The father and son returned home in the rain, took off their coats and hung them on the balcony. They lived in a detached house.
Do not think that the word "detached" sounded very high-end; in fact, many poor people in the Federation lived in detached houses.
In the Federation, the tier of a neighborhood and its geographic location were the core indicators that swung real estate prices, not whether a house was detached.
Moreover, detached did not mean a villa.
Like the apartments on Bu Peien Financial Street, sixty or seventy square meters were worth hundreds of thousands, but outside the ring road, a detached three-story house with a basement and a yard might cost only a tenth of that price, or even less! To Federation people, land was worthless.
In some areas, there were even laws stating that if ordinary people built a house on land without clear ownership—meaning non-private land—lived there for a certain number of years, and maintained the environment around the house.
Then this house and the plot of land beneath it belonged to the current occupants of the house.
Therefore, houses on the outskirts of the city were worthless.
This family lived far from the city center precisely to save some money.
When they bought the plot of land, it cost a little over ten thousand dollars. It was just a bare plot of land totaling one hundred and thirty-five square meters.
The real estate developer drew a rectangular area on the ground with lime, and then they fetched timber themselves and hired coworkers to help, eventually building the house.
This was also the life of many people at the bottom: buying a vacant plot of land and then building a house themselves just to save money.
Actually, rich people sometimes did this too.