McMansions Equivalent To 'SUVs That Run for 100 Years'
The ever-growing size of American homes means that, regardless of how "green" the construction techniques, they will be rapacious users of energy for decades to come.
"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."
"And for a given house design – 'green' or standard, monolithic or pseudo-Victorian -- the bigger its square footage, the bigger its environmental footprint."
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The long-term impact of titanic houses parallels that of gas-gulping SUVs and pickup trucks. Americans will be stuck with heating, cooling and powering the millions of them already littering the landscape – not for years like SUVs, but for decades."
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Time will tell
There was a recent article here about McMansions housing several unrelated families, or being subdivided into 2 or more residences.
Also, there is a trend of empty-nesters downsizing to smaller diggs.
If energy costs become too high, it will become less economically feasible to heat and cool a 4,000+ sf house for, say, 2 people. At some point it will just not pencil out and they will sell.
Either a larger family, two+ families .... or a couple with literally money to burn will buy the big house.
I predict that fewer people will buy these big houses unless they have a big family, or they will buy them and condo-ize them to duplexes, triplexes, etc.
Another liberal bogeyman
What, exactly, is your point? People are free to buy whatever they want, be it SUV's or large houses. Once again, free people making personal choices are castigated by an elitist, holier-than-thou minority who don't approve of their lifestyle. Too bad. I'm not interested in living to your expectations, only my own. Get over it.
More reactionary head in the sand me-first logic
Greg,
We live in a more and more integrated world. Even a libertarian must eventually accept that your freedom ends when it infringes on mine, and vice versa. People are free to buy whatever they want, but companies are not free to produce anything they want. We as a society engage in informed (sometimes less so) debates about OUR priorities. Not just mine, and certainly not just your own. Through that process WE set those priorities and have every constitutional right to tell industries how and what we want. The day you decide to move out to a farm, and live off the grid you can lecture us "elitist" planners about how self-sufficient and self contained you are. As long as you travel on public roads, buy goods at stores, and otherwise intersect with any form of wider society you are part of a collective body of humans, and you have to deal with the fact that your expectations have consequences for other people. Welcome to the human race.
And you know what throwing the "elitist" tag around is just sloppy. New York times readers I guess are elitists, but the home building company executives profiting from environmental damage to the tune of millions of dollars are just good ol' fashioned salt of the earth types, right?
You seem to get very agitated when so-called liberals decide to engage in our role as planners by bringing information to the table. In this country we often engage in this debate on a state by state basis. I, personally have no interest in going out to Idaho, or Texas (where I was raised) and dictate land use. But if the information is available that your region's land use policies are environmentally harmful then don't blame other's for trying to make that information available to a wider public. As long as I have information that your choices are damaging to an environment that we share I have no intention of "getting over it". Instead I fully intend on working to affect change in my area and hopefully some of that change will filter through to your region.
the point is clear...
big homes = big energy usage
fortunately, it's starting to look like homes are maxing out in size. as buyer demographics change, particularly for gen-x, studies show that these buyers do not want size, but quality.
as for you, Greg, your choices are having an significant impact on the quality of my life.
i would rather not live in a world with dirty air, wasted resources, and wars for oil.
have you signed up to fight in Iraq yet?