Are McMansions Making People Any Happier?
Homes have gotten bigger, but Americans aren’t any more pleased with the extra space
By Joe Pinsker
American homes are a lot bigger than they used to be. In 1973, when the Census Bureau started tracking home sizes, the median size of a newly built house was just over 1,500 square feet; that figure reached nearly 2,500 square feet in 2015.
This rise, combined with a drop in the average number of people per household, has translated to a whole lot more room for homeowners and their families: By one estimate, each newly built house had an average of 507 square feet per resident in 1973, and nearly twice that — 971 square feet — four decades later.
But according to a recent paper, Americans aren’t getting any happier with their ever bigger homes. “Despite a major upscaling of single-family houses since 1980,” writes Clément Bellet, a postdoctoral fellow at the European business school INSEAD, “house satisfaction has remained steady in American suburbs.”
This finding, Bellet reasons, has to do with how people compare their houses with others in their neighborhood — particularly the biggest ones. In his paper, which is currently under peer review, he looks closely at the construction of homes that are larger than at least…
