Big Houses Are Not Green: America's McMansion Problem

In Los Gatos, Calif., controversy has raged this summer over the city planning commission’s approval of a proposed hillside home that will occupy a whopping 3,600 square feet – and that's just the basement.  Atop that walkout basement will be 5,500 more square feet worth of house.  

The prospective owner says he’ll build to "green" standards, but at the Aug. 8 meeting where the permit was approved, the city's lone dissenting planning commissioner stated the obvious when he told the owner, "You have a 9,000-square-foot house with a three-car garage and a pool. I don't see that as green."

The just-popped housing bubble has left behind a couple of million families in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure.  It has also spawned a new generation of big, deluxe, under-occupied houses bulked up on low-interest steroids.

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates that 42 percent of newly built houses now have more than 2,400 square feet of floorspace, compared with only 10 percent in 1970.  In 1970 there were so few three-bathroom houses that they didn't even to show up in NAHB statistics.  By 2005, one out of every four new houses had at least three bathrooms.

Smaller families are living in bigger houses.  In the America of 1950, single-family dwellings were being were built with an average of 290 square feet of living space per resident; in 2003, a family moving into a typical new house had almost 900 square feet per person in which to ramble around. 

Not surprisingly, monster houses are especially popular in Texas; in Austin, regarded as the state’s progressive haven, 235 new houses of at least 5,000 square feet each were built in a single recent year; 41 of them had between 8,000 and 29,000 square feet. In the size of our dwellings, North Americans are world champions. The United Nations says houses and apartments in Pakistan or Nicaragua typically provide one-third of a room per person; it’s half a room per person in Syria and Azerbaijan, about one room in Eastern Europe, an average of a room and a half in Western Europe, and two whole rooms per person in the United States and Canada (not counting spaces like bathrooms, hallways, porches, etc.)

The U.N. defines a room as "an area large enough to hold a bed for an adult" -- at least 6 feet by 7 feet.  That's not an uncommon size in many countries, but it’s not exactly the kind of room that an American real-estate agent would be eager to walk through with a prospective homebuyer.  (A dozen such rooms would fit into a single bedroom in

href="http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,695193773,00.html">this surgeon’s house.)  

To go along with those big primary homes, Americans now own 5.7 million non-rental vacation houses with a median size of 1,300 square feet; together, those second homes represent enough surplus living space to accommodate the nation’s homeless population ten times over. Challenges to the oversized-house trend are being mounted across the country, most often on aesthetic grounds.  Monumental bad taste can be morbidly fascinating (as when CBS’s 60 Minutes paid a visit to the suburbs of "Vulgaria" last March), but a far more serious issue is the lasting environmental damage these incredible hulks can do. Since 1940, the average number of people living in an American home has dropped from 3.7 to 2.6, but the average size of new houses has doubled.  That extra space has gone partly to free children from having to share a bedroom, partly to accommodate Americans’ ever-growing bulk of material possessions, and partly to make room for more lavish entertaining. 

But if there seems to be no limit to the size of the material- and energy-hogging houses built in recent years, it's thanks most of all to that good old law of supply-and-demand run amok.