The median number of rooms in an American home increased slightly from 5.4 in 2007 to 5.5 in 2017. Moreover, there seems to be some correlation between the median number of rooms and housing affordability.
The American Community Survey doesn’t ask people the size of their homes in square feet, probably because it assumes most people don’t know. But it does ask how many rooms are in their homes. Survey directions specify that “Rooms must be separated by built-in archways or walls that extend out at least 6 inches and go from floor to ceiling.” People are to “include bedrooms, kitchens, etc.” but “exclude bathrooms, porches, balconies, foyers, halls, or unfinished basements.”
This can be misleading because many homes built since World War II have open floorplans, which usually means the kitchen, dining room, and living room are all one big room. By census definitions, a three-bedroom, open-floorplan home would have four rooms, while a three-bedroom, traditional house would have six rooms even if both have the same number of square feet. The best we can hope for is that the ratio of open- to closed-floorplan homes is about the same in different parts of the country, which seems unlikely.
To some degree, expensive places have a smaller-than-average number of rooms while more affordable places have more than the average number. The median home in DC, which has an unaffordable value-to-income ratio of 5.7, has just 4.1 rooms. More affordable Georgia, whose value-to-income ratio is just 2.6, has 5.9 rooms. But the most number of rooms are in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, which each have a median of 6 or more rooms despite having value-to-income ratios of around 3.5, which is not unaffordable but is only marginally affordable.
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Among states, the correlation between the number of rooms and the average value-to-income ratio is -0.58 (the minus sign meaning that areas with lower value-to-income ratios tend to have more rooms), which is reasonably strong. Among major cities it is just -0.37, and for urban areas it is only -.18, which is nearly non-existent.
Between 2007 and 2017, the median number of rooms increased in most areas, including all states except Vermont. However, they decreased in unaffordable San Francisco-Oakland, San Jose, and Seattle urban areas, while they increased in affordable Atlanta, Houston, and Indianapolis. However, the correlations between the change in room size and value-to-income ratios are not better than those between the number of rooms and value-to-income ratios.
If you want to see how well your state, region, county, or city fares in median room sizes, I’ve posted a showing the medians for 2007, 2010, 2016, and 2017.
Housing is more expensive than ever before, Nevermind the average home size has doubled in the last 30 years…might have something to do with that. A 25% reduction in floor plan size would result in a near 50% reduction in house volume. Volume which increases by a factor of 30-60% for every 100-200 sq ft increase in floor area, that volume adds to the higher energy cost to heat and cool. When realtors advertise 9-10 foot ceilings they’re scamming you…how the hell are you supposed to clean them? An increase in ceiling height increases the useless amount of air volume you have to heat and cool. A decrease in ceiling height by one foot decreases your air volume by 1000-2000 cubic feet. It takes 19 BTU’s of energy to change the temperature of 1000 cubic feet of air one degree Fahrenheit. It takes 2-3 times that much energy to decrease the temperature (Via air conditioning) one degree Fahrenheit. The average home size in the US is now 2,600 square feet of floor space. With a ceiling height of 9 feet that’s over 23,000 cubic feet of interior volume. A McMansion with 9 foot ceilings, needs several thousands BTU’s of energy per day to climate control. A floor plan decrease by 25% eliminates nearly 6,000 cubic feet of volume you’d have to cool down or heat up and a ceiling reduction of just one foot eliminates nearly 8,000 cubic feet of volume. Despite thousands of years of technological progression there’s still no substitute for the southern facing house and the thermal mass wall. Passive solar design requires the knowledge to design and orientate buildings so that they can be heated by the sun. Coupled with other low-tech solutions such as thermal underwear, heated clothing and tile stoves, passive solar design could all but eliminate the use of fossil fuels and biomass for heating buildings throughout large parts of the world. Modern climate control is a technology where we expend huge amounts of energy to warm a interior volume we mostly don’t occupy or spending more energy to get rid of that heat energy. Passive solar design does not involve any new technology. In fact, it has been around for thousands of years, and even predates the use of glass windows. For most of human history, buildings were adapted to the local climate through a consideration of their location, orientation and shape, as well as the appropriate building materials. This resulted in many vernacular building styles in different parts of the world. In contrast, most modern buildings look the same wherever they stand.
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The Ancient Greeks built entire cities which were optimal for solar exposure as far back as the fifth century BC. The fact is, passive solar design took a back seat to the EnergyStar concept which has done little to save energy. Appliances and devices are not the biggest energy consumers. The largest source of energy use is climate control namely water ad air heating which eats up 50-70% of our energy portfolio.
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Denver, Colorado was originally developed using the method described by passive solar pioneers. Since back then before snowplow trucks and salting there was no method but solar for melting the copious snow the city received. As it grew, the traditional north-south grid was used… which to this day requires much more cost and effort to clear in the winter. For those that grew up in Southern California, and could never figure why the old centers had grids that tilted off the cardinal points (Los Angeles, Downey, Anaheim, the oldest part of Santa Ana, and many others). Now you know.
Ralph Knowles, professor emeritus at the USC’s School of Architecture and author of three fascinating books on the topic.
Energy and Form: An Ecological Approach to Urban Growth
Sun Rhythm Form (MIT Press) Reprint Edition
Ritual House: Drawing on Nature’s Rhythms for Architecture and Urban Design
The Ancient Greeks resorted to passive solar design mainly because of acute firewoord shortages, but there was an additional reason: they believed that solar heat was good for human health. When solar access in cities regained attention in the western world during the urbanisation of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, health was the one and only motivation.
The Industrial Revolution brought plenty of cheap energy, but also plenty of disease. Millions of people ended up in overcrowded buildings in narrow streets. These neighbourhoods were soon ravaged by lethal epidemics such as tuberculosis, cholera, smallpox and typhoid fever. Most medical experts were convinced that these illnesses were caused by a lack of fresh air and sunshine. In reality they were the result of poor sanitation and compacted living conditions. Some ailments were indeed cured or alleviated by sunshine and fresh air. For example, rickets, a bone deforming disease endemic among children in nineteenth-century cities, was caused by a lack of sunshine.
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Density is a pet subject of environmentalists, who argue that densely populated cities are the solution to lower the energy requirements for transportation. On the other hand, the solar envelope shows that above a certain treshold, density can also raise energy requirements, in particular those of heating, cooling and daylighting buildings.
This means that it would probably be wise to aim for a compromise. If we would take the highest densities reached under the solar envelope as an upper limit, we could create cities where the critical functions of buildings can be met without fossil fuels, while still retaining (more than) high enough densities to make public transportation, bicycling and walking attractive.
Nine-foot ceilings are the ideal compromise between a feeling of spaciousness and energy efficiency. Basements especially are more tolerable with tall ceilings. Eliminates that dungeon feeling.
Every inch per 1000 square feet of space is another 83 cubic feet you don’t have to heat/cool.