New Homes – The Bigger the Better?

The elderly father of one of my good friends once said to me, “People should buy as much house as they can afford.”  In other words, the bigger, the better up to the maximum you can afford in monthly payments. 

I suppose this thinking makes sense from an economic perspective because a home is good place to put one’s savings.  It’s a stable investment and comes with a mortgage interest deduction on income tax assuming you have a loan on the property.  Real estate developers, agents, and lenders are pleased that many people embrace this positive outlook as it means more dollars in their pockets.

But from an environmental perspective and especially with regard to the climate crisis, it’s a rotten idea.  People need a place to live but do they really need the largest house they can afford?  Consider the following contrasts between a “McMansion” and a modestly-sized home:

- It takes more energy to heat and cool it and often that energy comes from greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels.

- It uses more building materials (like timber, bricks, and drywall) to construct it, most of which require fossil fuels to produce and transport them.

- It eats up more wildlife habitat and open space including trees and native grasses which consume carbon dioxide by photosynthesis.

- New McMansions are usually further away from jobs and services which means residents use more gasoline than they would if they had an older home closer to a city center.  They drive everywhere – who needs sidewalks?  Contractors and repair people based in the city use more gasoline to get to these suburban “estates”.

- The larger the home, the more unnecessary stuff the owners can accumulate.  Gotta fill up those empty rooms!

- People complain about the footprints of oil and gas wells but those typically have a life of 10 to 40 years and their sites can be reclaimed after they are plugged and abandoned.  New homes are forever or at least for hundreds of years.  How often do you hear about old homes being torn down to make way for new open space?

 

Do modern, small families really need all that home space unless they are Mormons or Roman Catholics who don’t believe in birth control?  Granted, there are some people with home businesses who need extra space.  But, some of these places are so large they could accommodate an African village or a bowling alley.  Why does anyone need 6 bedrooms and 6 baths?  Is it space for their kids and grandkids when they all visit once a year for Christmas?  Couldn’t they stay at Embassy Suites?  And why would you need a 4-car garage?  Oh, I suppose for your boat, snowmobiles, ATVs, motorcycles, and other assorted toys.

If you read the websites and promotional literature for new suburban/exurban developments with large homes, they play up their conservation values, provision and protection of open space, and the energy efficiency of their mega-house products.  Many developments have idyllic, euphemistic names like “Fox Run” and “Deer Valley” even though the foxes and deer have been displaced by these developments.  The developers tout that their communities are “covenant-protected” but the covenants seem to be about protecting conformity and perceived resale value while downplaying environmental values.  It’s all a “greenwashing” sham designed to make buyers feel better.  Consider the following:

-  How many of these new communities do you see with roof-top solar panels?  No, that would detract from the community aesthetics.  So, covenants prohibit them.

- How many of the new homes come with heat pumps or geothermal heating/cooling systems?  Nope – too gimmicky for their buyers.  Let’s just run gas lines into the development to perpetuate future dependency on natural gas.

-  Xeriscaping?  Forget it.  People want lawns, the greener the better.  Thus, developers buy up water rights from farmers and ranchers so community members can waste as much water as they want to.   

- Hanging out your clothes on a line to dry with the help of the sun and wind?  No, that’s tacky – we don’t want to see other peoples’ stinkin’ underwear!  Seriously – covenants prevented my partner Judy’s mother from hanging out her clothes in her gated community of big homes in Florida.  So instead, everyone always uses electric or gas dryers which create more carbon emissions.

  

I’m convinced that few developers have anything approaching a social conscience or environmental ethics.  It’s all about MONEY$$$.  The bigger the homes they build, the bigger their profits.  Better they should sell these monstrosities to foreign investors who let them sit idle most of the year (an especially big issue in resort communities) than provide housing for the lower middle class / working class.  Let them live in trailers and doublewides, right?  Or they can live in exorbitantly priced apartments they can barely afford – more perpetual income for investors and real estate companies. 

Following is an example of a development that really has annoyed me personally. 

In the Denver metro area, we have a wonderful tree-lined recreational trail that snakes 71 miles from the southwest to the northeast of the city.  It is called the Highline Canal Trail and it follows a 150-year-old former irrigation canal.  For many years, I ran along this trail while training for marathons and half-marathons.  Nowadays, I take long walks there.

There was one section of the trail I was particularly fond of near the south end, just south of Chatfield State Park.  It was relatively rural with prairie, trees, small farms, scattered homes, and mountain views to the west.  About three years ago, I saw to my horror that a large subdivision was under construction on both sides of a section of the trail.  It is called Solstice and was approved by county authorities in 2017.

 

An early version of Solstice’s site plan.  The Highline Canal Trail forms a semi-circle through the development.  Source:  https://www.sterlingranchroundup.com/post/the-latest-on-solstice-littleton-s-new-1-100-home-development

 

Solstice is platted for 1100 homes once it is fully built-out.  The sizes range from a relatively modest 2026 square feet ($684,000) to a whopping 5789 square feet selling for well over $1,200,000.  The biggest homes have 8 bedrooms and 7½ baths.  The development is about 20 miles from either of Denver’s two largest employment centers for business and professional workers:  downtown and the Denver Tech Center.  So more long, gas-guzzling commutes to work. 

 

A drawing of a proposed 5200-square-foot home in Trails Edge at Solstice:  6 bedrooms, 6½ baths, etc. and yours for only $1,200,000.  And this house is relatively modest in size and aesthetically drab compared to some of the new McMansions I’ve recently seen in the Denver Metro area.   Source: https://www.sterlingranchroundup.com/post/the-latest-on-solstice-littleton-s-new-1-100-home-development

 

If the homes in Solstice don’t fit your needs, there are numerous other new developments (homes, condos, and apartment buildings) gobbling up former open space and ranch land in the 5-mile area between Chatfield State Park and Roxborough State Park to the south.  All are in Douglas County, located between Denver and Colorado Springs and a poster-child for out-of-control development having ballooned from 8500 residents in 1970 to nearly 360,000 in 2020. 

What can we do about developments like Solstice that are destroying open space while contributing to the Climate Crisis?  Unfortunately, it’s against the law to shoot greedy real estate developers but in fairness to them, they wouldn’t be building, building, building bigger and bigger were people not clamoring for their products.  Somehow we have to change public attitudes bending them toward a more sustainable future.  There is a desperate need for an ethic that considers unnecessarily large homes nothing to be proud of.            

As individuals, we don’t have to buy these climate-damaging monstrosities.  We also don’t need to build a new home unless it’s energy efficient and has a footprint that minimizes the impact to Mother Earth.  But, otherwise, I despair at the prospect of endless construction of unnecessarily large new homes in the future. Maybe if we “Baby-Boomers” don’t make big homes obsolete, younger generations will.  They are having fewer kids and are buying less stuff – no personal libraries of books, no record collections, no formal dining rooms, and fewer adult toys.