Granted, America is a place where people tend to buy things they want rather than need, or often, can even afford, but let’s not go down that road. Instead, let’s look at a point Trent recently made over at The Simple Dollar:
A few years ago, there was a very widely circulated statistic from the National Association of Home Builders about the increase in home sizes over the last sixty years. According to their numbers, the average American home grew from 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,434 square feet in 2005.
For those who don’t want to do the math, that’s almost a 250% increase in home sizes over the course of 50 years. This begs the question as to whether or not this kind of increase is really necessary, or if it’s simply a reflection of the typical homeowner wanting to show off their spoils, even if these spoils are little more than real-estate gluttony.
When one looks at the chief differences in lifestyle from the 1950s to the modern era, a couple things spring to mind. For one, it’s become less common for middle-class children to share one room. Two, entertainment centers, namely televisions, have increased substantially in size from the 1950s, suggesting that home living rooms should become longer. Thirdly, with the widespread proliferation of vehicles, with most dual-income households having two cars, space required to park them has no doubt increased.
Still, the 250% bump in size isn’t warranted even with these considerations; a separate bedroom for a second child adds less than 150 square feet in most cases. For a big-screen LCD television, the viewing distance of approximately 10 feet, at most, should certainly add less than 100 square feet to even a modest living room, and we’d need even less than that to bump up the size of a one-car garage to be two-car friendly. In other words, the rampant bloat of houses today is simply unpurposeful, unless one is content with the realization that larger homes basically serve as easy-access storage for one’s acquired junk.
With smaller homes comes a built-in need for less materialism. That’s the simple truth when one stays away from buying, say, unnecessary kitchen gadgets because one’s kitchen simply isn’t big enough to house them. That’s on top of the savings from requiring less energy to heat or cool one’s smaller residence. Recently, a friend told us about the 208 light-bulbs required to light their home. Yes, 208. No home for a couple and one child should require that many light-bulbs, especially a home advertised as “Energy Star compliant.” Any good one has done by buying into the Energy Star label is immediately undone by compounding one’s energy needs, whether those needs are served by CFLs or not. We don’t know if LEED certification takes into account the energy needs of a single housing “unit,” but at least LEED certification still means something considering that Energy Star is merely a rough guide for a single energy-using widget. If one doubles the widgets in one’s home, the fact that they’re both Energy Star compliant does not make the duo energy efficient.
While there are many arguments for larger homes, few actually make sense in the end. Even the guest room argument, for example, falls short when one considers the cost of having the extra room in the long-run versus the sum of hotel expenses for occasional visitors.
Of course, this whole discussion would be moot if people invested in slightly larger properties instead of larger houses. This would at least create more space to help green the community, allow space for children to play on, and even to grow gardens. And, unless one lives in the deep south where couches and old appliances can easily be found scattered on one’s front lawn, smaller houses with larger properties would help us minimize the junk we keep around.
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