This New House

Just how much space do we Americans need to live in? It's constantly expanding, according to Mother Jones magazine. In fact, expanding at a treacherous rate: since 1970, the size of the average new home has expanded nearly 50%, and, of course, it has dragged things such as energy consumption up with it. Some points to think about:

• Since 1950, the average new house has increased by 1,247 sq. ft. Meanwhile, the average household has shrunk by 1 person.
• The Unabomber’s legal defense team cited the size of his shack—10’ x 12’—to buttress his insanity plea. [insinuating, of course, that the monastic size of his shack was "crazy" by the standards of American desires. And it was!]
• The number of Americans with commutes of longer than 90 minutes each way has increased 95% since 1990.
• 14 million households own 4 or more TVs.
• Americans spend more to power home audio and video equipment that is “off” but still plugged in than they do to power such devices while actually in use. Such “energy vampires” consume 5% of the nation’s electricity.
• People who live in cities use half as much energy as suburbanites.
• If Americans bought only appliances with an“Energy Star” rating over the next 15 years, the reduction in greenhouse gases would equate to taking 17 million cars off the road.
• Since 1976, federal housing assistance has been slashed by 48%. Last spring, the Bush administration proposed an additional $1 billion cut to the Section 8 housing subsidy.
• 87% of homeowners are white.
• Overall, blacks receive subprime loans 2.83 times more often than whites. The disparity increases when affluent blacks are compared to affluent whites.
• And most shockingly, the average cost of a luxury kitchen remodel is $57,000. That’s $10,000 more than it costs to build a typical Habitat for Humanity home.

As our cities expand, general consumption increases multi-fold in every aspect: energy consumption, food consumption (and waste), materials, water, resources. And, of course, it's hard to say that any of us are any happier because of it.

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Warren Buffet has this to say about the wildy expanding Real Estate market:

"A lot of the psychological well-being of the American public comes from how well they've done with their housew over the years.
....
"Certainly at the high end of the real estate market in some areas, you've seen extraordinary movement.... People go crazy in economics periodically, in all kinds of ways. Residential housing has different behavioral characteristics, simply because people live there. But when you get prices increasing faster than than the underlying costs, sometimes there can be pretty serious consequences."
...
Buffett: "I recently sold a house in Laguna for $3.5 million. It was on about 2000 sq. ft of land, maybe a twentieth of an acre, and the house might cost about $500,000 if you wanted to replace it. So the land sold for something like $60 million an acre."
Munger: "I know someone who lives next door to what you would actually call a fairly modest house that just sold for $17 million. There are some very extreme housing price bubbles going on."