Smaller Families living in Larger Homes
By: Tommy Unger, Data Analyst | February 20, 2007
I decided to have a little fun this past weekend and dig through some of Zillow’s vast database of property characteristics (yup, I’m a data junkie) for interesting trends. One of the more interesting pieces of data I found was the trend in average size of homes built by year since 1940. During the latter half of the 20th century, and into this century, the size of the average American home has almost always been on the rise.
While enduring only a slight dip during World War II and lulls in the early 70’s and 80’s, the average new US home size has increased from 1,500 to almost 2,500 square feet. The average home size can get skewed by the mega-mansions, so we’ve also included the median home size in the chart as well. Unsurprisingly, the median home size is a bit smaller than the average home size, but you can see virtually identical trends.
With suburban growth over the second half of the 20th century, this increasing home size trend is not too surprising. However, it presents a sharp contrast with the average household size according to the US Census (pdf).
While the homes being built in the US have been getting larger and larger, the average household size has steadily declined from 3.7 people to 2.6 people. It begs the question, what are people doing with all of this space?
- Stumble it!
- Categories: Real Estate Analytics, Zillow
Comments
4 Comments so far
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The Financial Ladder on February 20, 2007 12:28 pm
Probably storing all of the junk they waste their money on. That’s what happen after my wife and I moved out of our parents house a few years back. Our rooms became storage areas!
Aaron on February 20, 2007 12:59 pm
Some of it is home offices, some of it is kids no longer sharing bedrooms. But a lot of it is wasted space. I know empty nesters who moved after their kids were out of the house. What did they move to? A 5-BR 5-BA house. That’s right, a bedroom with a private suite for each child and one for a guest. The kids are in their 30s and visit twice a year. Parts of the house are filled with spare furniture they think their kids might want (they don’t.) Some of it is just prepared for possible guests. All of it is expensive to heat, cool, and clean. And all of it will take weeks to sort through when they die.
Camden Courcier on March 28, 2007 8:16 am
Could there be a correlation between this our stress level and the disappearance of the world’s rainforests?
Robin Lepine on March 30, 2009 7:17 am
After reading your column and noticing the super large homes being built in our area in Ontario, it amazes me just how much home there is and how little family there are living in these homes. Most importantly, the amount of land these homes take up and really nowhere to enjoy a back or front yard. It almost seems like it is a contest to show how successful a person is. My wife and I have professional jobs but we have chosen to live in a 1000 sq ft home with a huge acre lot where our child can grow, have friends over, where we can entertain our friends and just live freely. What is is that so many of us are missing when we drive by these huge homes and never see people outside enjoying them.