Houses and cars have gotten quite big

One might even say too big, if that one were me.

Andrey Popov/Getty Images

The houses are bigger

Over the past few decades, something has happened to houses in the United States: they’ve gotten bigger. Much bigger. The average new home in the U.S. is 1,000 square feet bigger than it was in 1973. At the same time, households have gotten smaller! On average, the amount of living space per person has nearly doubled since the 70s.

This 2019 piece by Joe Pinsker for The Atlantic does a nice job of exploring why this might be the case. The post-WWII suburbanization and the age of government-incentivized single-family detached homes, the sprawl-inducing federal highway system, new zoning regulations… all of these developments contributed to new houses getting bigger. Add in the shift from viewing a home as shelter to now viewing it as a financial investment, and you can imagine how a larger home starts to sound more attractive.

But also! It’s nice to have space to entertain! To have room to host guests! Theoretically.

The house I live in now with my three-person family is around 1,300-1,400 sq ft. It’s plenty big enough for us. When it’s just the three of us here, which is most of the time, it feels a little too big. To be honest, we don’t use our extra bedroom to the fullest. I clutter it up with art supplies and mementos, and maybe six times a year we have overnight guests.

When we have people over sometimes I think it feels small, but that’s mostly because it’s cozy and we have a lot of separate rooms — no open floor plan here. Our kitchen is separate from the dining room, which is separate from the living room, and so forth.

The very tiny kitchen we used to have in our small apartment. Looking back, it was probably too small, but it was also too cute.

I’m not a tiny house evangelist. I’m not suggesting we all move into 400 square foot sheds. Although, now that I think about it, Chris and I shared a <600 square foot apartment together for many years and I loved it. Our kitchen was very tiny, and even won a small cool kitchen contest back then. Ok, the kitchen was too tiny but the rest of the space worked.

I do think, though, the house size thing is something to consider. Yesterday I was in a conversation and someone mentioned all of the boomers still stuck in empty four-bedroom homes because there aren’t smaller options to downsize to. I think of the sprawl and distance between these bigger houses that makes it so difficult to start and grow friendships, to create the kind of neighborhoods and community that I crave. I think of all the COBWEBS that I would let take over a bigger house, since I practically already let them take over our medium-sized house.

I think of all of the different ways we could build and organize our housing, and how there isn’t just one right answer, but a whole slew of possibilities to meet people where they are.

From a different 2019 article about growing house sizes:

In this sense, the story of American home sizes in the past half century is a story of shifting norms. Fifty-plus years ago, a one-bathroom house or a bedroom that slept multiple siblings might have felt cramped—but it also probably felt normal. Today, many Americans can afford more space, and they’ve bought it. They just don’t appear to be any happier with it than with what they had before.

In her book Brave New Home: Our Future in Smaller, Simpler, Happier Housing,

Diana Lind

analyzes the paths that led to U.S. houses getting bigger and bigger. And she also notes that the suburbanization of America happened in contrast to the “see-and-be-seen” nature of cities: drive-in, attached garages, large backyard, etc. But the problem is, a bigger house offers a diminishing return. Yes, overcrowding is a serious problem that can negatively affect educational, health and social outcomes. But once you have enough space, you reach a point where more space won’t make you much happier. Lind imagines a society that is less dependent on and enamored of the large, single-family home; a society with more missing middle housing, more shared living options and more equitable access to good housing.

Also, the cars

Guess what else has gotten bigger? Cars! On average, cars today are significantly bigger than cars in the 1970s. I’m not as level-headed when it comes to giant cars as I am with bigger houses, so maybe I shouldn’t get into this…

Source: Blackbird Spyplane

… but I will just say that big cars and trucks are so much more deadly for pedestrians, especially children. Also they take up too much room on the roads. Also, cars ruin cities. Alright, I’ll leave it there.

Except, one more thing: there aren’t enough small, cool cars on the market. Everything is so big. Everything is a crossover SUV. Where are the funky little rides? Where are the adorable 1990 Ford Escorts, like my first car named Snowflake that I picked up from my great Aunt Louise in California?

Snowflake and me, Sacramento (2001).

When my current car is at the end of its life, I’m planning to replace it with an electric car, but here’s the thing: it needs to be small and cool. If you’ve found one, please please let me know.

Before you tell me about how useful big pick-up trucks are, let me gently remind you that I am in the construction industry. I get the utility of big pick-up trucks all the time, and Habitat even has our own big pick-up truck. But that’s a pretty specific use case, when you are actually hauling around massive amount of construction materials between sites. But for the daily commute and puttering around town? We can do better. From a post by

Blackbird Spyplane

:

We can of course sense that, whereas road trips do rock, when it comes to daily commutes, etc., cars are prison cells masquerading as tickets to freedom. Whereas if we had ill public transportation we’d be much happier ‘cause trains rip and, all things being equal, driving and dealing with traffic and other drivers sucks. The consumer desire for ever-larger cars (to the extent that this desire hasn’t been orchestrated by the people selling the cars) might reflect a delusion that if we can just make our prison cells big enough they won’t be prison cells anymore.

Maybe the supersizing of houses and cars aren’t related. Maybe it is. Maybe it has more to do with an American ideal of spaciousness and individualism and privatization. Maybe it’s just the natural course of evolution. I don’t know, but it does seem like we continue to trend toward Bigger and Newer, and I’m just not sure we’ve thought through all of the consequences of that path. Let’s make modest houses and cars cool again, ok?

Elsewhere lately

I’ve been named to this year’s local 40 Under 40 list. More to come!