A Reality Check On Home Size
With the era of easy financing over, buyers should seek out smaller, more affordable homes.
"For years, the building industry has produced bigger and bigger homes. Consumer expectations, easy credit and greater profit potential have resulted in new houses with more rooms, larger garages, increased volume and, of course, higher price tags.
Consumers, after all, seek to consume. Why settle for three bedrooms, two baths and a one-car garage? Why not opt for a kitchen big enough to entertain several guests and roast two turkeys at once? Why wouldn't someone want a house with a separate room for every function? How can anyone live without a dedicated audio-video entertainment space, multiple walk-in closets and a master bathroom larger than the rarely used dining room?
Today's housing-market paradox is that while houses have been expanding, households have been shrinking. In suburban houses built during recent decades, fewer people occupy more space.
This trend's lack of sustainability seems to finally be apparent."
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When did that happen?
I'd also like to know when (and who) decided it was a "societal goal" to reduce the size of housing? That seems like it should be a market/financing issue to me. If people want big houses, and can afford them, it's no one else's business.
What is the role of the planner vis a vis the Market?
Greg,
You bring up a fundamental unresolved question in the planning profession. What is the role of the planner vis a vis the Market? As I understand it our role is to provide information and where possible influence legislation and regulations. At the end of the day planners are not omnipotent (in fact we have very little direct power) and all we can do is work through or against market influences. However this does not change the fact that we have an obligation to transform knowledge into action, and advocate for what we have learned through our study to be true.
"(Who) decided it was a "societal goal" to reduce the size of housing?" In this case the tools of planning study reveal that large houses are energy in-efficient, encourage wasteful land-use, and dispersed settlement patterns that will make mass transit use more difficult in the future. I tend to agree that this is a matter for local control. If a developer and a community agree that what they want are giant suburban houses then all I can do as a professional is point out the wastefulness of that endeavor, and the possible problems that this will cause in the far term future. And of course vote with my dollars by NOT living in that community.
More importantly though as I've mentioned before if the developer and the community want to build that type of subdivision and connect all the traffic it will generate to an already congested system, then they plan on complaining about the time and distance it takes to get anywhere, its my job and obligation to point out that those residents made a choice to accept those wasteful practices.
Another thing to point out in all these posts is that planning by definition is about the future. The market is very good at allocating present-day resources (and via investment vehicles the near term future value of resources), however the market is not as capable at "deliberating" about the future repercussions. The market determines the cheapest inputs and outputs for each level of market spending capability. This is where the collaborative model of planning comes in and planners 2nd job is to facilitate a political discussion about what are societal goals. In this case some are going to see smaller houses as a societal goal and others are going to disagree, but there is not reason why the discussion shouldn't take place.
Finally you've brought up twice the concept of personal choice. In this respect planners have an obligation to point out and demonstrate whenever personal choices impose hidden costs on other members of society. That is what planners are currently doing with regards to the larger house trend.
Great Question
Marcotico, I think you've hit the nail on the head with this question. I think it should be the question that forms a basis for much of the discussion on this site.
I would disagree somewhat about your characterization of markets - they do comtemplate the future. A market transaction condenses all future thinking about something into an action today. Like planning, it could be "wrong", but it does at least contemplate the future. (Financial markets are great examples of this).
Planning can be quite broad, but my view of planning is that the planner is the implementor of land use policy, broadly defined. So, we can't talk about planning without discussing public policy. The role of public policy, at least in economic theory (and what is taught at grad policy schools), is to mitigate negative externalities and increase production of public goods.
Therefore, my take is that planners should identify negative externalities in the land market and present alternatives on how to combat those and present additional options for creating beneficial community public goods with the least market distortion possible. I don't think much of the planning profession sees their role in this way, but perhaps they should.
One problem that planners have from my view is that they have trouble identifying precisely what "the problem" is. Is house size really the problem? Or energy consumption? Are cars the problem? Or air pollution? Is lack of density the problem? Or how that density is designed and arranged?
This may seem nuanced, but I think it's critical because one has to know what he/she is trying to mitigate. What if one person has a green, solar powered 3,000 sf house in the country on an acre, but little impervious cover, telecommutes, and bikes into town whenever they need to and another lives in a 1,800 sf house on 1/8 acre in an inner suburb, but drives 20 miles to work in their truck, uses conventional power, and has a yard full of concrete? The logic of the "houses are too big argument" and "sprawl is bad argument" is not nuanced enough to capture the fact that the first person in the example is creating fewer externalities than the second.
I think if the planning profession does a better job identifying and defining problems, they could do a better job recommending policy instead of just saying houses are too big, people drive too much, we sprawl too much, or other not so helpful, pejorative phrases.
Planning-Market quotation.
Successful City Planning: Public action that generates a desirable, widespread and sustained private market reaction. - Alexander Garvin
Best,
D
Planning Nuance doesn't translate well into journalism
One of the problems is that nuance is embraced by the planning profession, but doesn't translate into journalism or government action. Journalism because of the need for brevity, and government because the US system is a) winner take all b) regulation is based on banning or allowing, and gets very complicated when it tries to enforce nuance.
The debate about sprawl is a perfect example. There are so many aspects to it. Is it environmentally harmful or not? Is sprawl created by development patterns or are development patterns created by a desire to sprawl? If it is a public "bad", is that because it's energy inefficient, because its not at human scale, because of its land use effects, or because of its transportation effects. Finally if any of these can be "proven" do they all need to be proven? And then what can regulations do about it without creating a market distortion? (ps. I'm not sure what I agree with about sprawl so I am using it as an example only)
Once the journalists get their hands on it, it turns into a suburbs versus high-rises debate, when those aren't the only two options. No one is seriously suggesting the US adopt soviet style policies of putting everyone in concrete tower blocks in the suburbs. That is a debate distortion.
I like your concept of the market condensing all future action, but I don't necessarily agree with it 100%. I think that market based capitalism does favor short term decisions over longer term decisions. But I need to think that one over a bit more.
However I do see your idea of planners having solutions in search of a problem. Though I think that is a function of having multi-faceted problems to tackle. For example energy use is a function of cars which is a function of land use, which is a function of transportation choices (ie cars). So what exactly is the problem that mass transit is the solution to. That sort of thing. (again just an example I'm thinking over)
The problem with Robert
The problem with Robert Lewis’s plea here is that he offers a lot of “shoulds” but doesn’t give us—as planners, policy makers, or even consumers—a path toward the societal goal of home downsizing.
If you look at housing as what economists refer to as a “positional good,” something that people attain in a material arms race to keep up with the Joneses, it’s rising inequality (following decades of Reagan and Bush tax cuts) that drives people to bigger and bigger homes. The New York Times’ recent article “In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich” is a good example of how this is working. Conspicuous consumption by the ultra-rich drives up the bar for everyone else. Middle income workers aspire toward houses that would have been considered ostentatious in other eras. Things have never been better for the top 1% in this country, and the rest of us are simply following their norms. Whether we can afford it or not.
Without significant changes to the economy, promoting equity instead of gluttony, I don’t see a major home downsizing trend. For the middle class, it’s all about the appearance of wealth you don’t have. Hiding your money in a beautifully-restored small 19th century Victorian or living in faux-poverty in a loft (with “exposed” brick!) will for the foreseeable future be niche desires of yuppies and the occasional eccentric. Count on quantity to reign supreme over quality for everybody who’s striving for upward mobility. And in the age of Paris Hilton and MTV Cribs, that’s an awful lot of people.
Oh, those evil rich
Thanks for endorsing the notion that the tax cuts enabled more people to afford home ownership. The "fat cats" aren't the main problem considering home ownership is higher than ever before. The problem is credit was extended to those who wouldn't have been considered credit worthy. That's a different issue but blaming the "rich" isn't exactly accurate. A majority of Americans (65.5%) own their own home. How people spend their money is their business even you label it conspicuous consumption. "Things have never been better for the top 1% in this country, and the rest of us are simply following their norms. Whether we can afford it or not." Things are always easier if you live in the upper 1% tax bracket; of course, they do pay more than you or I do as a percentage of revenue. I personally have no desire to spend excessively on a home so I must have superhuman powers to resist gluttony. I must older than you because Paris Hilton hasn't persuaded me to drive drunk or emulate an MTV Crib.