7 ms·

American Houses Are Still Much, Much Bigger Than They Used To Be

57 points by pg 14y ago

amalag 14y ago
The sound insulation inside US houses is also terrible. Maybe people wouldn't need so much space if they had some decent sound insulation between rooms. Otherwise it is the simple case of having a better house than your acquaintances and thinking of the extra space as an "investment".
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  Of course, that wouldn't be a problem if more houses were still built with stuff like brick, clay, daub, or even logs- but any more, that's seen as low-class. As time goes by though, the more I begin to wonder if I wouldn't prefer a brick house, if only for the old-fashioned appearance and thermal buffering.
  - debacle 14y ago
    There's nothing like brick to keep a house cool in the summer time.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - adestefan 14y ago
    I've never heard anyone calling those materials low class. The reason they are not used is because it takes significant skill to build with those products which makes the resulting house very expensive.
- briandear 14y ago
  Generalize much? The build quality in the US exceeds China and Korea in almost every possible way. Every been to China? The walls of most new construction homes in Shanghai are made of cinder block or poured concrete. Terrible sound insulation as well as horrendous thermal insulation. Increased home sizes would be hard to connect statistically to the reduction in sound insulation. Those two factors are not correlated at all. Many older homes have terrible sound insulation. In fact, older apartment buildings specifically are often terrible compared to new construction when it comes to insulation (both thermal and auditory.)
  - amalag 14y ago
    Cinder block and concrete are worse sound and thermal insulation than a layer of gypsum? Really?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
debacle 14y ago
My home is 1300 square feet. 800 more square feet would be a 20 x 40 room. I don't know what I would do with that much space, but chances are it would make my wife upset. That's a vast amount of space - my first office was only 300 square feet and that included the bathroom and was room for three of us with plenty of space.
- will_work4tears 14y ago
  I thought our house was too big as well when we bought it (also 1300 sqft). We now have a son (he get's his own room) and will later try for another (wife hopes for a girl) which will get a room - right now it's a craft room/spare room for guests. With a dog, two kids (an office and a garage for me to tool in) I don't know if I could survive with anything much smaller. We don't need bigger though, I don't feel cramped (living room is kinda small, get a few toys in there and it is hazardous - yes, kids take over the living room, I never believed it before).
  - r00fus 14y ago
    I just went from 1 kid to 3 (twin babies) and the 3-bedroom 1400sqft place we have is a bit cramped - babies command a LOT of space for stuff. That said, I don't think we would have ever purchased/rented a 4 bdrm while we were still a 1-kid family.
  - peckrob 14y ago
    This is the exact position my wife and I are in as well. Kids change the equation a lot. We have our first kid on the way (due at the end of November) and currently live in a 1,600 square foot house. I remember when I bought it, before I was married, it seemed like more space than I would ever need. I had rooms that had nothing in them for years until I got married. The problem, in our case, is that while 1600 square feet is a good bit of space, it's not very effectively laid out especially for a young family. Probably half of that square footage is in the living room. The next biggest room is the master on the first floor, then the other two "bedrooms" on the second floor are almost too small to be usable. One is about the size of a large closet and could just barely hold a twin bed (that's our office), and the other, which is just slightly larger, was a guest room and will be the nursery. Space for all the stuff you "need" (of course, I wonder how much of this stuff we actually need...) is a real issue. This became apparent now that we've started buying stuff for a nursery as well as other baby accessories. It completely filled the guest bedroom as well as a good bit of overflow into the living room. And this is just with one kid - we hope to try for another in a few years. I'm guessing that kids sharing rooms was much more common in the 70s and earlier than it now? I was born in '81, and always had a room to myself even after my sister was born.
Alex3917 14y ago
Ever notice that the bathrooms in houses built in the 60s are tiny, in houses built in the 90s they were enormous, and now they're roughly back to 'normal'? I wonder what this says about society.
- ddt 14y ago
  It's mostly just the master-bath, too. The house I'm currently renting has a master bath and walk-in closet that a person could comfortably live in, while the other bathrooms barely have enough room to stand in.
breckinloggins 14y ago
I've gone from small places to large places and back, and I can see the appeal of both. One thing that's nice about a bigger house is that you can have special purpose rooms. If you have only a living room but would love to have a pool table, you're either out of luck or need to convince whoever you're living with (sometimes yourself!) that it's ok to stick a pool table in the middle of the living room. Or you have to compromise and get one of those "pool table slash foosball table slash pingpong table" things that are pretty much worthless. Another example is home theatre. It's true that you can just put a big tv and surround sound in your living room, but that more often than not screws up the decor and larger purpose of the living room as a family gathering spot. When you have a dedicated room, you can go nuts with the stadium seating and all of that. That said, I've downsized in the past two years from a two story four bedroom house with a yard to a one bedroom apartment. I'm now preparing to spend the next several months in an RV. I'm actually much, much happier with this arrangement. For some, space is a true necessity (large families that wish to keep their sanity). For others, space is a luxury that they can afford and that truly makes them happy. For people like myself, though, I've found that I only wanted what I thought space could get me... "breathing room". Turns out I needed psychological and intellectual breathing room more than I need more physical space. Perhaps that will change as I get older, but right now I'm glad I learned that I can be happier in far less space. The freedom, flexibility, and lower financial burdens this affords are well worth the cost of having to move a table every now and then.
- farnsworth 14y ago
  It might be a slight digression from the OP, but I would be interested if you cared to expand on how you found psychological and intellectual breathing room.
  - breckinloggins 14y ago
    Sure. A lot of it was determining what made me happy versus what made other people happy. Other people may want you to live life a certain way, and it's easy to convince yourself that they must be right. A large part of it was simply allowing myself to be into topics and things and ways of living that other people just don't understand. Take hacking for instance. Most hard core programmers simply love fiddling with computers and making them do cool stuff. You might have a personal project to write your own OS or C compiler. Now lets say you hang around some other programmers who are very good at their jobs, but in the end it's just that: a job. They might say "sounds interesting but why are you wasting your time on that? You program all day for work, I don't understand why you go home and do it again for something that will never make you any money. You really ought to have a more balanced life. Hey, come hang out with us and have some beers and watch the game." And so you do, which is great and it is nice to get out once in a while and do normal social things. But what happens if you let your well-intentioned friends convince you that these hobby projects really aren't worthy of your time? In the beginning you might buy into it. But over time as you start to accomodate more and more to the life other people envision for you, you start to feel a growing emptiness inside. A lot of people fill that emptiness with quick fixes. Things like houses and expensive "stuff" were the big thing for me (and cigarettes, but no more thank goodness). Eventually (hopefully) you figure out that the only person who really has to live with yourself every day is YOU. So barring doing something completely selfish that destroys the people who depend on you, it's best to live the life the way you naturally desire to live it. I'm not making a hedonistic argument here, just saying that if you really want nothing more than to go home at the end of a hard day and fiddle with x86 TSS structures to get your homegrown OS to boot, it's not really anyone else's business. It's also not your problem if they don't like it, think it's too geeky, or think you should be doing something with your personal time other than "fooling around with computers". So a big part of my psychological and intellectual breathing room was giving myself permission to be who I am. Not everyone is going to understand my decision to pack up my crap in an RV and travel around the country for who knows how long. In the past I might have said "maybe they're right, this is a little crazy, why can't I just settle down?" But now I give myself permission to say "I'm doing this; I hope you'll support me. If you don't, I understand, but I'm doing this anyway." In a lot of ways, my conception of breathing room mirrors that of the Gestalt prayer, something I learned about only today: "I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped." (Fritz Perls, "Gestalt Therapy Verbatim", 1969)
kevinpet 14y ago
Single family homes may be a declining fraction of housing, and the lower end may be getting replaced by townhomes or condos.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
dsr_ 14y ago
And all the rooms are the wrong size. (That's a joke.) I suspect that the size of each kind of average apartment has not changed much over the last few decades. One bedrooms are still about 650 sq ft, two bedrooms about 780. Big buildings are designed for efficiency over the long term, and don't partake in fads so much. When you go out and buy a house, there's an inclination to buy as much house as you think you can afford. More space is more flexibility, after all, and after years living in not-quite-enough space, you want all that you can get.
- natrius 14y ago
  Here are three new-ish apartment buildings in Austin that are 20-30% larger than what you're saying was once normal: http://www.triangleaustin.com/residences/pages/floor-plans.asp http://www.triangleaustin.com/residences/pages/floor-plans.a... http://www.mosaicaustin.com/pages/floor-plans.asp http://www.mosaicaustin.com/pages/floor-plans.asp http://gables.com/find/apartment/1071-gables-pressler-austin-tx http://gables.com/find/apartment/1071-gables-pressler-austin... I've been in older apartments in Austin, and I'd say they're definitely getting bigger.
  - tthomas48 14y ago
    Interestingly enough a rather surprising number of families in Austin live in apartments. 78741 has some of the highest number of children living close to downtown and 87% of the housing in the area is apartments. This fits with the importance of having a backyard. Perhaps this is a sunbelt trend? As the rust belt is abandoned for the sun belt the value of a backyard seems less important (as many never leave their air-conditioning)?
    - natrius 14y ago
      I personally value a backyard less after growing up with a rarely-used one, but I think the prevalence of families living in apartments in that area is just because they can't afford anything else. It's the cheapest place to live in Austin, especially if you account for transportation.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
And backyards are getting smaller. If you look at the whole trend, houses are bigger, lots are smaller. One of the more interesting things I found in England when my sister was living there was that many folks had a small house but a large garden, because they spent most of their 'home' time in the garden rather than indoors. Whereas in the US there are a lot of people for who the 'garden' (or the yard as we yanks refer to it) is just a maintenance nightmare. Going so far as to install artificial turf to reduce the time burden of keeping it looking nicely. I think it is sad if people don't get out much, but recognize that more and more of folks leisure time requires more electricity than is available out there.
- majormajor 14y ago
  Interesting, my guess would've been that yard sizes were at least staying the same. I've chiefly associated new construction with "further from the city center" (from living in suburban Texas for most of my life until recently) where the amount of available land increases dramatically as the radius from the center increases. The Census PDF breaks things down into inside- and outside-MSAs, and they've both been getting bigger, but I'm not sure if the MSAs have stayed constant size or gotten bigger themselves...
  - bcbrown 14y ago
    At least in Seattle, most new construction seems to be taking one large lot, and either building one larger house with a smaller yard, or building multiple townhouses with little to no yard.
- quantumstate 14y ago
  I'm surprised that you got that impression. I'm from the UK, I have visited the US once and was in the Philadelphia suburbs. I would say that the UK has smaller homes and gardens. In the UK most people live in dense cities and towns as opposed to suburban sprawl in the US, this limits space available. I would agree that in England we spend more time gardening (though "most of their 'home' time" would be an exaggeration, possibly true in summer). There is strong separation of gardens in the UK as well, not having a fence would be very unusual, whereas where I was in the US back and front yards weren't clearly delineated.
EliRivers 14y ago
Here in the UK, about 850 sq ft is the average for a new home. Less than half. Please do not complain about having lots of room until you've had to live here :) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14916580 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14916580 When it comes to governments and houses, the British public are idiots who accept whatever is waved in front of them
- refurb 14y ago
  That's one thing that amazed me when I was out in the UK. Even very nice homes are relatively small. Living rooms where you could lie on the floor and touch two walls were not uncommon. It just goes to show you how humans can adapt to most any environment. A lot of what we think we "need", we only "want".
  - EliRivers 14y ago
    I prefer to think of it as showing that the British public are idiots, fooled by the rich to think that the UK is almost all built over (seriously, it's common for people to come up with values like 50% urbanised, or even more, when they are asked to estimate; it's actually about 10%, and of that around half is gardens and other green spaces) and fed a constant barrage of propaganda about how important it is to borrow as much money as they possibly can to buy over-priced, badly built houses our grandparents would be ashamed of. I now relinquish my soapbox :p
ktizo 14y ago
Does this mean that in the future, all houses will be massive and all the doors will be circular and we will just roll between all the rooms like giant beachballs made of meat?
dredmorbius 14y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9qnWg9kak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9qnWg9kak A bit minimal for my tastes, but highly ingenious. There are numerous other "small space" videos / websites out there. (Link is to "A Tiny Apartment Transforms into 24 Rooms" showing an ingeniously engineered Hong Kong apartment).
maxerickson 14y ago
I wonder how much of it is explained away the demographics of the typical people buildings homes. For example, people that are still well off after a few years of bad economy seem like they are more likely to build a home than people that have had financial stress during that period.
WalterBright 14y ago
Interestingly, increasing the size of the house does not increase the cost by a proportional amount. So, increasing the size is a relatively inexpensive way to "upgrade" a house. The "box" of the house is probably the least expensive part.
vl 14y ago
Our cars are getting bigger as well (after reset in the seventies), so what?
rayiner 14y ago
Now that the housing bubble has collapsed and devastated the economies of the housing-dependent south, I think you'll see the trend continue. I also think you'll see cultural trends push things in the other direction. I grew up in the DC suburbs, and my parents have a 6,000 sq-ft house. It's completely unwieldy and costs a fortune to heat and cool, not to mention its 30 minutes from the nearest anything, but they cling to it because they perceive having a huge house as a signal of "having made it." My wife and I, in the next generation, feel the complete opposite way. Our "dream houses" are 1,500 sq-ft high-rise condos in Chicago or a commutable suburb like Evanston. I don't want my dad's hour-long car commute, I'd much rather have a 25-minute train-commute where I can at least pull out my laptop and get started on my inbox. We don't want the entire floors my parents don't use, but we do want things like fixing leaky showers to be someone else's problem. We don't want the big back yard, we'd rather have the 1,200 acre park up the street and the lakefront beach. I think there are many people in our age demographic (late 20's) who feel the same way. As they reach the age when they've settled into careers and starting families, they're much less inclined to give up their lifestyles for big houses in the suburbs. You can even see this reflected in the media. In the 1970's there were tons of shows on TV where people lived in suburbs. Look at the popular shows of today--nearly everyone lives in apartments in urban-ish areas.

57 points by pg 14y ago

The sound insulation inside US houses is also terrible. Maybe people wouldn't need so much space if they had some decent sound insulation between rooms. Otherwise it is the simple case of having a better house than your acquaintances and thinking of the extra space as an "investment".

sliverstorm 14y ago
Of course, that wouldn't be a problem if more houses were still built with stuff like brick, clay, daub, or even logs- but any more, that's seen as low-class. As time goes by though, the more I begin to wonder if I wouldn't prefer a brick house, if only for the old-fashioned appearance and thermal buffering.
- debacle 14y ago
  There's nothing like brick to keep a house cool in the summer time.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- adestefan 14y ago
  I've never heard anyone calling those materials low class. The reason they are not used is because it takes significant skill to build with those products which makes the resulting house very expensive.
briandear 14y ago
Generalize much? The build quality in the US exceeds China and Korea in almost every possible way. Every been to China? The walls of most new construction homes in Shanghai are made of cinder block or poured concrete. Terrible sound insulation as well as horrendous thermal insulation. Increased home sizes would be hard to connect statistically to the reduction in sound insulation. Those two factors are not correlated at all. Many older homes have terrible sound insulation. In fact, older apartment buildings specifically are often terrible compared to new construction when it comes to insulation (both thermal and auditory.)
- amalag 14y ago
  Cinder block and concrete are worse sound and thermal insulation than a layer of gypsum? Really?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

debacle 14y ago

My home is 1300 square feet. 800 more square feet would be a 20 x 40 room. I don't know what I would do with that much space, but chances are it would make my wife upset. That's a vast amount of space - my first office was only 300 square feet and that included the bathroom and was room for three of us with plenty of space.

will_work4tears 14y ago
I thought our house was too big as well when we bought it (also 1300 sqft). We now have a son (he get's his own room) and will later try for another (wife hopes for a girl) which will get a room - right now it's a craft room/spare room for guests. With a dog, two kids (an office and a garage for me to tool in) I don't know if I could survive with anything much smaller. We don't need bigger though, I don't feel cramped (living room is kinda small, get a few toys in there and it is hazardous - yes, kids take over the living room, I never believed it before).
- r00fus 14y ago
  I just went from 1 kid to 3 (twin babies) and the 3-bedroom 1400sqft place we have is a bit cramped - babies command a LOT of space for stuff. That said, I don't think we would have ever purchased/rented a 4 bdrm while we were still a 1-kid family.
- peckrob 14y ago
  This is the exact position my wife and I are in as well. Kids change the equation a lot. We have our first kid on the way (due at the end of November) and currently live in a 1,600 square foot house. I remember when I bought it, before I was married, it seemed like more space than I would ever need. I had rooms that had nothing in them for years until I got married. The problem, in our case, is that while 1600 square feet is a good bit of space, it's not very effectively laid out especially for a young family. Probably half of that square footage is in the living room. The next biggest room is the master on the first floor, then the other two "bedrooms" on the second floor are almost too small to be usable. One is about the size of a large closet and could just barely hold a twin bed (that's our office), and the other, which is just slightly larger, was a guest room and will be the nursery. Space for all the stuff you "need" (of course, I wonder how much of this stuff we actually need...) is a real issue. This became apparent now that we've started buying stuff for a nursery as well as other baby accessories. It completely filled the guest bedroom as well as a good bit of overflow into the living room. And this is just with one kid - we hope to try for another in a few years. I'm guessing that kids sharing rooms was much more common in the 70s and earlier than it now? I was born in '81, and always had a room to myself even after my sister was born.

Alex3917 14y ago

Ever notice that the bathrooms in houses built in the 60s are tiny, in houses built in the 90s they were enormous, and now they're roughly back to 'normal'? I wonder what this says about society.

ddt 14y ago
It's mostly just the master-bath, too. The house I'm currently renting has a master bath and walk-in closet that a person could comfortably live in, while the other bathrooms barely have enough room to stand in.

breckinloggins 14y ago

I've gone from small places to large places and back, and I can see the appeal of both. One thing that's nice about a bigger house is that you can have special purpose rooms. If you have only a living room but would love to have a pool table, you're either out of luck or need to convince whoever you're living with (sometimes yourself!) that it's ok to stick a pool table in the middle of the living room. Or you have to compromise and get one of those "pool table slash foosball table slash pingpong table" things that are pretty much worthless. Another example is home theatre. It's true that you can just put a big tv and surround sound in your living room, but that more often than not screws up the decor and larger purpose of the living room as a family gathering spot. When you have a dedicated room, you can go nuts with the stadium seating and all of that. That said, I've downsized in the past two years from a two story four bedroom house with a yard to a one bedroom apartment. I'm now preparing to spend the next several months in an RV. I'm actually much, much happier with this arrangement. For some, space is a true necessity (large families that wish to keep their sanity). For others, space is a luxury that they can afford and that truly makes them happy. For people like myself, though, I've found that I only wanted what I thought space could get me... "breathing room". Turns out I needed psychological and intellectual breathing room more than I need more physical space. Perhaps that will change as I get older, but right now I'm glad I learned that I can be happier in far less space. The freedom, flexibility, and lower financial burdens this affords are well worth the cost of having to move a table every now and then.

farnsworth 14y ago
It might be a slight digression from the OP, but I would be interested if you cared to expand on how you found psychological and intellectual breathing room.
- breckinloggins 14y ago
  Sure. A lot of it was determining what made me happy versus what made other people happy. Other people may want you to live life a certain way, and it's easy to convince yourself that they must be right. A large part of it was simply allowing myself to be into topics and things and ways of living that other people just don't understand. Take hacking for instance. Most hard core programmers simply love fiddling with computers and making them do cool stuff. You might have a personal project to write your own OS or C compiler. Now lets say you hang around some other programmers who are very good at their jobs, but in the end it's just that: a job. They might say "sounds interesting but why are you wasting your time on that? You program all day for work, I don't understand why you go home and do it again for something that will never make you any money. You really ought to have a more balanced life. Hey, come hang out with us and have some beers and watch the game." And so you do, which is great and it is nice to get out once in a while and do normal social things. But what happens if you let your well-intentioned friends convince you that these hobby projects really aren't worthy of your time? In the beginning you might buy into it. But over time as you start to accomodate more and more to the life other people envision for you, you start to feel a growing emptiness inside. A lot of people fill that emptiness with quick fixes. Things like houses and expensive "stuff" were the big thing for me (and cigarettes, but no more thank goodness). Eventually (hopefully) you figure out that the only person who really has to live with yourself every day is YOU. So barring doing something completely selfish that destroys the people who depend on you, it's best to live the life the way you naturally desire to live it. I'm not making a hedonistic argument here, just saying that if you really want nothing more than to go home at the end of a hard day and fiddle with x86 TSS structures to get your homegrown OS to boot, it's not really anyone else's business. It's also not your problem if they don't like it, think it's too geeky, or think you should be doing something with your personal time other than "fooling around with computers". So a big part of my psychological and intellectual breathing room was giving myself permission to be who I am. Not everyone is going to understand my decision to pack up my crap in an RV and travel around the country for who knows how long. In the past I might have said "maybe they're right, this is a little crazy, why can't I just settle down?" But now I give myself permission to say "I'm doing this; I hope you'll support me. If you don't, I understand, but I'm doing this anyway." In a lot of ways, my conception of breathing room mirrors that of the Gestalt prayer, something I learned about only today: "I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped." (Fritz Perls, "Gestalt Therapy Verbatim", 1969)

kevinpet 14y ago

Single family homes may be a declining fraction of housing, and the lower end may be getting replaced by townhomes or condos.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

dsr_ 14y ago

And all the rooms are the wrong size. (That's a joke.) I suspect that the size of each kind of average apartment has not changed much over the last few decades. One bedrooms are still about 650 sq ft, two bedrooms about 780. Big buildings are designed for efficiency over the long term, and don't partake in fads so much. When you go out and buy a house, there's an inclination to buy as much house as you think you can afford. More space is more flexibility, after all, and after years living in not-quite-enough space, you want all that you can get.

natrius 14y ago
Here are three new-ish apartment buildings in Austin that are 20-30% larger than what you're saying was once normal: http://www.triangleaustin.com/residences/pages/floor-plans.asp http://www.triangleaustin.com/residences/pages/floor-plans.a... http://www.mosaicaustin.com/pages/floor-plans.asp http://www.mosaicaustin.com/pages/floor-plans.asp http://gables.com/find/apartment/1071-gables-pressler-austin-tx http://gables.com/find/apartment/1071-gables-pressler-austin... I've been in older apartments in Austin, and I'd say they're definitely getting bigger.
- tthomas48 14y ago
  Interestingly enough a rather surprising number of families in Austin live in apartments. 78741 has some of the highest number of children living close to downtown and 87% of the housing in the area is apartments. This fits with the importance of having a backyard. Perhaps this is a sunbelt trend? As the rust belt is abandoned for the sun belt the value of a backyard seems less important (as many never leave their air-conditioning)?
  - natrius 14y ago
    I personally value a backyard less after growing up with a rarely-used one, but I think the prevalence of families living in apartments in that area is just because they can't afford anything else. It's the cheapest place to live in Austin, especially if you account for transportation.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

And backyards are getting smaller. If you look at the whole trend, houses are bigger, lots are smaller. One of the more interesting things I found in England when my sister was living there was that many folks had a small house but a large garden, because they spent most of their 'home' time in the garden rather than indoors. Whereas in the US there are a lot of people for who the 'garden' (or the yard as we yanks refer to it) is just a maintenance nightmare. Going so far as to install artificial turf to reduce the time burden of keeping it looking nicely. I think it is sad if people don't get out much, but recognize that more and more of folks leisure time requires more electricity than is available out there.

majormajor 14y ago
Interesting, my guess would've been that yard sizes were at least staying the same. I've chiefly associated new construction with "further from the city center" (from living in suburban Texas for most of my life until recently) where the amount of available land increases dramatically as the radius from the center increases. The Census PDF breaks things down into inside- and outside-MSAs, and they've both been getting bigger, but I'm not sure if the MSAs have stayed constant size or gotten bigger themselves...
- bcbrown 14y ago
  At least in Seattle, most new construction seems to be taking one large lot, and either building one larger house with a smaller yard, or building multiple townhouses with little to no yard.
quantumstate 14y ago
I'm surprised that you got that impression. I'm from the UK, I have visited the US once and was in the Philadelphia suburbs. I would say that the UK has smaller homes and gardens. In the UK most people live in dense cities and towns as opposed to suburban sprawl in the US, this limits space available. I would agree that in England we spend more time gardening (though "most of their 'home' time" would be an exaggeration, possibly true in summer). There is strong separation of gardens in the UK as well, not having a fence would be very unusual, whereas where I was in the US back and front yards weren't clearly delineated.

EliRivers 14y ago

Here in the UK, about 850 sq ft is the average for a new home. Less than half. Please do not complain about having lots of room until you've had to live here :) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14916580 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14916580 When it comes to governments and houses, the British public are idiots who accept whatever is waved in front of them

refurb 14y ago
That's one thing that amazed me when I was out in the UK. Even very nice homes are relatively small. Living rooms where you could lie on the floor and touch two walls were not uncommon. It just goes to show you how humans can adapt to most any environment. A lot of what we think we "need", we only "want".
- EliRivers 14y ago
  I prefer to think of it as showing that the British public are idiots, fooled by the rich to think that the UK is almost all built over (seriously, it's common for people to come up with values like 50% urbanised, or even more, when they are asked to estimate; it's actually about 10%, and of that around half is gardens and other green spaces) and fed a constant barrage of propaganda about how important it is to borrow as much money as they possibly can to buy over-priced, badly built houses our grandparents would be ashamed of. I now relinquish my soapbox :p

ktizo 14y ago

Does this mean that in the future, all houses will be massive and all the doors will be circular and we will just roll between all the rooms like giant beachballs made of meat?

dredmorbius 14y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9qnWg9kak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9qnWg9kak A bit minimal for my tastes, but highly ingenious. There are numerous other "small space" videos / websites out there. (Link is to "A Tiny Apartment Transforms into 24 Rooms" showing an ingeniously engineered Hong Kong apartment).

maxerickson 14y ago

I wonder how much of it is explained away the demographics of the typical people buildings homes. For example, people that are still well off after a few years of bad economy seem like they are more likely to build a home than people that have had financial stress during that period.

WalterBright 14y ago

Interestingly, increasing the size of the house does not increase the cost by a proportional amount. So, increasing the size is a relatively inexpensive way to "upgrade" a house. The "box" of the house is probably the least expensive part.

vl 14y ago

Our cars are getting bigger as well (after reset in the seventies), so what?

rayiner 14y ago

Now that the housing bubble has collapsed and devastated the economies of the housing-dependent south, I think you'll see the trend continue. I also think you'll see cultural trends push things in the other direction. I grew up in the DC suburbs, and my parents have a 6,000 sq-ft house. It's completely unwieldy and costs a fortune to heat and cool, not to mention its 30 minutes from the nearest anything, but they cling to it because they perceive having a huge house as a signal of "having made it." My wife and I, in the next generation, feel the complete opposite way. Our "dream houses" are 1,500 sq-ft high-rise condos in Chicago or a commutable suburb like Evanston. I don't want my dad's hour-long car commute, I'd much rather have a 25-minute train-commute where I can at least pull out my laptop and get started on my inbox. We don't want the entire floors my parents don't use, but we do want things like fixing leaky showers to be someone else's problem. We don't want the big back yard, we'd rather have the 1,200 acre park up the street and the lakefront beach. I think there are many people in our age demographic (late 20's) who feel the same way. As they reach the age when they've settled into careers and starting families, they're much less inclined to give up their lifestyles for big houses in the suburbs. You can even see this reflected in the media. In the 1970's there were tons of shows on TV where people lived in suburbs. Look at the popular shows of today--nearly everyone lives in apartments in urban-ish areas.