American Houses Are Still Much, Much Bigger Than They Used To Be | Hacker News Reader

American Houses Are Still Much, Much Bigger Than They Used To Be

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57 pointspg48 comments

I've gone from small places to large places and back, and I can see the appeal of both. One thing that's nice about a bigger house is that you can have special purpose rooms. If you have only a living room but would love to have a pool table, you're either out of luck or need to convince whoever you're living with (sometimes yourself!) that it's ok to stick a pool table in the middle of the living room. Or you have to compromise and get one of those "pool table slash foosball table slash pingpong table" things that are pretty much worthless.

Another example is home theatre. It's true that you can just put a big tv and surround sound in your living room, but that more often than not screws up the decor and larger purpose of the living room as a family gathering spot. When you have a dedicated room, you can go nuts with the stadium seating and all of that.

That said, I've downsized in the past two years from a two story four bedroom house with a yard to a one bedroom apartment. I'm now preparing to spend the next several months in an RV. I'm actually much, much happier with this arrangement.

For some, space is a true necessity (large families that wish to keep their sanity). For others, space is a luxury that they can afford and that truly makes them happy. For people like myself, though, I've found that I only wanted what I thought space could get me... "breathing room". Turns out I needed psychological and intellectual breathing room more than I need more physical space. Perhaps that will change as I get older, but right now I'm glad I learned that I can be happier in far less space. The freedom, flexibility, and lower financial burdens this affords are well worth the cost of having to move a table every now and then.

It might be a slight digression from the OP, but I would be interested if you cared to expand on how you found psychological and intellectual breathing room.

Sure.

A lot of it was determining what made me happy versus what made other people happy. Other people may want you to live life a certain way, and it's easy to convince yourself that they must be right. A large part of it was simply allowing myself to be into topics and things and ways of living that other people just don't understand.

Take hacking for instance. Most hard core programmers simply love fiddling with computers and making them do cool stuff. You might have a personal project to write your own OS or C compiler. Now lets say you hang around some other programmers who are very good at their jobs, but in the end it's just that: a job. They might say "sounds interesting but why are you wasting your time on that? You program all day for work, I don't understand why you go home and do it again for something that will never make you any money. You really ought to have a more balanced life. Hey, come hang out with us and have some beers and watch the game."

And so you do, which is great and it is nice to get out once in a while and do normal social things. But what happens if you let your well-intentioned friends convince you that these hobby projects really aren't worthy of your time? In the beginning you might buy into it. But over time as you start to accomodate more and more to the life other people envision for you, you start to feel a growing emptiness inside. A lot of people fill that emptiness with quick fixes. Things like houses and expensive "stuff" were the big thing for me (and cigarettes, but no more thank goodness).

Eventually (hopefully) you figure out that the only person who really has to live with yourself every day is YOU. So barring doing something completely selfish that destroys the people who depend on you, it's best to live the life the way you naturally desire to live it. I'm not making a hedonistic argument here, just saying that if you really want nothing more than to go home at the end of a hard day and fiddle with x86 TSS structures to get your homegrown OS to boot, it's not really anyone else's business. It's also not your problem if they don't like it, think it's too geeky, or think you should be doing something with your personal time other than "fooling around with computers".

So a big part of my psychological and intellectual breathing room was giving myself permission to be who I am. Not everyone is going to understand my decision to pack up my crap in an RV and travel around the country for who knows how long. In the past I might have said "maybe they're right, this is a little crazy, why can't I just settle down?" But now I give myself permission to say "I'm doing this; I hope you'll support me. If you don't, I understand, but I'm doing this anyway."

In a lot of ways, my conception of breathing room mirrors that of the Gestalt prayer, something I learned about only today:

"I do my thing and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you, and I am I,

and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.

If not, it can't be helped."

(Fritz Perls, "Gestalt Therapy Verbatim", 1969)

Wow, I wish I could vote this up by 10. It is so important to be ok with who you are, even if those around you think that who you are isn't for them. I completely understand how lonely that can make people sometimes but the key is sharing your passions. Your passions define you as a person, and sharing them will let other people in your 'tribe' recognize you.

I was at a cocktail party at Usenix in the 80's where another person at our table started talking about geology, they where hugely into it and loved being in California (normally lived in the midwest) because they could look at volcanoes up close, they had stayed over the weekend so they could camp at Mt. Lassen State Park. Another person at the table lit up and was totally going toe to toe, mineral for mineral with this person. It was amazing. But the most amazing thing was that this other person didn't know any 'rockhounds' because they never brought it up.

Excellent response. And extra props for the Fritz Perls quote. It represents the best way for adults to relate to each other in the world.

Related to this: It drives me up a wall when someone responds to something someone else did with "Wow someone has too much time on their hands." And just what were you doing that was so important that you hardly had enough time to put that person down? Or are you just jealous?

The problem is that a lot of larger houses simply have larger rooms. For example, I have a the living room and dining room sharing a large rectangular space with a vaulted ceiling. Then, there is another rectangle which has the kitchen at one end, and a family room at the other (separated by a tile / carpet boundary, and a partial knee wall). So in effect I only have two rooms on the main floor. And the upper story has 3 bedrooms (two normal size, and a large master bedroom). But the master bedroom has too much wall space covered with windows, or interior doors, so there isn't much space to put furniture (but you have a lot of floor space in between).

The only area that was actually any use (for things like a lounge, office, etc) is the basement (a large open space that I split up with walls). All in all, I'd rather have less total square footage of floor space, and more wall space.

You know, these trends are like a rollercoaster. Wallspace used to be preferred over open spaces, then people started clamoring for open spaces (call it "loft envy"), walls got torn down in old houses, new houses got built without walls. If you wait, the trend for more rooms/walls will probably come back again, though I personally prefer the large inside open spaces.

People have had large families without much space for centuries. It clearly isn't a necessity.

Having a large family isn't a necessity either, I guess. Who gets to decide such things in a free society?

> It clearly isn't a necessity

Right. That's what freedom means. The freedom to buy whatever house you want. I don't want people deciding what my "necessities" are. That's the problem, too many people think they know what's best for everyone else. The Soviets apparently knew what was "best" for their people and their crappy products, terrible farming yields and dismal failing economic system was the result, not to mention widespread poverty (as well as famine in 1930-1932.)

A house in general isn't a necessity. A lean-to in the woods could work. So could a tent. People can tell me what they heck I'm allowed to buy, do or how I should live as soon as they give me the right to start evaluating everything they're doing.

If people want to build bigger homes, that's their right -- they are paying for them. Just like if I want to drive 100,000 miles per year in a Hummer -- that's my right. Bigger houses are valued higher so the residents pay more taxes which pays for more "stuff" that I often feel is clearly not a "necessity." If I drive 100,000 miles per year, I'm paying gasoline taxes (and tolls) which ostensibly fund roads and bridges as well as other infrastructure.

I personally prefer a higher quality house and am willing to pay more per square foot to get it. If that means I have a smaller house, that's fine with me, but if people value size over quality, that's their right as well. In a free market, no one is forced to buy anything (except for health insurance, of course,) but those large suburban homes.. if that's what people want, who cares? I don't tell people what women or men they should make babies with, so why should people be able to tell us what homes to buy? Although I would argue that bad human breeding choices causes more societal damage than a house with 500 extra square feet, but once again, it's about freedom.

Many people have forgotten what freedom means. It embarrassing to call myself an American when a good portion of Americans feel like it's their duty to tell everyone else how they should live their life to fit with some normative idea held by this group or that. I guarantee that every single one of us has something in our lifestyle that could be considered "bad" by someone. Who gets to decide what's bad? As long as your life choices don't deprive others of life, liberty or property, then do whatever the fuck you want. Don't try to make the lame argument that bigger houses consume more resources and it causes you die sooner. Those people pay for the resources consumed and people have jobs because of those resources consumed. And, as those resources become more scarce, the prices will rise, thus leading to a reduction of consumption of those resources. The economy is generally a self-regulating system (at least when we stop trying to manipulate it for political ends.)

If someone wants to live in a Manhattan closet and someone else wants to live in a Queens "McMansion," what right is it of ours to say otherwise?

For those complaining about "too big" then ask yourself, do you really "need" a 27 inch monitor? An 11 inch MacBook Air is good enough for 37signals, why should you need anything bigger? It isn't a necessity right? A computer isn't really a necessity when you get down to it. Society hummed along just fine before we had computers in every (smaller) home.

/end rant

It's not just an issue of freedom. It's an issue of the public policies that generate particular preferences. Our public policy creates tremendous incentives that push people to those giant houses in the suburbs. E.g. here in Illinois, the state is massively funding highway construction, while giving little to no money to maintain the Chicago commuter rail network. Aging trains and overcrowding on the rail that results from these policies dramatically affects peoples "choices."

And backyards are getting smaller.

If you look at the whole trend, houses are bigger, lots are smaller. One of the more interesting things I found in England when my sister was living there was that many folks had a small house but a large garden, because they spent most of their 'home' time in the garden rather than indoors. Whereas in the US there are a lot of people for who the 'garden' (or the yard as we yanks refer to it) is just a maintenance nightmare. Going so far as to install artificial turf to reduce the time burden of keeping it looking nicely.

I think it is sad if people don't get out much, but recognize that more and more of folks leisure time requires more electricity than is available out there.

Interesting, my guess would've been that yard sizes were at least staying the same. I've chiefly associated new construction with "further from the city center" (from living in suburban Texas for most of my life until recently) where the amount of available land increases dramatically as the radius from the center increases.

The Census PDF breaks things down into inside- and outside-MSAs, and they've both been getting bigger, but I'm not sure if the MSAs have stayed constant size or gotten bigger themselves...

At least in Seattle, most new construction seems to be taking one large lot, and either building one larger house with a smaller yard, or building multiple townhouses with little to no yard.

I'm surprised that you got that impression. I'm from the UK, I have visited the US once and was in the Philadelphia suburbs. I would say that the UK has smaller homes and gardens. In the UK most people live in dense cities and towns as opposed to suburban sprawl in the US, this limits space available.

I would agree that in England we spend more time gardening (though "most of their 'home' time" would be an exaggeration, possibly true in summer). There is strong separation of gardens in the UK as well, not having a fence would be very unusual, whereas where I was in the US back and front yards weren't clearly delineated.

That is an issue, there are a lot of different neighborhoods in both the US and the UK. So allow me to narrow my comment down somewhat.

In the San Francisco Bay Area and the Las Vegas metropolitan area, both places where I've been able to keep up to date on for about 30+ years, later neighborhoods have smaller lots and larger homes. In what started as the 'suburbs' in the peninsula like Sunnyvale, Campbell, Cupertino, and Los Altos. You can see pretty this pretty clearly from aerial imagery in Google Maps if you also know approximate neighborhood dates. We've had a number of towns propose or pass 'zero lot line' ordinances which restrict the building of residences that go right to the edge of the lot. And lots themselves have gone from 1/2 acre to 1/3 acre then to 1/4 acre, and now often 1/6 acre.

On the east coast, where I spent some of my childhood, back lots were commonly unfenced and effectively like mini-parks behind the houses out front, whereas in California fences are the norm. In Las Vegas fences are also the norm and lots have shown a similar drop although there was a lot of desert around so it has not been as pronounced as it has in the Bay Area.

My sister lived in Birmingham UK for a while and noted how much more invested folks she met were in their gardens than Americans were.

You really have to be specific about where you're collecting your anecdotal data.

If you live in Texas or much of the Southern US, being outside during the summer is nasty. As though the heat isn't bad enough, the mosquitoes are positively vicious. When I lived in Texas, we spent most of May-September indoors. It was great to have a big house there.

Likewise, you need to consider how snowbound many portions of the US are during the winter months. Being outside from November to March in Minnesota is a great way to freeze, but gardening isn't really possible.

When I lived in California, the weather was beautiful and the bugs were few. We lived in smaller places and it didn't matter since we were outside so much of the time.

It's a big country with many different climates.

It is very common for new house constructions to either tear down a few adjacent house and build tightly placed houses on the land, or tear down a single house and build a larger house on it. This is specially true in high cost areas.

This is really obvious in the town where I live. Older houses are smaller with larger yards, even considering proportions.

I have no personal use for a yard or a giant house. I would rather live in a small house with many acres of space for natural growth for the area (prairie, trees, sagebrush, etc)( I really dislike the "lawn" look. :-)).

My plan is to have a apartment/condo for a time, then - if I have enough career freedom - move to a more rural region where acreage is cheap.

Part of my thought is that we need to design homes to be habitable and extensible. This is very different from the slap-it-up construction suburbs have tended to use. I'd like to be able to modify my own space, add new buildings, etc, as needed. Christopher Alexander talks about this style of building in his writings some.

I know a couple of people who live like that, they have a pretty spartan condo in San Francisco and then larger places out in Portola in one case and Morgan Hill in the other.

My thought is it sounds lovely, if you can afford to keep two places running :-( But maybe an AptBnB kind of thing, work apartment by the week or something.

I don't see myself with the two-home lifestyle. I have enough issues with multiple computers. Maybe this will change, but I see the house as a home, a place to abide. (Which, incidentally, realigns priorities for debts and expectations: the home isn't an asset, it's not for sale :-) ).

Here in the UK, about 850 sq ft is the average for a new home. Less than half. Please do not complain about having lots of room until you've had to live here :)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14916580

When it comes to governments and houses, the British public are idiots who accept whatever is waved in front of them

That's one thing that amazed me when I was out in the UK. Even very nice homes are relatively small. Living rooms where you could lie on the floor and touch two walls were not uncommon.

It just goes to show you how humans can adapt to most any environment. A lot of what we think we "need", we only "want".

I prefer to think of it as showing that the British public are idiots, fooled by the rich to think that the UK is almost all built over (seriously, it's common for people to come up with values like 50% urbanised, or even more, when they are asked to estimate; it's actually about 10%, and of that around half is gardens and other green spaces) and fed a constant barrage of propaganda about how important it is to borrow as much money as they possibly can to buy over-priced, badly built houses our grandparents would be ashamed of.

I now relinquish my soapbox :p

The sound insulation inside US houses is also terrible. Maybe people wouldn't need so much space if they had some decent sound insulation between rooms. Otherwise it is the simple case of having a better house than your acquaintances and thinking of the extra space as an "investment".

Of course, that wouldn't be a problem if more houses were still built with stuff like brick, clay, daub, or even logs- but any more, that's seen as low-class.

As time goes by though, the more I begin to wonder if I wouldn't prefer a brick house, if only for the old-fashioned appearance and thermal buffering.

There's nothing like brick to keep a house cool in the summer time.

I've never heard anyone calling those materials low class. The reason they are not used is because it takes significant skill to build with those products which makes the resulting house very expensive.

Generalize much? The build quality in the US exceeds China and Korea in almost every possible way. Every been to China? The walls of most new construction homes in Shanghai are made of cinder block or poured concrete. Terrible sound insulation as well as horrendous thermal insulation.

Increased home sizes would be hard to connect statistically to the reduction in sound insulation. Those two factors are not correlated at all. Many older homes have terrible sound insulation. In fact, older apartment buildings specifically are often terrible compared to new construction when it comes to insulation (both thermal and auditory.)

Cinder block and concrete are worse sound and thermal insulation than a layer of gypsum? Really?

Ever notice that the bathrooms in houses built in the 60s are tiny, in houses built in the 90s they were enormous, and now they're roughly back to 'normal'? I wonder what this says about society.

It's mostly just the master-bath, too. The house I'm currently renting has a master bath and walk-in closet that a person could comfortably live in, while the other bathrooms barely have enough room to stand in.

Now that the housing bubble has collapsed and devastated the economies of the housing-dependent south, I think you'll see the trend continue. I also think you'll see cultural trends push things in the other direction.

I grew up in the DC suburbs, and my parents have a 6,000 sq-ft house. It's completely unwieldy and costs a fortune to heat and cool, not to mention its 30 minutes from the nearest anything, but they cling to it because they perceive having a huge house as a signal of "having made it."

My wife and I, in the next generation, feel the complete opposite way. Our "dream houses" are 1,500 sq-ft high-rise condos in Chicago or a commutable suburb like Evanston. I don't want my dad's hour-long car commute, I'd much rather have a 25-minute train-commute where I can at least pull out my laptop and get started on my inbox. We don't want the entire floors my parents don't use, but we do want things like fixing leaky showers to be someone else's problem. We don't want the big back yard, we'd rather have the 1,200 acre park up the street and the lakefront beach.

I think there are many people in our age demographic (late 20's) who feel the same way. As they reach the age when they've settled into careers and starting families, they're much less inclined to give up their lifestyles for big houses in the suburbs. You can even see this reflected in the media. In the 1970's there were tons of shows on TV where people lived in suburbs. Look at the popular shows of today--nearly everyone lives in apartments in urban-ish areas.

My home is 1300 square feet. 800 more square feet would be a 20 x 40 room. I don't know what I would do with that much space, but chances are it would make my wife upset. That's a vast amount of space - my first office was only 300 square feet and that included the bathroom and was room for three of us with plenty of space.

I thought our house was too big as well when we bought it (also 1300 sqft). We now have a son (he get's his own room) and will later try for another (wife hopes for a girl) which will get a room - right now it's a craft room/spare room for guests.

With a dog, two kids (an office and a garage for me to tool in) I don't know if I could survive with anything much smaller. We don't need bigger though, I don't feel cramped (living room is kinda small, get a few toys in there and it is hazardous - yes, kids take over the living room, I never believed it before).

I just went from 1 kid to 3 (twin babies) and the 3-bedroom 1400sqft place we have is a bit cramped - babies command a LOT of space for stuff.

That said, I don't think we would have ever purchased/rented a 4 bdrm while we were still a 1-kid family.

This is the exact position my wife and I are in as well. Kids change the equation a lot.

We have our first kid on the way (due at the end of November) and currently live in a 1,600 square foot house. I remember when I bought it, before I was married, it seemed like more space than I would ever need. I had rooms that had nothing in them for years until I got married.

The problem, in our case, is that while 1600 square feet is a good bit of space, it's not very effectively laid out especially for a young family. Probably half of that square footage is in the living room. The next biggest room is the master on the first floor, then the other two "bedrooms" on the second floor are almost too small to be usable. One is about the size of a large closet and could just barely hold a twin bed (that's our office), and the other, which is just slightly larger, was a guest room and will be the nursery.

Space for all the stuff you "need" (of course, I wonder how much of this stuff we actually need...) is a real issue. This became apparent now that we've started buying stuff for a nursery as well as other baby accessories. It completely filled the guest bedroom as well as a good bit of overflow into the living room.

And this is just with one kid - we hope to try for another in a few years. I'm guessing that kids sharing rooms was much more common in the 70s and earlier than it now? I was born in '81, and always had a room to myself even after my sister was born.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9qnWg9kak

A bit minimal for my tastes, but highly ingenious. There are numerous other "small space" videos / websites out there.

(Link is to "A Tiny Apartment Transforms into 24 Rooms" showing an ingeniously engineered Hong Kong apartment).

Single family homes may be a declining fraction of housing, and the lower end may be getting replaced by townhomes or condos.

And all the rooms are the wrong size.

(That's a joke.)

I suspect that the size of each kind of average apartment has not changed much over the last few decades. One bedrooms are still about 650 sq ft, two bedrooms about 780. Big buildings are designed for efficiency over the long term, and don't partake in fads so much.

When you go out and buy a house, there's an inclination to buy as much house as you think you can afford. More space is more flexibility, after all, and after years living in not-quite-enough space, you want all that you can get.

Here are three new-ish apartment buildings in Austin that are 20-30% larger than what you're saying was once normal:

http://www.triangleaustin.com/residences/pages/floor-plans.a...

http://www.mosaicaustin.com/pages/floor-plans.asp

http://gables.com/find/apartment/1071-gables-pressler-austin...

I've been in older apartments in Austin, and I'd say they're definitely getting bigger.

Interestingly enough a rather surprising number of families in Austin live in apartments. 78741 has some of the highest number of children living close to downtown and 87% of the housing in the area is apartments. This fits with the importance of having a backyard. Perhaps this is a sunbelt trend? As the rust belt is abandoned for the sun belt the value of a backyard seems less important (as many never leave their air-conditioning)?

I personally value a backyard less after growing up with a rarely-used one, but I think the prevalence of families living in apartments in that area is just because they can't afford anything else. It's the cheapest place to live in Austin, especially if you account for transportation.

I wonder how much of it is explained away the demographics of the typical people buildings homes.

For example, people that are still well off after a few years of bad economy seem like they are more likely to build a home than people that have had financial stress during that period.

Interestingly, increasing the size of the house does not increase the cost by a proportional amount. So, increasing the size is a relatively inexpensive way to "upgrade" a house.

The "box" of the house is probably the least expensive part.

Our cars are getting bigger as well (after reset in the seventies), so what?

Does this mean that in the future, all houses will be massive and all the doors will be circular and we will just roll between all the rooms like giant beachballs made of meat?

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