I don’t know of many people who really loved the idea of new home developers putting bigger homes on smaller lots, but certainly many people over the last decade bought them. Personally, if I had a choice between two huge houses sitting so close to one another that I could see into my neighbor’s window, and a two similarly sized townhouses … I’d pick the option with the solid wall separating us from the nuts next door. (And, in fact, I did.)
Still, the “McMansion” craze was a national development, and as the square footage of these hulks increased and the size of the lots decreased, you had to wonder if living shoulder to shoulder in the suburbs with little underlying sense of community wasn’t the cause of many of our society’s problems. Media rooms and “man caves” taking what used to be times of communal experience and building camaraderie and putting them in windowless basement rooms where we were cut off from those around us.
Now, in the middle of our dark winter, comes news from the National Association of Homebuilders. The average size of new homes is shrinking — from the 2,629 sq. ft. average in the third quarter of 2008 to 2,438 sq. ft. in the fourth quarter of the year. Fully 88% of their members surveyed in January said they will be building a larger share of smaller homes in their new developments, although they make no mention on whether they will try to downsize the lots as well. And from that venerable source of information on how Americans design, build and decorate homes — Better Homes and Gardens — come survey results involving 733 potential new-home buyers that find 32% of them expect their new home to be “either somewhat smaller or much smaller then the one they already live in.”
I wish that the reason for this change in attitude was a sense that things had gotten out of hand instead of the devastating impact of the current economic crisis. Not a week goes by that I don’t go into a home built two generations ago, where mom, dad and a brood of four children were raised to hard-working adulthood in half of the square footage of our current median home size of 2,090 sq. ft. These were real communities, where people got to know their neighbors, where much of the activity of life took place on front stoops in warm weather, and people looked out for one another.
And when adults had to get away from the little darlings, there was also a bar on every corner. Dark, windowless “man caves” where…
Oh, never mind.
