Indigestible leftovers of the housing bubble.

• Author: Cox, Stan
• Position: Big Houses

In Los Gatos, California, controversy has raged over the city planning commission's approval of a proposed hillside home that will occupy a whopping 3600 square feet--and that's just the basement. Atop that walkout basement will be 5500 more square feet worth of house.

The prospective owner says he'll build to "green" standards, but at the August 8, 2007 meeting where the permit was approved, the city's lone dissenting planning commissioner stated the obvious when he told the owner, "You have a 9,000-square-foot house with a three with a three-car garage and a pool. I don't see that as green."

The just-popped housing bubble has left behind a couple of million families in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure. It has also spawned a new generation of big, deluxe, underoccupied houses bulked up on low-interest steroids.

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates that 42% of newly built houses now have more than 2400 square feet of floorspace, compared with only 10% in 1970. In 1970 there were so few three-bathrooms houses that they didn't even show up in NAHB statistics. By 2005, 1 out of every 4 new houses had at least 3 bathrooms.

Smaller families are living in bigger houses. In the America of 1950, single-family dwellings were built with an average of 290 square feet of living space per resident; in 2003, a family moving into a typical new house had almost 900 square feet per person in which to ramble around.

In the size of our dwellings, North Americans are world champions. The United Nations says houses and apartments in Pakistan or Nicaragua typically provide one-third of a room per person; it's half a room per person in Syria and Azerbaijan, about one room in Eastern Europe, an average of a room and a half in Western Europe, and two whole rooms per person in the US and Canada (not counting spaces like bathrooms, hallways, porches, etc.).

The UN defines a room as "an area large enough to hold a bed for an adult"--at least 6 by 7 feet. To go along with those big primary homes, Americans now own 5.7 million non-rental vacation houses with a median size of 1300 square feet; together, those second homes represent enough surplus living space to accommodate the nation's homeless population 10 times over.

Challenges to the oversized-house trend are being mounted across the country, most often on aesthetic grounds. Monumental bad taste can be morbidly fascinating, but a far more serious issue is the lasting environmental damage these incredible hulks can do.

Since 1940, the average number of people living in an American home has dropped from 3.7 to 2.6, but the average size of new houses has doubled. That extra space has gone partly to free children from having to...