Remodel
American homes are growing while family sizes are shrinking
For most people, where we live is our most important investment. Surprisingly, the basic connection between families and homes has been irrational in the last three generations of American homes. As families get smaller, homes get bigger.
America has grown in these generations, from less than 50 million families to nearly 130 million households. About a million or more new homes are built each year, and despite actively meeting the needs and wants of housing consumers, there is a skewed relationship between family size, home size, and the number of vacant homes in America.
The US Census provides clear data on the difference between shrinking families and growing single-family homes. Family size has shrunk in America—from over four people living in a home before World War II to well under three today. Families are about 40 percent smaller now, but homes have exploded in size. The average home in America was under 1,000 square feet 70 years ago, but is now an average of 2,500 square feet today.
When the reduced number of people living in each dwelling is factored into the increasing size of the dwellings they live in, the change in dwellings is startling. There used to be less than 300 square feet of house per person 70 years ago, but now over 1,000 square feet per family member lives in a home in America. Instead of building fewer bedrooms per home, the four-bedroom house becomes as common as the three-bedroom home.
There is one simple reason for larger homes for smaller families: people earn more. The average annual income for families has doubled in these years. Gross domestic product also increased. Not surprisingly, the cost of these larger homes for wealthier people also increased, as homes today are over three times as expensive, even when accounting for inflation.
The nature of our families has also changed. Less than 10 percent of families had single-parent children in their homes in 1950, and now nearly 30 percent do. Now 30 percent of the homes are places where single people live, where once barely five percent of the population lived alone. So fewer family members (parents and children) are accommodated in more expensive, larger homes with more bedrooms. These demographic and socioeconomic changes are multigenerational and nationwide.
Why do these changes happen? People are living longer and life expectancy is on average 15 years longer than in 1940.
People have been living in the wake of the suburbs in America since World War II. Fewer than a quarter of the population lived in the suburbs after World War II; now more than half the population does. After the pandemic revealed that work can be at home and that exercise and entertainment can also become a home activity, these spatial needs can also be added to the size of any home.
But there are largely unspoken consequences of this huge shift of larger homes for smaller families, increasingly outside the cities. All the townhouses where most people lived before the Second World War are now too small and confined to cities. What happened to them? According to the US Census Bureau, there are approximately 19 million abandoned properties in America. Many cities have neighborhoods with “zombie buildings”.
In the last two generations, there has been an estimated 10 percent of all homes that are simply empty. Perhaps three million of these homes are “unencumbered” with expectations of future use, but fifteen million are dead buildings standing. According to the US Census Bureau, there are over 120,000 abandoned homes in Connecticut. These homes are often in abandoned rural areas where industrialized agriculture and the relocation of production have ended the need to house workers. But most of these abandoned homes are places that are too cramped in a world where larger homes for smaller families are now a requirement.
Today, society lives in a climate-focused world where all the carbon contained in millions of abandoned buildings has a greater cultural value than ever before. At the same time, we create carbon by building new, larger places to live, when 10 percent of the homes are simply unused. This is an unsustainable dilemma on many levels.
