AI devices; iyO, which launched as an independent company from Google’s moonshot initiative X in 2021, makes an AI device of its own. The company describes its iyO One, an AI wearable worn like an earbud that’s available only as a preorder, as “the world’s first audio computer.” It reportedly pitched to Sam Altman’s investment fund and Ive’s design studio in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Following a ruling from U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson, OpenAI erased any mention of its deal with Ive over io on its website Sunday, including a promotional video. The company told The Guardian it took action because of iyO’s legal complaint, which will be addressed in a hearing come October. This page is temporarily down due to a court order following a trademark complaint from iyO about our use of the name io. We dont agree with the complaint and are reviewing our options.https://t.co/suwMRPTHqB— OpenAI Newsroom (@OpenAINewsroom) June 22, 2025 OpenAI has reason to take iyO’s claims seriously. Trademark infringement has been found in plenty of cases in which defendants mark is spelled differently from plaintiffs but pronounced the same, even when the two terms have different meanings, Alexandra Roberts, a professor of law and media at Northeastern University tells Fast Company. The key question in infringement cases is likelihood of confusion. The singer Pink filed suit last year over Pharrell Williams’s proposed P.Inc trademark, for example, and infringement has been found in cases like Seycos and Seiko, both watchmakers, and X-Seed and XCEED, which both made agricultural seed. Courts assessing the likelihood of confusion between two marks consider a number of factors, including the similarity of the marks, relatedness of the goods and services, strength of the plaintiff’s mark, and sophistication of the relevant consumers, Roberts says. Similarity weighs toward a likelihood of confusion, and lack of similarity weighs against it. The I/O naming convention, which stands for Input/Output, is popular with AI companies since their products generate AI output from user input. For iyO, blocking OpenAI from using the io name is about protecting its brand against the combined power of the maker of ChatGPT and a designer who’s worked with Apple on products like the iPhone and iPad. The outcome of the legal dispute could play a role in naming whatever the AI giant and design legend end up creating together.
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E-Commerce
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