US homes keep getting bigger and bigger

Washington Post

10 Jun, 2014 02:00 AM3 mins to read

American trends in new construction among single-family homes show houses are bigger than ever. Photo / Thinkstock

There was a time during the Great Recession when it looked like Americans were rethinking their mega-homes, reining in their budgets and ambitions and love of the three-car garage.

That moment has passed. Census data released last week on the characteristics of new single-family housing construction confirm that the median size of a new pad in the United States is bigger than ever.

In 2013, the median size of a new single-family home in the United States was 2,384 square feet (the average, not surprisingly, was tugged even higher by the mega-mega home: 2,598 square feet). That median is above the pre-crash peak of 2,277 square feet in 2007, and it dwarfs the size of homes we were building back in 1973 (median size then: 1,525 square feet).

With the exception of a few economic downturns since then, Americans have been building bigger and bigger houses ever since.

Historically, this trend runs counter to another demographic pattern: American homes have been getting larger as their households have actually been shrinking.

So the long-running American appetite for ever more spacious homes can't be explained by the need to fit more people into them.

What, then, do Americans want all of this room for?

What's particularly striking in the Census Bureau's historic data on new housing characteristics is the growth of what would be luxuries for many households: fourth bedrooms, third bathrooms, three-car garages. Notably, demand for all three dipped during the recession in parallel to the temporary drop in new housing size.

In 1973, 23 per cent of new homes had four bedrooms or more. Today, 44 per cent do. In 1987 (when this data was first collected), 12 per cent of homes were built with at least three bathrooms. Now 33 per cent are. Since the early '90s, three-car garages have grown from 11 per cent of the market to 21 per cent.

These numbers are not a reflection of all US housing stock. Rather, they only reflect trends in new construction, and only new construction among single-family homes.

Apartment buildings aren't included. But as new housing comes to replace the old, these historic figures capture broad changes in how Americans want to - and think they can afford to - live (with no small amount of help from the home mortgage interest deduction).

Right now, high-end homes are driving new single-family construction. And so perhaps these numbers will scale back some as the housing market continues to recover for families who can only offer smaller down payments and have dreams of more modest homes (families who, today, face a harder time getting a mortgage). It seems unlikely at this point, though, that the housing crash fundamentally altered the long-term trajectory of the ever-expanding American home.