Interesting chart showing how housing prices and quality have changed in the US. From 1956 to 2024 the median house nearly doubled in size, and they now have a lot more amenities. You have to love that in 1956 only 33% of houses had insulation. (Although some would have been brick, which is a decent insulator, and wooden clapboards also have some insulating value. But not nearly as much as fiberglass or foam.) The numbers of hours worked (by the median worker) per square foot is about the same.
This chart does hide some problems. Americans without children regularly complain that the market forces them to buy much bigger houses than they need, since everything in the better neighborhoods is huge. We should build more small houses. There is also the problem that in certain areas this median house would cost twice as much as in the median neighborhood, perhaps three times as much.
But one of the main drivers of rising housing costs is that we expect a lot more from a house.
1 comment:
Large houses is somewhat unique to America , where we lack the Third Places that are so common in, for example, Europe. (Canada and Australia are similar, but also share some of the cultural quirks that contribute to this.)
The average size of houses in Europe is about half as big. A huge part of that is that Europeans tend to spend MUCH more of their non-working hours in shared public spaces where people can go to relax and socialize without having to spend money, without having to arrange for transportation, without needing permission or an appointment, and without needing to have any prior relationships with others.
This is, I feel, an incredibly overlooked failing of American society. We're constantly complaining about our country's general lack of community, sense of belonging, sense of place, et cetera. People wake up, drive to school or work, maybe go shopping for groceries, and then drive home and stay there until they fall asleep and do it all over again. We rarely walk and get exercise, rarely enjoy and interact with our local environment, rarely have the chance to socialize with people we unexpectedly run into while out and about (grocery stores being a notable, yet limited, exception), et cetera.
It's a sad, depressing way to live - and that's not opinion, that's flatly empirical observation of American mental and social health. Americans are demonstrably more miserable and isolated, and it doesn't just happen for no reason.
I would also argue that America's legacy of being a "frontier" nation (also shared by Canada and Australia) is likely a major contributor to house sizes. We're talking about massive geographic regions which went from virtually no inhabitants to massive populations in extremely short periods of time, and which still have huge swathes of (chiefly rural) land which is largely empty of people.
Less crowding means houses can be built larger. Cities being laid out to accommodate car culture and commuting means even further relative reductions in crowding, and you can build bigger houses when they're pushed out into the suburbs and aren't competing for space with other kinds of locations. In fact, there's a massive incentive to build larger houses as a way to convince people to accept commuting in the first place. It's a self fulfilling system in that regard.
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