Mar 06 2009
A Home Is Like A Tomato
See? Like a tomato.
A home is like a tomato. When seeking one out, you just can’t go for size, you’ve got to go for taste. There is not much that excites me as the topic of green homes does. I mean green like quality, endurance, longevity, and functionality. If something does not do its job well, it will not be used for long. A home that is not comfortable, useful, and affordable is a home in the landfill. Quite possibly the only topic that could get me going more than the topic of green homes is the topic of America embracing a more thorough definition of what a green home actually is. For a home with solar panels, geothermal heat, FSC certified wood and no-VOC furniture is not green if it has 8,000 square feet of living space for two people and a dog. And a cat. And four children. It is just too big to be considered green due to the exorbitant rate of consumption of materials during construction and energy throughout its lifespan.
Getting back to me being excited, this is why I flipped over the recent article in Trim Tab, a new quarterly e-magazine that highlights green building trends published by the Cascadia Region Green Building Council. The article talks about Sarah Susanka’s book series, from which one of my favorite books comes; The Not So Big House: A Blueprint For the Way We Really Live. If you are interested in these two things, you will thoroughly enjoy this read:
1) how the design of your home effects your health and well-being
2) how the size of your home effects your health, well-being, and wallet
It conceptualizes how “The American Dream Home” has transformed over the last several decades and reveals blunt truths about McMansions, over-sized, empty boxes that are built using cheap materials and are poorly designed. In other words, a large investment that does not give a fraction of the satisfaction or longevity you expect of it and, to top it off, grossly increases your carbon footprint and energy bills. Not So Big gives solutions to many of the obstacles we encounter in the quest for a dream home, like how to get good design on a budget and how to figure out what size home works for you. It also plunges into detail about how subtle design moves are the ones that create the most treasured nuances in a home and how you can achieve them with very little space.
Trim Tab’s article gives so many great pieces of information that make your Green Home IQ sky-rocket. Not only does it steer you towards one of the most useful books regarding home design, it sums up how the issue of wanting ‘too much house’ has become grossly out of control and unnecessary. It gives statistics that show the trend in increasing square footage in single family homes and underlines the need for quality design and materials to create homes that are comfortable and long-lasting and work with our lifestyles without energy-gorging. The idea is to build smaller and smarter. It’s kind of like going with that organic, medium sized farm-stand tomato instead of the colossal, wan, peaked hybrid that was grown using chemical fertilizers and contains one tenth of the vitamins and flavor of the former.
You can find the article here in Trim Tab. It is free.
photo source: http://www.worth1000.com/emailthis.asp?entry=251912
Tax law, business financing and land costs continue to be motivators for increased house size in my realm of experience.
I live in a region with high-income families who take on larger mortgages (larger houses) for the larger interest deduction, business owners who were advised by their banks to buy larger homes in order to build more home equity to use as collateral to finance business expansion. Further, higher land costs encourage construction of more costly (larger) homes proportional to the value of the lot. The economics of a modest home on an expensive lot don’t work.
The drop in home values has temporarily stifled some of this motivation, but this may be a good time for another discussion about limitations on the mortgage deduction, as an economic motivator to build smaller more efficient homes proportional to the need.
Dennis
I second Dennis’es assertion that todays homes (at least most of those in the mass construction sector) do not reflect their main intended purpose - a comfortable living. They are designed to be first and foremost profitable for the building construction company. They are several times the size that would provide comfortable living conditions to the regular family because larges size can command higher price and since practically no one pays for the home out of pocket, the pain of paying too much for unneeded space is delayed by the mortgage term. The result - a huge drafty home made practically of cardboard with immense amount of wasted corridor and basement space that is very expensive to heat or cool and that looks pretentious yet still kind of cheesy.
I really don’t see any way the building industry can correct itself into building better, more comfortable and energy efficient homes. As long as market incentives are driving home sizes up, they will grow. The government will have to step up and use VERY unpopular tax measures on either the building construction side of the business or on the home owner side to penalize for overblown house size.
You know, it is a really tough time to be a believer into the free market enterprise spirit these days. it just does not seem to be too many markets able to correct themselves. Banks driving themselves into defaults, building construction industry that does not know when to stop, auto manufacturers making larger cars when the demand shifts into smaller - there is just no end to the samples of businesses NOT knowing what’s best for them.
Peace!