Making a case for modest houses
I’m not saying “tiny” houses are for the birds, but returning to our old housing normal, size-wise, is a worthy and more pragmatic environmental goal.
If you suspect American homes have gotten super-sized over the years, just like pick-ups trucks, Slurpees, and thousands of other products, you are not wrong. In 1950, the average single-family dwelling in the USA measured 983 square feet. Now, the average new house is pushing 3,000.
I’m not here to analyze why. It’s pretty obvious that we’re bombarded incessantly (and in ever more sophisticated ways) with suggestions that more is always better.
More of everything.
We need to go back to smaller houses for environmental reasons. Improved insulation techniques notwithstanding, bigger houses require more energy, which means burning more polluting fuels. Plus, they supplant trees and shrubs we need more than ever for filtering our air.
The “tiny house” movement is at least in part an effort to counter our overbuilding, and while I appreciate and respect it, most of us are unlikely to live by choice in a house the size of a single-car garage.
More houses of the size that was average in 1950 is a much more credible goal.
I know this to be true because I grew up in such a house. My family’s home in rural Mississippi had two bedrooms, one bath, a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen. It measured 850 square feet, maybe, and most of our neighbor's houses were no bigger.
This was not some isolated poor South phenomenon. It was all-American. The infamous “little boxes made of ticky-tacky” of Malvena Reynolds’ 1950s folk song may have signified conformity but they were a hell of a lot saner than a McMansion.
Athens, Georgia, where I live now, has its share of humongous houses, both historic and newly constructed. But it also has residential neighborhoods like Boulevard, Pulaski Heights, and the perfectly named Normaltown.
Built mostly between the late 1940s and early 1960s, the majority of Normaltown’s hundreds of houses are two-bedroom, one-bath cottages that measure 1,000 square feet, give or take 40 or 50.
They’re considered “starter” or “down-sizing” homes today, but their original occupants were fulled sized families. Some have been enlarged in the past decade or so. Some have been bought for their lots, razed, and replaced with much bigger houses. But the average size of a Normaltown house is still well below the national average for new single-family homes, and the neighborhood, because it’s cute and has lots of trees, is highly desirable real estate.
It’s also highly sane.
In his brilliant book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, social critic and philosopher Christopher Lasch examined the limits of the capitalistic notion of progress — the delusional idea that everybody can have more and more ad infinitum. He says we have to address the “urgent question of how the living standards of the rich can be extended to the poor, on a global scale, without putting a burden on the earth’s natural resources.”
That kind of equality will require “a more modest standard of living for all, not an extension of the lavish standards enjoyed by the favored classes in the industrial nations to the rest of the world,” Lasch says.
And one way to at least start would be to re-embrace the sort of lifestyle that so many of us in this country experienced in the late 1940s and early ’50s, a lower-middle-class lifestyle like my family’s. We had fewer material possessions than we do now but, in honest retrospect, it was enough.
It can be done again, and it could save the world.
