Cars are smaller and fewer and less gassy in America, but home-size growth halted only briefly during the depths of the Great Recession, subsequently regaining the lost square footage and then some. Even our most famous environmentalist, Al Gore, lives in a climate-killing monster with more-than-ample mantle space for his Nobel and Oscar. From Henry Grabar’s Salon piece, “We Must Kill the McMansion!“:

“This surfeit of space is a potent symbol of the American way of life; it speaks to our priorities, our prosperity and our tendency to take more than we need. But the superlative size of our houses isn’t just a foam finger America can hold up to the world. It’s correlated with land use patterns and population density, which in turn determine the environmental impact and personal health of communities, and whether they can support a diverse range of businesses, facilities and transportation choices. It’s no coincidence that a modern American suburb like Weston, Florida, has just one-third the population density of Levittown.

Given the environmental, infrastructural and financial costs of Americans’ insatiable spatial appetites – the share of our budgets devoted to housing is 41 percent, up from 26 percent in the Levittown era – you can understand why some saw good news in the recession-era report that our houses had begun to shrink. Between 2007 and 2010, for the first time in a half century, the average size of new U.S. homes fell by more than a hundred square feet, dropping back toward 2004 levels.

It was no peak; last year, the average size of new American houses reached an all-time high of 2,679 square feet. The increase in space per person has been even more dramatic. Between 1973 and 2013, the average American household shrank from 3.01 to 2.54 persons; new homes give Americans more than 1,000 square feet per family member, on average. That’s roughly twice as much space as we had in 1973.

You may consider this an indicator of success, excess, or both. Planners consider it a challenge. Economic growth, as the prolific planner Pedro Ortiz has written, drives urban expansion far more than population growth. In Madrid, for example, the average person’s living space expanded from 129 square feet in 1974 to 301 square feet in 2007 — a nearly threefold increase. While the population hardly changed between 1975 and 1995, the city’s footprint expanded by 50 percent.

The phenomenon is universal. But American homes dwarf those in nearly every other country on Earth.”