Saturday, July 12, 2014

McMansions: An American Embarrassment and Ecological Problem

During my closeted married years I lived in the Great Neck area of Virginia Beach where the main focus on life for many was "how big is your house, how expensive is your car, and what private school do your children attend."  Superficiality seemed to be the norm with far too many of the residents and, when I came out, I discovered how few real friends I truly had.  Many acquaintances, but few real friends.  What I experienced sadly is a reflection of the America's obsession with ever larger homes- McMansions, if you will  -  which produce suburban sprawl and higher than necessary energy consumption.  Much of the development taking place in parts of Tidewater Virginia continues this trend.  A piece in Salon looks at America's wasteful use of land and energy as the McMansion craze continues.  Here are some highlights:
Since the Truman administration, the average American house has inflated with the runaway pace of a hot air balloon, floating from city to suburb to exurb in search of a lot that can hold it.

By 2007, our average crib had grown to 2,521 square feet — 50 percent larger than in 1973, and more than three times the size of the “little boxes” of Levittown, New York, the 1947 Long Island development that marked the dawn of the suburban era.

This surfeit of space is a potent symbol of the American way of life; it speaks to our priorities, our prosperity and our tendency to take more than we need. But the superlative size of our houses isn’t just a foam finger America can hold up to the world. It’s correlated with land use patterns and population density, which in turn determine the environmental impact and personal health of communities, and whether they can support a diverse range of businesses, facilities and transportation choices. It’s no coincidence that a modern American suburb like Weston, Florida, has just one-third the population density of Levittown.

[L]ast year, the average size of new American houses reached an all-time high of 2,679 square feet. The increase in space per person has been even more dramatic. Between 1973 and 2013, the average American household shrank from 3.01 to 2.54 persons; new homes give Americans more than 1,000 square feet per family member, on average. That’s roughly twice as much space as we had in 1973.

American homes dwarf those in nearly every other country on Earth. Our new houses are twice the size of those in Germany, and you could fit three new U.K. houses inside one of ours. (For what it’s worth, the houses in the U.K. are rather cramped.) Even in spacious Canada, our neighbors are building homes three-quarters the size of their U.S. equivalents. Only Australia, which has the lowest population density in the world after Mongolia and Namibia, can rival the U.S.A. for big houses.

During most of the early-aughts housing boom, too, more than four of five new units were single-family homes. But that huge discrepancy has been vanquished by a surge in apartment construction. These days, the rate of new starts in multi-family buildings has been hovering, nationwide, near 40 percent — a level not seen in decades.

That raises a number of questions. Are these new residents trading the space of suburbia for the vibrancy of a city? Are they downsizing their living quarters to spend money on other things? Or can they simply not afford to rent a bigger apartment or purchase a house?

Not surprisingly, as communities sprawl, auto use soars and mass transit becomes untenable. 

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