What We Can Do To Cope With Recession AND Live Better: Downsize
Our economic recession was ignited by a mortgage crisis. Behind the wheel of the mortgage crisis, a reckless consensus said that we should own bigger homes and more cars, live far from where we work, buy lots of disposable stuff, and shop at big box stores.
It said that we should have TV’s in every room of the house, eat out often, live in gated communities and drink lattes at cafes that arrived on site in a box one day, down to the last caramel-colored teardrop pendant lamp and the over-friendly twenty-six year old barista who harbors the belief that working at the one with mocha-toned walls and world music sold at the counter instead of the one with the tacky orange and yellow bubble font is evidence that he’s done something with himself.
We have to reinvent the culture of dwelling in America. We need new values and new habits, a new vernacular of habitat. We need a new social imaginary of home and happiness that places worth on sustainability over size, community over consumption, durability over disposability, and goodness over growth.
This recession isn’t just an economic crisis. It’s an existential crisis, a crucible in which a model of dwelling born out of the post-War and post-Cold War booms have been exposed as a great estrangement. We have become divorced from the patient processes and firsthand practices that give meaning and texture to living.
The good news is that a better model of dwelling is more economically feasible than the consumption-driven model that has put us on this collision course. And the lessons that need to be learned about how we got into this mess and how to get out of it are lessons that provide the outline for a new culture of dwelling in America.
There are several things that Americans can do to cope with recession while at the same time cultivating the richness of life. One of them is to downsize.
The average home size has increased from 900 square feet in the years just after World War II, to 1300 square feet by 1970, to 1900 square feet by 1990, and in 2004 the average home size was 2330 square feet.
Larger homes on larger lots require more water for landscaping and more energy for heating and cooling, which is, despite all the bad press given to SUV’s, America’s greatest source of fuel consumption. The demand for space to build larger homes compelled the construction of suburbs and exurbs, requiring longer commutes, obtrusive and awkward development patterns, and the neglect of cities and urban neighborhoods.
The tension between thoughtful urban renewal and class-insensitive gentrification is one that has to be attended to. I support the movement towards the rehabilitation of now-neglected mid-century suburbs, those that have been passed over by the construction of the outlying exurb. 1000 square foot ranches, capes, and colonials at the circumference of many major cities are ripe for savvy appropriation by creative, community-minded renters and owners, a trend that resists the push for new development and revives a more intimate notion of middle class living than what the gated, super-secure planned communities of the last decade and a half offer.
Say what you want about Levittown, but Levitt’s homes came with common yards, modest lots, clean lines and picture windows. We need to relearn the advantages of smaller living.
This will mean redefining the art of organization. It will mean consuming less. It will mean relearning the intimacies of shared spaces. It will mean redefining the self-worth of the self-made American, not in terms of the size of their dwelling’s footprint, but in terms of its efficiency and ingenuity.
The revolution in paring down that I’ve been holding my breath for is about radical parsimony, where personal downsizing is seen as a virtue, an opportunity to solve age-old problems in the art of living in ways other than the knee-jerk inclinations of unsustainable growth and addictive expansion, moving further away and further apart. We can do better than that.
GREAT post, Shane. Buying a bicycle was, for me, the first step in this direction. Pursuing a job in a smaller city factors in as well. This will alleviate excuses to not ride that creep in so easily, and increase the chances that I will commit wholeheartedly to commuting by bicycle. Selling one of our vehicles is next on the agenda (though that meets with resistance and reasons why we should wait a while to be sure from others in the household), along with moving into a smaller-sized house well within city limits (assuming we ever sell the one we’re in presently). Christmas was (somewhat) different this year for related reasons. All of this is good to be sure, but I’m aware that these decisions, efforts, changes are (for the time being at least) only initial, partial. Time doesn’t permit any details, but suffice it to say that it takes much more to truly and fundamentally downsize one’s way of seeing the world and our lives in it than only riding your bike more or choosing to own a home with fewer bathrooms. The attitudes and perspectives towards wealth, possession, space, etc. that our generation has inherited are deeply ingrained and seem to show up in entirely unexpected ways. By the same token, however, there is a sense in which doing concrete things like buying a bike and selling a car force the shift presupposed by such acts (ideally).
By way of follow-up (though you’ve likely seen it already): http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/what-will-save-the-suburbs/.
Village Scribe,
No, I hadn’t seen Arieff’s blog at the New York Times. I know her through her work at Dwell Magazine, but thanks a ton for that link. She got 352 comments to that blog in just one day. Pretty amazing, and they shut it down. So I submitted a letter to the editor that borrowed a few sentences from this post. Here’s what I said:
Dear Editor,
Allison Arieff wants to know how to rehabilitate exurbia. Spoken like a true real estate developer. This kind of myopic attention to McMansionland garners paychecks and page views but overlooks the more promising and immediately pertinent question: what can we do with the suburbs?
Arieff and others overlook mid-century suburbs because they were on average 900-1300 square feet, and few people are prepared to commit to that sort of drastic downsizing. But it’s the older suburbs that are subject to blight and mass foreclosure on a significant scale, not the exurbs.
What we need is not some clever plan for turning high priced mansions into high priced condos. We have to reinvent the culture of dwelling in America. We need new values and new habits, a new vernacular of habitat. We need a new social imaginary of home and happiness that places worth on sustainability over size, community over consumption, durability over disposability, and goodness over growth. Arieff missed that boat.
Matt Waggoner
New Haven
1-13-09
Shazam! Haha, anyway, I’ll keep you (yes and you too, other guy) posted on how my letter submission fares against the other thousand they get every day.
Excellent. All hail the power of the blog, the ultimate vanity press.
Meanwhile, as I continue to think about my own move to a smaller home, I’m curious if you happen to have any information on average family size vis-a-vis the 900-1300 square foot houses, and perhaps the ages of the inhabitants as well. In other words, are these average house size figures taking into account absolutely every owner-occupied dwelling across the entire US? Some of what our family is trying to figure out right now is how to significantly downsize but still be realistic about our needs as a family of four, the two youngest of which are presently less than two years old. (Of course, discerning what one truly “needs” is at the heart of this entire conversation.) Our goal, going into this, is to find a house that is both large enough to raise a family in and small enough to retire in. I know that any number of things can happen between now and when I kick the bucket, but I’m at least going into this with the intention of staying forever.
As a side note, buying a house with the intention of staying forever seems to me, on one level, an alternative approach, one that is motivated by commitment to a community/neighborhood, by a desire for longstanding relationships, and by an effort to do away with certain attitudes surrounding disposability and supposedly upward mobility. I wonder though if, on the other hand, it isn’t still fundamentally about attachment, possession, ownership, and a sense (however false) of stability and accomplishment. Surely those things are not necessarily bad in and of themselves, though, right? There must be a way to pursue such things in better ways than have been done in the past. But when do noble ideals and creative thinking give way to rationalization? Apologies for the ramble.
Scribe,
Every time I visit Scotland or Austria or whatever I’m struck by the smallness of the very basic and old but also sturdy and nicely retrofitted homes that people live in and are happy about it. Likewise, a summer or two ago I visited a friend in Dallas, Texas who has a family of 5 and had just bought one of these 3000 sq ft behemoths on the way-outskirts of the city. It was so bare out there, and the presence of these houses on the landscape looked like a monopoly board. Eerie. Even more eerie was the inside of his house. They didn’t have, and really couldn’t have, enough furniture for this massive thing. So, they had tapped themselves financially to be able to buy the house, he had an hour-plus commute into the city so they could live there, and yet when you walked inside the house it was like they lived like refugees, little bundles of things here and there, no sense that anyone really had a home there. I wish I could’ve have taken pictures. T
The numbers I gave are I guess averages across family sizes, ages, and regions, so take them for what they’re worth.
Your intention to live in one house til you die is certainly not the norm today, and kind of charming, or quaint, because it’s just a lost ideal of life. Many of us inherited from our baby boomer parents this notion that life is an upward motion, upsizing and upgrading. It’s no wonder the boomers gave us the tech world as we know it with all of its planned obsolescence and incessant, necessary upgrading. Bastards.
My little ranch is 932 square feet of heaven. I’d say that if my situation was like yours it would feel smallish. But I also feel like there was a point when the idea of adding on was abandoned in favor of buying up. I tend to think that buying with the possibility of adding on or refinishing basements or whatever, rather than going into it with the mindset of a buying up every few years or rung on the corporate ladder, is a good idea.
Children raise some interesting issues when it comes to the culture of dwelling. Certainly the home construction industry (which I worked in throughout graduate school) has pushed for years this idea that the typical male, head-of-household homebuyer can and should see himself as fulfilling some kind of masculine gender role by purchasing a thing with a massive kitchen and a rec room for the kids, preferably with a built-in theater entertainment center equipped for xbox or something like that.
These are choices that we have been making, pressured by industries and retail and home and garden entertainment, which have dramatically altered the expectations and experience of dwelling in homes, sharing spaces with people, spending time, and so on. I think it’s cool that you’re going into it so thoughtfully.
My point is not to guilt people out of bigger places. It’s to suggest that we reevaluate our needs, our perceptions of our needs, and the kinds and quality of the lives these things we call houses afford us. I’d opt for a smaller house with a sense of history and community than my friends mansion in the desert of real estate hell any day.
Thanks for chiming in as always and for keeping me posted.
[...] is for my old friend the Village Scribe, with whom I have been having a great conversation on this blog about home buying and home sizes. I don’t really know what to say, Scribe, [...]