Opinion: A small house costs less to build, uses less material, is cheaper to furnish, easier to clean and less environmentally damaging to heat and cool.
Until I went off to university, I grew up in a two-storey house with 1,200 square feet of floor space. It had three small bedrooms, a small living and dining room, a single bathroom and a kitchen smaller than today’s walk-in closets. It had no attic and an unfinished basement.
Somehow, my parents and my brother and I survived living in so modest a house.
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Of all the homes I have lived in, the largest was 2,500 square feet.
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But my favourite of all the homes I have lived in was the smallest.
It was 800 sq. ft.
My wife and I rented it from a family friend. It started life as a net shed of a fish company that had long ago gone under. When we moved in, the bathroom — and I’m being generous calling it that — was a six-by-10-foot afterthought with a toilet, a shower head and a square cement basin one stood in while showering. That’s it. There was no bathtub or sink. The rest of the house consisted of a narrow kitchen, a living room, and three tiny bedrooms — one of which we converted into a dining room. There was no attic, basement or — and this is an absence that would be inconceivable in today’s homes — closets. There simply wasn’t room for them.
Over time, we made it habitable — sanding the wood floors that had been painted dark brown, installing a bathtub and bathroom sink, and covering every wall in the house with a sturdy burlap wallpaper we discovered in Ikea. It was thick enough to hide all of the house’s sins. We heated the place with a wood stove.
We raised three children there.
Fast-forward to today. We now live in a three-bedroom, two storey home just over 2,100 sq. ft It was built in 1964, big for its time. Our kids now have homes of their own, and two of our bedrooms remain empty unless the grandkids visit. Yet as over-housed as my wife and I feel we are, our home is much, much smaller than the new homes now being built in our neighbourhood.
West Coast Homes
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The same has happened all over North America. Exact statistics vary, but most studies estimate that average house size in Canada and the U.S. has doubled since the mid-1970s. In one 2017 study, the average square footage for all homes in Canada was just under 1,800 sq. ft and trending upward. Canada, in terms of living space per person, ranks third in the world, surpassed only by Australia and the U.S.
None of this, however, makes demographic sense.
Family size and fertility rates have fallen. Marriage rates have declined dramatically. The average age of women having children has risen, and extraneous factors like divorce, environmental concerns and debt load have all contributed to smaller families. According to Statistics Canada, the average census family size over the last century has decreased from 4.2 persons in 1931 to 2.9 persons in 2021.
And even though the country frets over mortgage rates and housing shortages, you find many owners, with their eyes focused on resale values, building their homes to maximum allowable limits, and which are often out of character to the neighbouring houses around them — a jarring unneighbourliness of no concern, it seems, to city planners. And then there are the homes with square footages in the five figures — homes so gigantic and so ludicrously overbuilt that you come away wondering what the owners do with all that space.
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Good question.
Living in the little 800 sq. ft house that we did, we had to be mindful of how we, in fact, lived.
The house made demands of us. It demanded intimacy and patience. It demanded frugality, since we had no storage space to put anything. It demanded that our children play outdoors and that we, as parents, go with them. While it sometimes felt chaotic and fractious, and while the wait for the bathroom could be intolerable, life in the little house pressed us together. It demanded we be a family.
Today, the reverse is true. It’s the homeowners making the demands. They demand designer kitchens. They demand dining rooms big enough to seat a football team. They demand a surplus of bedrooms, with ensuite bathrooms. They demand a den, an office, an exercise room, a games room and a “family” room — as if the rest of the house, compartmentalized into such specific, overlapping uses is meant for something other than family. They demand a finished basement and a two-car garage in which they keep, not cars, but all the stuff they’ve accumulated but rarely use. These houses speak not just to their affluence, or the ability and desire to show off that affluence, but also to a compulsive insatiability.
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The media, especially TV, has a lot to answer for when it comes to shaping outsized housing expectations and appetites. The airwaves are filled with real estate and renovation shows — otherwise known as “house porn” — that feature fabulous homes and renovations that most young couples could never afford. Where the money comes from for those renovations is never explained, nor is the fact that housing debt loads are at record levels.
I hope, if just for the sake of the planet, we see a shift toward smaller houses. A small house costs less to build, uses less material, is cheaper to furnish, easier to clean and less environmentally damaging to heat and cool.
And really, what is it that we want from the place we live?
“Home” is where the heart is.
A “house” is an edifice.
Somewhere along the way, many of us seemed to have confused the two.
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/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tgam/S3MFVGWOKZJO7KMEGWOYL4W2AU.jpg "Is the difficulty in authentic estate that residences charge as well significantly, or that individuals hope way too significantly?")
As highly-priced as our significant cities are to us in this article in Canada, they are form of a deal on a global scale.
In the a short while ago issued 2023 Mercer Price tag of Residing survey, Toronto ranked 90th out of 227 metropolitan areas, Vancouver 116th, Montreal 135th, Ottawa 137th and Calgary 145th. Nineteen U.S. cities are far more highly-priced than the 5 Canadian cities in the study, as are a swathe of towns in Europe, Asia and the Center East.
“The expense of residing surely is better in those places, even relative to the most high-priced locations in Canada,” explained Gord Frost, a partner with the Canadian arm of Mercer, a world wide HR and pension consulting business. “Everyday costs like foodstuff are much more pricey. Housing is a lot more expensive. Transit is far more expensive.”
In a way, so what? What matters are charges wherever you live, not in towns you may at most visit briefly. But a world-wide perspective does notify us some thing critical. If we contemplate our metropolitan areas to be world class, then we’ll need to have to adapt to the significant fees that go along with that difference. The affordability of yesteryear, notably in housing, is not coming back.
Rob Carrick: Oh, great. Unaffordable Toronto and Vancouver are rated as top cities for younger folks to are living and get the job done in
People today adapt to mega-high-priced towns like Hong Kong, New York, San Francisco, Seoul, London and Tokyo by possibly dwelling outdoors the town or accepting that they’ll are living in smaller sized households.
“The mentality is unique,” Mr. Frost said. “People don’t anticipate to reside in three- or four-bed room detached homes in Singapore, or in London, Paris or Zurich. They count on to are living in a flat or a considerably more compact house.”
Canadians acquired applied to more substantial residences simply because we had the land to develop them. We’re running out of place in urban parts, which is 1 of the reasons why housing prices have soared about the decades. But there is even now a large is very best mindset that, preferably, everybody in a family members will get their personal bedroom, that every single kitchen area ought to be significant sufficient to have an island and that each home really should have a sizable yard.
Irritation about the high price of residing has been building in the earlier 12 months, but Canadian metropolitan areas are falling in the Mercer expense of residing ranking. Toronto was down 1 place from 2022, Vancouver fell by eight spots, Montreal by 10, Ottawa by 5 and Calgary by 4. In the United States, meanwhile, all metropolitan areas in the survey went up in the ranking in comparison to past yr.
U.S. towns are in a considerably increased league of unaffordability than Canadian metropolitan areas in the Mercer rating. New York ranked sixth in general, Los Angeles 11th, San Francisco 14th, Boston 21st and Chicago 24th. Detroit and Cleveland rated 80th and 88th, respectively.
Mercer’s position is centered on the charge of much more than 200 products in each and every city, such as housing, transportation, foods, garments, household products and amusement. The data is meant to be made use of by businesses in location compensation for worldwide workforce. Other price tag of living surveys have ranked Toronto and Vancouver much bigger for housing or dwelling fees.
Mr. Frost claimed that Canada is found globally as an desirable location to live for equally expense and high quality of residing causes. In the very last Mercer rating of metropolitan areas by top quality of living, from 2019, Vancouver came in 3rd, Toronto 16th, Ottawa 19th, Montreal 21st and Calgary 32nd out of 231 countries. Vienna ranked to start with.
Canada’s comparatively sturdy scores on actions of charge and high quality need to placate no a single who is indignant that they can not pay for groceries or housing. But these scores do give us a sense of what’s sensible in examining the cost of residing.
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Our housing costs feel astronomical compared to incomes, meals price ranges have soared and the overall inflation price stays as well substantial inspite of more than a calendar year of desire amount hikes. But we haven’t been uniquely victimized listed here in Canada by these complications. They’re world wide, influencing towns all around the world.
On housing in certain, we need smarter, much more aggressive action to tackle affordability. The lethargy of governments in receiving more households and rental models developed is maddening.
But expectations issue, much too. Canada’s significant towns are portion of a world neighborhood exactly where proudly owning a detached residence with a massive lawn is a luxurious. As they’ve completed in the 89-furthermore towns that are much more high-priced than Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa and Calgary, we can adapt.
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