McMansions Equivalent To 'SUVs That Run for 100 Years'

"The just-popped housing bubble has left behind a couple of million families in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure. It has also spawned a new generation of big, deluxe, under-occupied houses bulked up on low-interest steroids."

"The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates that 42 percent of newly built houses now have more than 2,400 square feet of floorspace, compared with only 10 percent in 1970. In 1970 there were so few three-bathroom houses that they didn't even to show up in NAHB statistics. By 2005, one out of every four new houses had at least three bathrooms."

"Smaller families are living in bigger houses. In the America of 1950, single-family dwellings were being were built with an average of 290 square feet of living space per resident; in 2003, a family moving into a typical new house had almost 900 square feet per person in which to ramble around."

"And for a given house design – 'green' or standard, monolithic or pseudo-Victorian -- the bigger its square footage, the bigger its environmental footprint."

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The long-term impact of titanic houses parallels that of gas-gulping SUVs and pickup trucks. Americans will be stuck with heating, cooling and powering the millions of them already littering the landscape – not for years like SUVs, but for decades."