According to Curbed, America is building fewer smaller houses due to a number of historical and economic factors. The average U.S. home is roughly 1,600 square feet, and new homes being built today clock in at an average of 2,505 square feet, making them 600 to 800 feet larger than houses in other industrialized countries. The data comes from a study by Sonia A. Hirt, a professor of landscape architecture and planning at the University of Georgia.
To explain why Americans value larger homes in many cases, Hirt points all the way back to the earliest days of British colonialism in North America. The European settlers who came to the colonies in the late 1600s, leaving behind their more crowded European homes and taking land from those who already lived here, saw North America as a land of “spatial generosity,” she says.
“If you look at the writings from some of the Founding Fathers, you pick up this expectation that there is an American way, and part of that American dream is having your own space for a private household,” she says. As she cites in her book, Zoned in the U.S.A., John Adams wrote that as long as his countrymen lived in less dense arrangements “sprinkled over large tracts of land,” they would be free from “the contagions of madness and folly, which are seen in countries where large numbers live in small places.”
If the desire and expectation for vast personal space has always been there, the pattern of ever-larger homes really took off in the booming economy of the postwar era. U.S. federal housing policy underwrote mortgages (for white Americans), subsidizing the construction of suburbia and larger housing developments. The completion of the interstate highway system and urban renewal connected suburban houses to downtown offices, allowing buyers to live in large homes far from city centers while still having an easy commute.
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