Giant Houses in Small Neighborhoods


Giant houses in little neighborhoods is almost as bad as giant houses in giant neighborhoods.  And to successfully rationalize this trend as creating value to match what was paid for the lot the house sits on, takes ignoring a lot of realities.

Forgetting the moral arguments where one compares house size to castle size, and how the average size new home talked about in the article is roughly five times the size of the average house in American in 1959.  

Or how the waste of building materials to create something multiple times the size any family needs, and then the cost of heating and cooling something many times the size a family needs; or the confusion so many Americans have of the difference between ‘want’ and ‘need’; there is the simple equation that an expensive lot with a new house comparable to a neighborhood size standard will still be worth more than the investment.  Often, quite a lot more.

And, as we continue to contemplate—and even embrace—the fact of climate change, to ignore the effects of outsized houses on that climate must make it easier to ignore the effects of outsized houses on the outsized costs of housing.  In a popular and continuing to grow housing market as we have in Central Texas, to blame those costs—in part or all—on a legislative need to combat property taxes seems to ignore all the evidence in order to grasp a limited part of a truth.


And that some of the most quoted people, in the (above linked) article, offering these arguments are in the real estate business—a business I’m also very much a part of—tells the not-so-casual observer here are people who have bought into the mythology of home ownership rather than the reality of where we are as a nation, versus what we need to do to get to where we need to be, and the rationalizations allowing us to ignore the future we are creating.

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