We're Building Giant Houses Again

The Census Bureau released updated statistics this morning on new single-family housing completed within the past year, a snapshot of the latest demand for fireplaces (in 43 percent of new homes), fourth bedrooms (41 percent) and three-car garages (19 percent) in the housing construction market.

Most notably, Census has also been collecting data since 1973 on the average size of new homes in America, a number that has trended upward for decades (as, oddly, the size of the average U.S. household has actually gotten smaller). It appeared after the housing crash that the American appetite for ever-larger homes was finally waning. And this would seem a logical lesson learned from a recession when hundreds of thousands of households found themselves stuck in cavernous houses they neither needed nor could afford.