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> But the U.S. wasn’t always so profusely bathroomed. In the past half century, the number of bathrooms per person in America has doubled. “We went from two peo

> But the U.S. wasn’t always so profusely bathroomed. In the past half century, the number of bathrooms per person in America has doubled. “We went from two people per bathroom to one person per bathroom in the last 50 years,” says Jeff Tucker, an economist at Zillow. “That’s amazing, because postwar America was already rich and booming, and we just, you know, kept building more bathrooms.” Across the country, bathrooms are multiplying—including in apartments and condos—even as American families and households are getting smaller. The article misses a major point here which explains much (though not all) of the trend: household sizes have decreased dramatically in the last 50 years, and the number of single-person households has increased dramatically. Single-person households can generally be expected to have at least one bathroom per person, and small households will generally have higher ratios than large households. In 1960 single-person households were about 13% of all households; they have more than doubled, to about 28% in 2019 [1]. In 1960 the average household size was about 3.3; in 2019 it was 2.5 [2]. [1] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/hh-4.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat... [2] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/hh-6.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...

BurningFrog 7y ago
> postwar America was already rich and booming, It was booming, and it was richer than it ever had been, but it was very poor by today's standards. GDP per person in 1950 was 27% of the 2019 level. And since this always has to be pointed out: That is adjusted for inflation. https://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-per-capita/table/by-year https://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-per-capita/table/by-year
- re-actor 7y ago
  There's a LOT more to wealth than GDP/person, saying postwar america wasn't rich is absurd.
  - devmunchies 7y ago
    exactly. The economy didn't need to support so many restaurants and food services when most people cooked at home. People also mostly entertained themselves or spent time with friends/family. Moving all that to a company or service will raise the GDP.
    - njarboe 7y ago
      Plus childcare and eldercare. Take those and the ones you mention into account, and GDP/person has probably dropped since the 1950s.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    It's easy to confuse relative and absolute wealth. Relative: 1950s USA was easily the richest country in the world, and in history. Absolute: In today's world, that affluence is only average for the world. Other countries around there are Brazil, China, and Algeria. Both those things are true. https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/ https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/
  - bpt3 7y ago
    It's relative, not absolute. Saying America today isn't richer than postwar America is even more absurd.
  - rconti 7y ago
    Just like today, wealth is not evenly distributed. There are people in the US today living in abject poverty. Name the cause, fine, but that doesn't make it less true. The poverty level 70 years ago would have been even more desperate.
- werber 7y ago
  https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1952/demo/p60-009.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1952/demo/p60-00... Adjusted for inflation that's about a $35,000 median family income compared to an average of about $55,000 today. Still not great, but other items like homes were cheaper (and smaller), cars, etc. So not quite as bad as the GDP per person, but it does make me think about how that monumental rise of GDP isn't reflected more closely in how much money is being made by the average working person
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    Income per family is a treacherous measure, since family sizes have shrunk considerably. If I marry you, our family income has doubled, but none of us is any richer.
    - oblio 7y ago
      > Income per family is a treacherous measure, since family sizes have shrunk considerably. > If I marry you, our family income has doubled, but none of us is any richer. I don't disagree with your core point, but I have to nitpick a bit the last part. Expenses don't grow linearly with the number of people in a family, especially with the number of wage-earning adults. You will be richer in a couple, and I don't only mean emotionally :-) Rent won't double, all sorts of other living expenses can be shared, etc. Disposable income should definitely be higher than for 2 single people. I feel that a decent chunk of the issues in modern societies is that many people are single for long periods of time. That makes things really hard financially, plus there's less support in case of issues...
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      I would expect that two could live a fair bit more cheaply (apples to apples) than double what they individually spent as singles. Rent, utilities, and (to a lesser extent) groceries all seemed to get quite a bit more efficient when we moved in together.
  - dahfizz 7y ago
    The "median family" is wildly different today than it was 60 years ago. A skyrocketing percent of households are single individuals with a single income and no child expenses. https://ourworldindata.org/living-alone https://ourworldindata.org/living-alone
- varjag 7y ago
  We have grown-up people earning 4x median wages on this website living with roommates, am not sure it was the case in 1950.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    Yes, because of special circumstances in one metro area; that isn’t typical nationwide.
    - thebradbain 7y ago
      The Bay Area is definitely an extreme, but millennials nationwide are doing worse financially than their parents, even though they're working more. Here's one of my absolute favorite articles on the topic, which addresses everything from work/health/education/housing. https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/ https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenn...
      - thunderbird120 7y ago
        Not really. Millennials certainly face different problems than previous generations but it would be generally inaccurate to say that they are financially worse off. Going back to that article you linked, I have to take the opposite stance in terms of its quality. Articles which rely heavily on anecdotes to make their point are really not a good way to try to understand what constitutes "typical". In fact, they're mostly useless for that. If you want to understand what really is "typical" then you really need to dive into some dry and boring data releases. Let's use the BLS Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers Archived News Releases found here https://www.bls.gov/bls/news-release/wkyeng.htm https://www.bls.gov/bls/news-release/wkyeng.htm These reports provide reliable information about median weekly earnings for full-time workers, are available online going back to 1996, and include more specific data about different age groups. Let's compare the age range of 25-34 in Q1 1996 (non millennials) to the same range in Q4 2019 (millennials) while adjusting for increases in cost of living using CPI-U. Here are the major spending categories assessed in CPI calculations https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm#Question_10 https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm#Question_1... For ages 25-34: Q1 1996 weekly earnings: $419 % change in CPI-U over duration: + ~66% Q1 1996 weekly earnings in Q4 2019 dollars: $695.54 Q4 2019 weekly earnings: $815 % Increase in real weekly earnings: ~17%
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  GDP just reflects economic output, not the distribution of the resulting wealth to real people. If you want to adjust for anything, adjust for the cost of healthcare, education, and amount of consumer debt.
- slumdev 7y ago
  > And since this always has to be pointed out: That is adjusted for inflation. I must point out a concern about your out point. Is this using CPI? PPI? Currency supply? Something else? Education, housing, and many other expenses have outpaced "inflation" for decades.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    I'd argue that housing and education today are better on average than in the past as well.
SamBam 7y ago
That's a very valid point, but I assume the same trend would show up (though not as drastically) in the number of bathrooms per bedroom. (If not, then the article is bunk, but I assume it does.) I'd also be interested to know the trend in the percentage of floor space given over to bathrooms, which would fuzz both the number of bathrooms and the increased bathroom size. It seems to me like a lot of space wasted, personally, although I admit it does feel nice to walk into a (rare) beautiful full-sized master bathroom.
- CrazyStat 7y ago
  Yes, I expect the trend would still be there, just not quite as dramatic. We live in a 3-bedroom 2.5-bath home and I wouldn't want to give any of the bathrooms up. Not having two full bathrooms would be seriously annoying when either my or my wife's parents are in town, which is about 6 weeks a year, and not having the half bath on the ground floor would be mildly annoying all the time (and slightly more annoying when friends are over).
majormajor 7y ago
> “That’s amazing, because postwar America was already rich and booming, and we just, you know, kept building more bathrooms.” Across the country, bathrooms are multiplying—including in apartments and condos—even as American families and households are getting smaller. You'd expect that wealth to show up in new construction more than in retrofitting every existing home, so bathrooms as a lagging indicator makes sense to me.

BurningFrog 7y ago

> postwar America was already rich and booming, It was booming, and it was richer than it ever had been, but it was very poor by today's standards. GDP per person in 1950 was 27% of the 2019 level. And since this always has to be pointed out: That is adjusted for inflation. https://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-per-capita/table/by-year https://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-per-capita/table/by-year

re-actor 7y ago
There's a LOT more to wealth than GDP/person, saying postwar america wasn't rich is absurd.
- devmunchies 7y ago
  exactly. The economy didn't need to support so many restaurants and food services when most people cooked at home. People also mostly entertained themselves or spent time with friends/family. Moving all that to a company or service will raise the GDP.
  - njarboe 7y ago
    Plus childcare and eldercare. Take those and the ones you mention into account, and GDP/person has probably dropped since the 1950s.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  It's easy to confuse relative and absolute wealth. Relative: 1950s USA was easily the richest country in the world, and in history. Absolute: In today's world, that affluence is only average for the world. Other countries around there are Brazil, China, and Algeria. Both those things are true. https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/ https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/
- bpt3 7y ago
  It's relative, not absolute. Saying America today isn't richer than postwar America is even more absurd.
- rconti 7y ago
  Just like today, wealth is not evenly distributed. There are people in the US today living in abject poverty. Name the cause, fine, but that doesn't make it less true. The poverty level 70 years ago would have been even more desperate.
werber 7y ago
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1952/demo/p60-009.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1952/demo/p60-00... Adjusted for inflation that's about a $35,000 median family income compared to an average of about $55,000 today. Still not great, but other items like homes were cheaper (and smaller), cars, etc. So not quite as bad as the GDP per person, but it does make me think about how that monumental rise of GDP isn't reflected more closely in how much money is being made by the average working person
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Income per family is a treacherous measure, since family sizes have shrunk considerably. If I marry you, our family income has doubled, but none of us is any richer.
  - oblio 7y ago
    > Income per family is a treacherous measure, since family sizes have shrunk considerably. > If I marry you, our family income has doubled, but none of us is any richer. I don't disagree with your core point, but I have to nitpick a bit the last part. Expenses don't grow linearly with the number of people in a family, especially with the number of wage-earning adults. You will be richer in a couple, and I don't only mean emotionally :-) Rent won't double, all sorts of other living expenses can be shared, etc. Disposable income should definitely be higher than for 2 single people. I feel that a decent chunk of the issues in modern societies is that many people are single for long periods of time. That makes things really hard financially, plus there's less support in case of issues...
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    I would expect that two could live a fair bit more cheaply (apples to apples) than double what they individually spent as singles. Rent, utilities, and (to a lesser extent) groceries all seemed to get quite a bit more efficient when we moved in together.
- dahfizz 7y ago
  The "median family" is wildly different today than it was 60 years ago. A skyrocketing percent of households are single individuals with a single income and no child expenses. https://ourworldindata.org/living-alone https://ourworldindata.org/living-alone
varjag 7y ago
We have grown-up people earning 4x median wages on this website living with roommates, am not sure it was the case in 1950.
- SilasX 7y ago
  Yes, because of special circumstances in one metro area; that isn’t typical nationwide.
  - thebradbain 7y ago
    The Bay Area is definitely an extreme, but millennials nationwide are doing worse financially than their parents, even though they're working more. Here's one of my absolute favorite articles on the topic, which addresses everything from work/health/education/housing. https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/ https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenn...
    - thunderbird120 7y ago
      Not really. Millennials certainly face different problems than previous generations but it would be generally inaccurate to say that they are financially worse off. Going back to that article you linked, I have to take the opposite stance in terms of its quality. Articles which rely heavily on anecdotes to make their point are really not a good way to try to understand what constitutes "typical". In fact, they're mostly useless for that. If you want to understand what really is "typical" then you really need to dive into some dry and boring data releases. Let's use the BLS Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers Archived News Releases found here https://www.bls.gov/bls/news-release/wkyeng.htm https://www.bls.gov/bls/news-release/wkyeng.htm These reports provide reliable information about median weekly earnings for full-time workers, are available online going back to 1996, and include more specific data about different age groups. Let's compare the age range of 25-34 in Q1 1996 (non millennials) to the same range in Q4 2019 (millennials) while adjusting for increases in cost of living using CPI-U. Here are the major spending categories assessed in CPI calculations https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm#Question_10 https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm#Question_1... For ages 25-34: Q1 1996 weekly earnings: $419 % change in CPI-U over duration: + ~66% Q1 1996 weekly earnings in Q4 2019 dollars: $695.54 Q4 2019 weekly earnings: $815 % Increase in real weekly earnings: ~17%
unlinked_dll 7y ago
GDP just reflects economic output, not the distribution of the resulting wealth to real people. If you want to adjust for anything, adjust for the cost of healthcare, education, and amount of consumer debt.
slumdev 7y ago
> And since this always has to be pointed out: That is adjusted for inflation. I must point out a concern about your out point. Is this using CPI? PPI? Currency supply? Something else? Education, housing, and many other expenses have outpaced "inflation" for decades.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  I'd argue that housing and education today are better on average than in the past as well.

SamBam 7y ago

That's a very valid point, but I assume the same trend would show up (though not as drastically) in the number of bathrooms per bedroom. (If not, then the article is bunk, but I assume it does.) I'd also be interested to know the trend in the percentage of floor space given over to bathrooms, which would fuzz both the number of bathrooms and the increased bathroom size. It seems to me like a lot of space wasted, personally, although I admit it does feel nice to walk into a (rare) beautiful full-sized master bathroom.

CrazyStat 7y ago
Yes, I expect the trend would still be there, just not quite as dramatic. We live in a 3-bedroom 2.5-bath home and I wouldn't want to give any of the bathrooms up. Not having two full bathrooms would be seriously annoying when either my or my wife's parents are in town, which is about 6 weeks a year, and not having the half bath on the ground floor would be mildly annoying all the time (and slightly more annoying when friends are over).

majormajor 7y ago

> “That’s amazing, because postwar America was already rich and booming, and we just, you know, kept building more bathrooms.” Across the country, bathrooms are multiplying—including in apartments and condos—even as American families and households are getting smaller. You'd expect that wealth to show up in new construction more than in retrofitting every existing home, so bathrooms as a lagging indicator makes sense to me.