WE COULD HAVE SEVEN MORE KIDS
Earlier today, I joined in on a discussion over at Discovering Urbanism concerning the amount of house the average American had in 1950 versus today. Over at 100K House, you can find the numbers: 983 square feet for 3.37 people in 1950 (or 292 square feet per person), and 2,349 square feet for 2.61 people in 2006 (or 900 square feet per person). In other words, we're consuming more than three times more house than before!
To better put this in perspective for myself, I considered how many people we could jam into our spacious twin in University City. Admittedly, we have an embarrassment of space, what with three full floors, as well as well over half our basement finished. (It is an equal embarrassment that we paid less than 100K for it just eight years ago.) If we lived at 1950 density, we could have a household size of 11! So, if we were OK with that kind of living space ratio, we could have seven more kids and not need to move out of our house. For now, I'll stick with the two kids we do have, and remind myself to quit grumbling about our living accommodations.
Truth or Tribe
There could hardly be anything more important than truth, right? Most people wouldn’t dare say so. And yet we very often put “tribe” be...
-
PHILADELPHIA NAMED BEST CITY FOR NEW GRADS How about Philly besting Boston, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and every other city in America for ...
-
I recently had a humorous but telling incident on my bus ride into work. It being rush hour, the vehicle is often crowded and even standin...
2 comments:
Considering you generally fit 8 college students into one of those, it's not surprising that a family of 11 could find accomodation. It's a great design for a house! Development houses in the suburbs nowadays have I think more square footage with about half the bedrooms.
The two us downsized in space quite a bit when we moved across the country - to only 450 sq ft. At first, it was a little frustrating trying to find space to store everything (our apartment has very little storage), but eventually we began to fit into our new place perfectly well.
We joke about how when we lived in a two-story house, we automatically started accumulating stuff just to fill in the space. Now that we've grown accustomed to the smaller size, some things are even a little easier. At least until/if kids come around.
Post a Comment