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Are Big Houses Making Americans Unhappy? – The Atlantic

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Are Big Houses Making Americans Unhappy? – The Atlantic

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.

Housing Can’t Be Both Affordable and a Good Investment

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Housing Can’t Be Both Affordable and a Good Investment

"Promoting homeownership as an investment strategy is a risky proposition. No financial advisor would recommend going into debt in order to put such a massive part of your savings in any other single financial instrument—and one that, as we learned just a few years ago, carries a great deal of risk. Even worse, that risk isn’t random: It falls most heavily on low-income, black, and Hispanic buyers, who are given worse mortgage terms, and whose neighborhoods are systematically more likely to see low or even falling home values, with devastating effects on the racial wealth gap."

Homeownership Percentage

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The homeownership rate is computed by dividing the number of households that are owners by the total number of occupied households.

A housing unit is classified as occupied if it is the current place of residence of the person or group of people living in it at the time of interview, or if the occupants are only temporarily absent from the residence for two months or less, that is, away on vacation or a business trip. If all the people staying in the unit at the time of the interview are staying there for two months or less, the unit is considered to be temporarily occupied and classified as “vacant.”

The date of the data is the end of the 5-year period. For example, a value dated 2015 actually represents data from 2010 to 2015.

Data Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Homeownership Rate by County, retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://geofred.stlouisfed.org/, February 24, 2017.