Over the years American houses have got bigger and bigger. According to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) approximately 42 percent of newly built houses now have more than 2,400 square feet of floor space, compared to only 10 percent in 1970. No, wonder the environmentalists are so concerned, because the larger the house the more the greenhouse gas emissions.
Do you know that there were so little three-bathroom houses in the 1970 that they didn’t even to show up in NAHB statistics? Can you imagine that by 2005, one out of every four new houses built had at least three bathrooms!
Why is this so? Is it because the size of average American families has grown? Or it is because people find it fashionable to live in larger houses? The boom in large mansions is largely due to low mortgage rates. You know, you could buy a 40-percent bigger house and still owe $273 less per month on your mortgage, than if you were buying a smaller house at 1983-level interest rates?
So, as you can see it is all about affordability, rather than requirement. Looks like the housing industry urges the homebuyer’s to ask themselves ‘How much house can I afford?’
A smaller house is much more viable for the environment that a mansion which has a green construction. According to an article published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology in 2005 –
A 1,500-square-foot house with mediocre energy-performance standards will use far less energy for heating and cooling than a 3,000-square-foot house of comparable geometry with much better energy detailing. Downsizing a conventionally framed house by 25 percent should save significantly more wood than substituting the most wood-efficient advanced framing techniques for that house. And it is easier to reduce the embodied energy of a house by making the house smaller than by searching for low embodied-energy materials.
Apart from having laws in place which prohibit the construction of extremely large mansions, I believe that as responsible citizens we also need to ask ourselves the question of how much space we really need to live comfortably. After all it is in our interest that we take care of the environment around us.
