I used to have a 1500 sqft house. Next was a 1600 sqft house. Now, a 3300 sqft house.
I miss the 1500 sqft house so much.
Our current house has a 3/4 acre yard bordering on 20 acres of preserve/park, so I love that, but I would still take the small house on the 1/4 acre over this, since I live near plenty of nature opportunities anyway.
I'm genuinely curious - how did you manage 1500 sq ft with two kids? I've seen various outlets that state most people need roughly 450 sq ft, and we currently have 900 sq ft for me and my wife and that feels right, maybe even slightly big. I wanted an 1750-1800 sq ft home and my wife wants closer to 2200-2250. So I'm shocked you felt comfortable with 1500 sq ft and wonder what made the house so nice. Was it layout? Efficient use of wall space?
In 1950, the average space per person was 259 sq ft. People in the 1950s turned out just fine. The larger and larger homes we are seeing today while witnessing the ever declining family size are the result of unadulterated greed, pure and simple.
I just want to know what on earth people are filling these enormous 2000+ sq.ft houses with! 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms? Even if you have 4 people in your family, do they all need separate rooms, and what is the probability that they all need to pee at the exact same time?
> Even if you have 4 people in your family, do they all need separate rooms
“Need” is a flexible term; it's clearly possible for people to survive without any rooms. But, yes, there's plenty of reason to believe that there are benefits to having a private space.
But most likely a four-person family with a 4-bedroom house has two adults sharing the master bedroom, two children with their own rooms, and a guest room and/or office.
> and what is the probability that they all need to pee at the exact same time?
Hopefully, close to zero, since your hypothetical still has fewer bathrooms than people. But multiple restrooms.
But, it's actually quite likely that multiple people will be using bathrooms for either elimination or bathing at the same time, particularly in the mornings.
(It's also somewhat likely when entertaining, which is one of the reasons people want large houses.)
The rich of back then had big houses too. It's not some increase in greed, just an increase in accessibility. I don't see the need to ascribe negative traits like greed to wanting more space in any case.
The rich back then were greedy, just as the rich are today. Greed in 1950 is as bad as greed today. Arguing that there are more greedy people does not exonerate anyone. It's not like there being more greedy people somehow lessens the amount of greed experienced by each one. In other words, greed is not a zero-sum game.
And yes, greed is a negative trait when your greed means wasting things that you objectively do not need.
I pointed out that people did just as well with less space. This is evidence they do not need more space, and that it is wasteful to use more space for fewer people. My job requires web browsing, and insofar as my employment is good for society, I'm not convinced it's at the same level of utility.
Also, no one asked me in incredulity how I could get by with less electricity.
I have about 1200 sqft (2bd 2 ba) for a family of 5 and it works. The kids are young and share a big room, and they love it. The only thing that's cramped is that we don't have a place for guests to stay with us, which I'd change if I could.
I do think we'll want to upsize to get a full guest room and maybe another half-bath, a 4bd would probably be perfect for us. But there's no urgency to move, bc. we have a good deal and it's actually quite comfortable - and very low maintenance.
Living in a smaller space you just learn to be efficient and not to collect junk. We have plenty of toys / things / whatever, it's not like we're zen minimalists, we just don't keep very much "stuff" that we don't use regularly. That's actually really nice.
We know a lot of families in the city that live in even smaller spaces. I think my takeaway from this is you can make whatever work, you just adapt to the space you have. I'm not saying it's better necessarily, it just really depends on all the other variables in your situation. For my family the nice neighborhood, very short commute, and affordable / low maintenance space is a win. Other people would choose differently.
How will that scale when they are teenagers? Especially if mixed-sexes, I can foresee this being difficult, which I think is part of the reason my wife and I are looking at separate bedrooms.
This is amazing to me, where I live (suburbs of Dublin in Ireland) an average 3 bed family home is 100sqm (~1000sqft), I would consider a 150sqm home (~1500sqft) to be quite large, so the idea that it’s a size that you might just about manage with 2 kids is sort of horrifying.
I have 1,500 for a family of 4 and it's fine. The youngest's bedroom isn't all that big but it's hardly a cell. The layout is crap, it's a 1950s split so that 1,500 square feet is divided over 3 staggered levels. One room, half the bottom floor, is as big as a one car garage and is just my office. The main floor is open living room and dining room, with a separate kitchen, then 3 beds and two bathrooms upstairs. We have never noticed feeling cramped, though I would definitely enjoy the extra space in my friends' larger houses. In our case we bought on the edge of a park a five minute walk to every school my kids will need until college. So we can suck it up. (And if it gets too cramped, we'll build another floor.)
It's only bad when the kids go nuts and spread their mess out over the ground floor. You just have to learn to be tidy!
We have a 1500 sq ft house with 2 kids. We have 3 bedrooms so each kid has their own room. We also have 2 added sunrooms off each end of the house, one of which I use for my office. Part of our garage has also been converted into a gaming area for my son and his friends. We don't want anything bigger. It really is the perfect size for our family. We all have our own space when we need it but still close enough so we aren't totally alienated from each other.
American suburbian standards are so utterly ridiculous, and apparently getting even more ridiculous. When I was a kid our family (parents+three children) lived in a 100m^2 apartment and it was plenty. I mean, you do have families living in cities too? No way to have close to 50m^2 per person there without being a millionaire! Such a ridiculous number cannot be anything else than marketing speak.
My last house was quite a bit bigger than current one, but id didn't have any more space. Sure, the master bedroom was huge, but that just meant there was that much floor space to walk across to get from the bed to the bathroom. There was a "great room", which had a dining room table on one side (mostly unused, except to collect junk), and an empty living room on the other side. Separate family room adjoining the kitchen (knee wall separating them), where TV was. Only useful feature was a full sized basement (which collected a bunch of junk), and 2 full baths upstairs.
Current house still has 3 bedrooms, they are a bit smaller though. And 1 1/2 bath.
Make your kids share a room and limit how much crap they accumulate. My brother and I grew up in an 1,100 square foot house with our parents and never felt cramped. (On the flip side, if you don't aggressively limit crap accumulation, a substantially larger home will feel small. Our house is about 2,800 square feet, and we're looking to finish the basement and add another 800 because everyone has too much crap.)
In terms of layout, big bedrooms and big bathrooms account for a lot of square footage but don't add much utility. Our main floor bathroom is the size of a small bedroom, and we got furniture in it so we could store some of our crap.
I would certainly be ok with an 1800 sqft house if it was the right house. For me, 2200 is probably pushing the upper limits of what I would like, but you know sometimes you just have to compromise.
The layout of the 1500 was amazing. It was a story and a half, 3 main floor bedrooms, with the upper story usable as anything, including another bedroom if desired. The main floor bedrooms are small, but we tend to spend as little time as possible in them. No TVs. No computers. No school work. Not much play, unless wanting to be alone. Edit: One of the main floor bedrooms was super small, like only really a nursery/baby room, though still fine for a little kid.
The kitchen was small but super usable.
The living room was nice sized, long and narrow, like 25' x 10' if I recall. That meant you could kind of have separate spaces there, separated by furniture.
I even had a 12'x14' main floor office that was all my own space, while my wife went to school and then worked all out of the house, so it was never crowded.
The kicker was a fully finished basement bathroom with a shower (no bathtub). It was only about 3'x8', so hardly increasing sqft total, but the convenience of it was worth hundreds of sqft. The rest of the basement was unfinished, but we used it for some crafts, workshop, storage, etc.
My wife's parents' house is even smaller, like sub-1400 sqft, and they raised 2 kids from birth to college. Like us, they have a finished 3/4 bath (toilet/shower) in the basement.
I sincerely believe that the key to having a nice, smaller house might be having a finished, nice bathroom in the basement, even if the rest of the basement isn't finished.
I grew up in a smallish house, about 1300-1400 sqft that my parents doubled in size when I was a young teenager, like 14 or 15. So I was used to the smaller sized houses of the early-mid 20th century. They felt perfect to me, and still do I guess.
We ended up in our current house because my wife wanted a large enough dining room, a spacious kitchen, and a guest room.
The kitchen is much bigger than necessary, though certainly nice to use. We do use the dining room a lot, but only for eating as a family and not entertaining much, unlike how she imagined. What we had in smaller houses would have sufficed.
The guest room was used once, and may never be used again as a guest room. The people she imagined would stay end up staying in hotels instead. It would have been cheaper as a proportion of the cost of our house to buy a cheaper house and to set that money aside and pay for hotels for our guests ourselves.
We have a little more than 1500 but not much more. Our two girls had to share a bedroom and they grumbled a little but we have a policy to not negotiate with our kids and in the end it wasn't a problem and they learned to get along. Now they are almost out of the house and we don't have a large empty home to deal with.
I also have a one-car detached garage with no space for a car. If there's one thing I could change it's more space for storage and a shop. On the other hand it forces us to not accumulate too much junk.
The author of this page has made critical errors in either interpreting or creating many of the graphs on the page.
> Another housing trend that popped up in 2014 was the rise in homes with four or more bedrooms.
If you actually look at the graph, the rise in 4+ bedrooms had been going since 1985. In 2014 it just became the most popular.
> Demand for fireplaces has been cooling since the ’90s with 2007 being the first year that more homes were built without the feature than with.
Actually, that would be 2010. The "None" point is plotted higher than the "1" point in 2007 but still definitely below the 50% mark.
> The average square feet of floor area in a newly completed single-family home was down 2 percent or 56 square feet in 2017 from the high mark.
The graph above has percentages in the y-axis rather than square feet...no idea what happened there. Plus, it is somewhat misleading! In the real data chart [0, page 9], the median square footage actually increased in 2017, while the average did decrease. Additionally, this difference appears to be within the relative standard error window.
One thing that I always think about with these absurd HGTV house shows is who is going to clean all of these extra bathrooms? When you've got 3-4 bathrooms, and 2000+ square feet, you will have to spend a nontrivial amount of time cleaning every week. Or hire it out.
Oh, and I really, really, really, never want to hear the term "bonus room" used ever again.
Bigger houses tend to not get dirty as quickly. But it is more nooks and crannies that need attention on an infrequent basis. So many houses I step into have parts that have never been cleaned since they took ownership. Wow it gets nasty!
What is your cell phone bill? The person I know who does house cleaning charges $25/hr, takes 5 hours on the average house, and goes to most of their houses at least twice a month.
I pay $150/month for a crew of two to clean my 2200sqft house every other week. It's so worth it, even just so I don't have to clean the shower anymore. But really, the better benefit is more time to spend with my kids and work on other things.
This is only new single-family homes. I would guess the vast majority of these are in the far-reaching suburbs of large cities. I wonder - how would this look if you plotted # of bedrooms (or one of the other data points being discussed) versus how far from the nearest major city the house is being built?
I have a 1300 square foot home with 3 bedrooms & 1.5 bathrooms. While my wife and I don't have kids, I'm happy with the size. Anything bigger and I feel like it'd be overkill for us. I wish the floorplan was a little more open or could be easier to open up, but otherwise I feel the size is perfect for our needs.
Obviously if children enter the picture, things might change, but I feel like having a house that's too big is more of a pain than it's worth...especially when you need to clean for company.
As a guest bedroom? A few times a year, when distant friends and relatives top by. As spare storage for seasonal clothes, decorations and so forth? Probably 1 out of every 4 days. As a hobby room for things that don't work out well in the office? Quite a few more days. As a sleeping room for pets (ferrets)? Every day.
Edit: To be used as a guest bedroom, we tend to reorganize a bit (such as moving the pets to the master bedroom) but primarily we consider it the "guest bedroom". It sounds a bit nicer than "arbitrary spare room".
I’ve seen people run actual companies and they needed a ton of space to keep legal documents, spec books, and a professional grade printer to copy binders of docs. They were fully utilizing the room.
But I doubt most people run companies, and personal docs usualy fit in a single box. Most people also use laptops, consumer printer/scanners are pretty unobtrusive, if people even keep one.
All of that would fit in half of a cabinet, so what I am missing that goes into an office room ?
In my early days, I ran my law office out of my house, and had an actual office, and clients sometimes came over. I have known a few lawyers to do this. I stopped after a few years because having kids ended up not being very compatible with this setup, but it did mean that our house was virtually spotlessly clean for a long time! My wife liked that.
For me, my "computer room" (office) has a couple bookshelves full of standard computer books, most of them are a decade or two old but still relevant. Things like W. Richard Stevens books, O'Reilly, Knuth, Tanenbaum, some books from college, etc. And I like having a table/desk to hold the model M keyboard and large monitor, and docked laptop. And I have a tower server on the side, and large 4-color laser printer.
But the most important reason for a dedicated office is to keep the cats out of my computer gear. And now that we have a toddler back in the house (S.O.'s grandkid that we are raising), keeping him out too.
That layout is how my house is laid out. The guest room is hardly used, but my wife works remotely, and I like to play around with side projects, so the office is quite useful.
For me personally, it's nice to have the room set aside for "work", keeping me a little less distracted.
I work from home 3 days a week, I use it for that. I'm on a lot of conference calls and need my own space with a desk and a door that closes. I also have a couch I can sit / lay on if I want to during the day, and a tv. Sometimes in the winter we watch tv in the office because it is warmer upstairs. I also use the office to store personal possessions like hobby stuff and work related plaques etc that would be taking up space somewhere else. House is 1500 sq ft and there are 2 people and 3 dogs.
We have a 2-bedroom (no kids) and do a combo guest bedroom / office which works well for us. Large futon instead of a full bed to save space. We don't work exclusively from home though nor have guests more than once every couple months so that helps.
I guess that kind of makes sense, since my house was built in the 1950s. It doesn't feel all that large though.
I will admit that I might be a little skewed given that comparing my house to the others in my neighborhood, it's on the smaller size. Most houses I've seen go on the market in my neighborhood are generally 3-400+ sqft larger.
I just bought my first home, and I live alone. It's a single story home, with a basement, built in 1959. The upstairs is about 1000 sq/ft, while the basement is only about 200 sq/ft making it strictly a laundry area.
Having now lived in the house for about 3 months, I can say that it's more than comfortable for me, and is easily managed in terms of cleaning. It's definitely not a huge place, and when I have friends over for dinner and there's more than 5 of us, it can feel quite cramped.
I guess if you live in Brooklyn in one of those 300sqft places, it would feel huge...
I think it reflects the amount of possessions we have now compared to the 1960s. People need space to store all that crap, also reflected in the fact that the storage business is booming.
>People with more money to spend typically want five bedrooms with bathrooms, porcelain tile and quartz countertops. “Most everything we’re doing at this price point includes a garage that fits a minimum of four cars,” Jackson says. “We just finished a home that had a nine-car garage.”
Yep, at least around the DC Metro area. With Cyber Command and all the associated cyber stuff bringing in tons of people, most new housing developments I've seen are almost as dense as town homes in Baltimore, there's just a little more space between the sides of the houses, and there is usually a small front yard instead of being right up against the sidewalk.
No, and they typically aren't allowed by modern zoning restrictions. I'm in a house from the mid-1910s and my lot is a third of what is required for new construction in other parts of the city.
Would you enjoy picking somewhere nice to live, then it becomes crowded with a bunch of denser living structures, with all the extra noise, congestion, crime (simply by virtue of more people being present), etc. completely changing the character of the location?
We can't just turn every single locality into a Manhattan. Nice areas with sparse, bigger houses should be able to elect to stay that way.
The "sprawl" everyone complains about in SF is (from the last article I saw) a bunch of super tiny square houses with tiny lawns packed into a giant grid. Honestly seems like an alright compromise to me between huge apartment buildings and big lawns for a city-like area, compromised too far in the direction of density even.
I honestly don't see the big deal about some areas like SF being able to exist where you can live in a city and actually have a nice-ish single family house in commute distance of your city-job, even if it prices some people out. It's one city in a country of 300 million.
> We can't just turn every single locality into a Manhattan. Nice areas with sparse, bigger houses should be able to elect to stay that way.
Only if property owners want that. If a property owner wants to built a 4-story condo on their property, they should be allowed to do so. If their neighbors want the property to remain a single family home, they should buy out the property owner.
I mean if you try to build a condo on single family house zone, you will generate too much waste, and water usage for the land if it is not connected to city water and sewage. You simply wouldnt have enough land to naturally draw water from a well, or put sewage water back into the ground.
And if it is, the infrastructre may still not be developed for allowing 10x the number of people as live in a typical family house.
Depends in location. Most builders want bigger jobs: it's better to build 5 big houses than 10 little ones. We were looking at building a smallish house and the builder thought we were crazy for wanting a 1300sqft cottage. Ended up being only slightly cheaper than a 2000sqft place. What builders in the us don't get that some in europe do is some people prefer quality over quantity.
It seems less and less prevalent. Most of the modest 1-story homes in my hometown have been steadily replaced over the past 10-15 years with obnoxious McMansions with very little space in between them. Square footage is the cheapest thing you can add to a house's up-front cost (key emphasis on "up-front") and fetches large premiums on home value. Just the reality of the market I guess.
Not to be pedantic, but that house pictured isn't a McMansion, on the virtue that the windows match and there isn't a giant garage turret tumor thing stapled to one of the sides
Still an interesting article however; with all this talk about people repopulating cities and cutting back it seems the data still shows people love living large
If you work at home, that’s a bedroom off for office.
I also build synths and electronics and firearms, that’s a bedroom off for workshop/music.
Weight room. Guest bedroom for when friends visit. Master bedroom for me, partner bedroom to save relationship sanity.
That’s six for just two adults, and I still haven’t racked the servers and switches in my lab. I think the mistake is thinking of them as bedrooms and not general purpose rooms for activities that require equipment/storage.
I wonder how much of this demand are multi-generational homes (e.g. parents, spouse, kids all in the same house). Those are very common in, say, Chinese families.
I'm not sure that the demand in new home building is the same thing as the overall demand for homes. People who want to build new suburban (cookie-cutter) homes are not the entirety of our society. I'd trust data and feedback from real estate agents more than I would from home builders.
That’s good for us because we don’t want a big home and depressed demand for them will probably mean a cheaper starter home for us.
I used to be averse to the idea of buying an older, smaller home, but my wife is insistent on it. The more I think about it, the more I think she has the right idea.
I call BS on the single-story build rate > 40%. Finding my current home in 2015 - a single-story - took a lot longer because they weren't that many on the market at a given time. Some were under contract in less than one day on the market! But I am confusing build rate with market availability.
The blame will fall on HGTV for some of the problem.
Another factor is profitability - a 2000 sqft house costs less than 2x to build than a 1000 sqft house, but within the same hypothetical neighborhood, will probably cost 2x or more because of the additional features that additional floor space makes possible.
"a 2000 sqft house costs less than 2x to build than a 1000 sqft house, but within the same hypothetical neighborhood, will probably cost 2x or more"
That's certainly not true where I am. The lot is 75% or more of the total value. Even if the bigger house is 4x the value for 1.5x the build cost, that's still not 2x the total purchase price, and those are wildly optimistic numbers. I suspect the same is true in most high-cost neighborhoods. Building bigger nicer houses does improve the ROI somewhat, but that's like an optimization after picking the right lots in the right neighborhoods.
Averages are always misleading - in this case I wonder if single story builds are weighted towards 50+ elder communities (they are in our area) which throws off the distribution.
Cutting trees, building something more or less permanent with the wood, and planting new trees seems to be the most useful. Most timber used for dimensional lumber comes from managed forests that are continually re-planted as they are cut, not old-growth clear-cutting.
Not necessarily. A mature forest can only hold so much carbon, old trees decompose, releasing their sequestered carbon back into the environment even while new trees are busy locking it up again. By removing this carbon and turning it into building materials then letting new trees grow to replace them you are keeping more carbon from returning to the atmosphere.
Home building is a net positive contribution to CO2 levels. Eg, 80 tons for 2-bed house in the UK, says https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20... . There's the CO2 emissions for harvesting and transport, plus emissions for the foundation, plus plastics for the plumbing, wiring, house wrap, etc.
If the goal is CO2 sequestration, build a smaller house and use the saved money to transport bamboo or other fast-growing plants directly to a disused mine, then seal the mine.
I used to have a 1500 sqft house. Next was a 1600 sqft house. Now, a 3300 sqft house.
I miss the 1500 sqft house so much.
Our current house has a 3/4 acre yard bordering on 20 acres of preserve/park, so I love that, but I would still take the small house on the 1/4 acre over this, since I live near plenty of nature opportunities anyway.