the median-size home has increased in size by almost 1,000 square feet, from 1,525 square feet in 1973 to 2,491 last year. In percentage terms, the average home size has increased by 61.4% since 1973, while the median home size increased by 63.3%.
Meanwhile, the average household size has been declining, from 3.01 persons per household on average in 1973 to a new record low of 2.54 persons per household last year, a reduction of almost one-half person per household over the last 40 years
We bought our house in 1980, and at the time I think it was a bit larger than median, but it’s clearly much smaller now.
Maybe Americans are over-housed?
1. If square-feet pre person is a function of welfare then you would expect people to consume more of it as they grow richer.
2. How much of this is just ‘suburbanization’ since 1973. There aren’t such costly constraints on extra square feet far the city center. What does the urban trend look like? I’d guess much flatter.
3. Steve Sailer has given this explanation: People care somewhat about the size of their plots and homes, but usually reach diminishing returns at about 2,000 square feet and maybe half an acre. What they care more about are the ‘quality’ of their neighbors and the peers that will attending the local public school with their kids, and ‘quality’ correlates with income.
The evidence is that there is a kind of virtuous or vicious-cycle positive feedback that occurs in local prices if an established neighborhood becomes desirable or undesirable (thus filled with higher or lower quality neighbors) that is completely orthogonal to the condition of the housing stock itself. But new developers on cheap, suburban land, and with cheap construction costs do not have an established neighborhood, and new buyers are wary about whether it will fill up with high or low quality neighbors.
If the developers built merely to ‘satisfaction’, then some low-quality low-income types could afford to live there too, and potential buyers know that when they see low prices. So developers purposefully over-build – using bigger plats of land and building more square feet – to raise the minimum price of a neighborhood to the point that makes prospective buyers confident that only ‘high quality’ buyers would become their new neighbors.
The consequence of this pattern of building being widespread for a long while was to shut out the lower third of the income spectrum from most new suburban neighborhoods – leaving them ‘trapped’ in the urban core, or only slowly expanding outward. Many advocates behind ‘affordable / low-income housing’ requirements see them as ways to combat this tendency, and also to ‘dilute’ poverty into the suburbs instead of concentrate it in failed ghetto housing projects.
Housing is a luxury good. No surprise there.
The average new home size actually fell during the Great Recession but is now increasing again.
I think of this in terms of an increased willingness to share home space. For example, when I was eighteen I was sharing a room with two brothers, so of course I moved out as quickly as possible, even if it meant taking whatever job I could find. Flash forward to today and my twenty something daughters each have their own rooms and are in no hurry at all to move out, or to take employment that isn’t up to their standards. I suspect that the increase in home size is a significant factor in the decline of the labor participation rate.
On the whole, Americans are without question overhoused, in both size of residence and number of residences. Housing policy has had something to do with that, as has been made clear on these pages, but so has cultural appetite. 20 years hence, I wonder how the neighborhoods of 4,000 sq. ft homes will be used. Subdivided? Turned into compounds?
Not entirely a fair comparison. The two statistics presented are average household size and average new house size.
The overwhelming majority of households in 2013 do not live in a house built in 2013, and thus this graph vastly overstates the increase in house size.
The meaningful comparison is 2013 median household size vs. 2013 median occupied house size.
In coastal urban areas, this is largely driven by zoning. It’s impossible to subdivide, build multi-family housing, or in any way increase the housing density on most land in urban areas. The choice available to developers is a small house on very expensive land, or a large house on very expensive land, which naturally leads to large houses. Consumers might prefer smaller house on smaller plots, but this is just not possible for a very large % of all urban land.