New Conceptions of Sufficient Home Size in High-Income Countries: Are We Approaching a Sustainable Consumption Transition?

ABSTRACT

Housing plays a significant role in impelling demand for natural resources and driving economic growth in high-income countries. Public policies, commercial prerogatives, and other inducements have encouraged construction and occupancy of ever-larger homes and this pattern has persisted in the face of decreasing household size, declining fertility, ageing populations, and increasing complexity of domestic relationships. This situation has created a perverse mismatch between available housing stocks and residential requirements. Additionally, imperatives to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions and to hasten progress on the United Nations 2030 Agenda demand new planning priorities. Building on the sufficiency turn in the field of sustainable consumption, this paper first formulates parameters for estimating an environmentally tenable and globally equitable amount of per person living area. It then highlights five emblematic cases of “space-efficient” housing. While acknowledging that prevalent spatial norms are evolving, the conclusion discusses the profound challenges of achieving a successful sustainable consumption transition.

KEYWORDS:

• Tiny houses
• smaller living
• accessory dwelling units
• micro-apartments
• co-living
• co-working
• sustainable lifestyles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Buildings constructed in accordance with “green” performance standards often fail to achieve their energy-efficiency projections and experience a so-called “energy-performance gap” (Conniff 2017). This disparity is frequently unacknowledged because the building has received initial (or renewed) certification and post-occupancy assessment is generally not required. Furthermore, singular focus on energy efficiency, without complementary consideration of the spatial dimensions of the structure, can give rise to notably perverse outcomes like the 929 m²/10,000 ft²) environmentally certified house (with ten-car garage) proposed in California (the plan was eventually abandoned after a six-year legal battle) (Bernstein 2010; Cherney 2016). While this case is exceptional, it makes obvious the need to consider not just home size, but also the consequences of related trends towards increasing lavishness, comfort, and convenience (Shove 2003; Quitzau and Røpke 2008, 2009).

2. Homebuilding is an important part of national economies because of its scale of resource throughput and employment. In the United States, calculations produced by the National Association of Home Builders suggest that construction of new single-family and multifamily structures, residential remodelling, production of manufactured homes, and brokers’ fees accounts for 3‒5 percent of total gross domestic product. See https://www.nahb.org/en/research/housing-economics/housings-economic-impact/housings-contribution-to-gross-domestic-product-gdp.aspx. More generally, the political economy of homebuilding in the country has powerfully encouraged the provision of outsized houses (see, for example, Beauregard 2006; Gallagher 2013). The term “aspirational identity” is from Garelick (2014).

3. European countries with the most residential space per person (as of 2008) are Denmark (77 m²/829 ft²), Cyprus (59 m²/635 ft²), Sweden (58 m²/624 ft²), Netherlands (56 m²/603 ft²), Finland (56 m²/603 ft²), Austria (55 m²/592 ft²), France (53 m²/571 ft²), Germany (53 m²/571 ft²), Ireland (52 m²/560 ft²), and Italy (50 m²/592 ft²). See http://www.entranze.enerdata.eu.

4. Interestingly, there was a decline in the average (both mean and median) size of new privately owned single-family housing units started in the United States in 2016 and 2017. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the mean size of floor area for new construction of such homes was 2,689 ft² in 2015, 2,624 ft² in 2016, and 2,599 ft² in 2017 (https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/pdf/quarterly_starts_completions.pdf). It is relevant to note that previous declarations that the era of increasing home size was coming to an end, most recently during the mid-2000s were ultimately premature and the dominant pattern ultimately reasserted itself once economic conditions improved (see, for example, Flint 2006; Flisram 2010; Rice 2010).

5. The spatial adequacy of housing can also be assessed through household-crowding indices used by epidemiologists and others to measure residential density within particular dwelling units with the aim of determining the relationship between socioeconomic status and various morbidity and mortality risks as well as social and psychological well-being (see, for example, Krieger and Higgins 2002; Blake, Kellerson, and Simic 2007; Ferguson, MacAllister, and Evans 2013; Semple 2016).

6. Some jurisdictions have developed more elaborate legal requirements for different parts of a residential unit. For instance, New York City has a particularly detailed building code that includes precise guidance on the dimensions of various rooms. For example, at least one room must be at least 14 m²/150 ft² and minimum bedroom size is 7 m²/80 ft² though this latter requirement does not apply to studio or one-room apartments. The 14 m²/150 ft² stipulation does not include the kitchen, the bathroom, or the closets. These standards generally only apply to market-rate apartments and are not relevant with respect to units designated for affordable housing, some types of senior housing, and in certain zoning districts. See https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/apps/pdf_viewer/viewer.html?file=2014CC_BC_Chapter_12_Interior_Environment.pdf§ion=conscode_2014.

7. At the same time, already low fertility rates in a number of high-income countries are continuing to decline. For instance, in the United States, the number of children born to women of childbearing age has dropped by 15 percent since 2007 (Tavernise 2019).

8. While it is admittedly a special case, average home size in Hong Kong is 45 m²/484 ft². Singapore represents another unique example. A three-bedroom apartment managed by the country’s Housing and Development Board is 65 m²/700 ft² which on a per person basis equals 19 m²/205 ft² per person (http://www.teoalida.com/singapore/hdbflatsizes). Average home size in Italy is 81 m²/872 ft² and Sweden is 83 m²/893 ft², both just above the maximum sufficiency threshold.

9. Per person living space in most eastern European countries [Romania (24 m²/258 ft²), Slovakia (32 m²/344 ft²), Croatia (33 m²/355 ft²), Bulgaria (34 m²/365 ft²), and Poland (35 m²/376 ft²)] is only marginally higher than the upper bound determined by the current analysis (see http://www.entranze.enerdata.eu).

10. One of the more curious facets of the tiny-house movement is the penchant among some owners to furnish their homes to extremely luxurious standards. An explanation for this apparent paradox is the well-known psychological concept of moral licencing which suggests that people will aim to balance “good” and “bad” deeds (see, for example, Tiefenbeck et al. 2013). In other words, a personally or socially venerated activity provides entitlement to justify an associated pursuit that is morally contestable (termed “negative spillover”). This phenomenon is a common feature of “green consumerism” whereby ecologically minded consumers deploy compensatory heuristics that help to resolve the dissonance they experience when purchasing or using resource-intensive products. In the case of tiny houses, the smallness of the residential space arguably provides warrant for the luxury upgrades.

11. If a tiny house is opulently furnished in ways that resemble the projects featured in popular media depictions, even the presumptive gains in sustainability performance are unlikely to be realized.

12. Growing interest in Hong Kong in so-called micro-flats located in densely configured multi-unit buildings seems to offer a more legitimate form of sufficient housing – with more credible opportunities for sustainable lifestyles – than the tiny-house movement. See, for example, Lau and Wei (2018).

13. The relative popularity of urban and regional self-sufficiency in parts of the Nordic countries is also an important dimension of this debate, but autonomous management of resources raises a different set of issues than sufficiency. For work that emphasizes the self-sufficiency of geographic areas of the region, refer to Iveroth, Johansson, and Brandt (2013) and Björklund, Eksvärd, and Schaffer (2019).

14. Other Finnish small-house prototypes include Casagrande Laboratory’s Tikku (meaning “stick”) that has a footprint that is the size of a standard car-parking space (https://www.fastcompany.com/40482921/this-three-story-tiny-house-fits-in-the-footprint-of-a-parking-space), Sanaksenaho Architects’ House K in Espoo (https://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/sanaksenaho-architects-latest-house-in-finland-is-small-but-perfectly-formed), K2S Architects cabin on the island of Lepäinen (https://smallhousebliss.com/2015/03/01/k2s-architects-villa-kallioniemi), and designer Robin Falck’s micro-home (https://newatlas.com/finnish-micro-house/22580).

15. Media disparagement of small-scale living seems to be a common occurrence. For instance, announcement of a competition to construct micro-apartments in New York City (see below) prompted local tabloid newspapers to describe the units as “shoe-box sized” and “closetlike.” For a discussion of this episode and the issue in general, see an excellent series of articles by Doll that appears on the website of The Atlantic (Doll 2012a, 2012b). She makes the compelling argument that this derogatory commentary derives in part from the “unexpected power of tiny spaces [that] may serve to threaten those who live in bigger ones, or make them feel the need to defend their own life choices” (Doll 2012c). An extension to this contention is that the wider culture is built on a system of prerogatives that privilege – and socially reward – bigness.

16. As Volpe (2018) describes, other factors currently contributing to the rising number of “doubled-up households” in the United States are delayed marriage rates and mounting student-loan debt. Such residential arrangements have historically been widespread among very low-income households (a type of “private safety net” that is often a precursor to homelessness), but some analysts suggest that during the wake of the Great Recession it became a more common phenomenon (Mykyta and Macartney 2011; cf. Bitler and Hoynes 2015).

17. Despite efforts to address the challenges and contradictions (Clift, Sim, and Sinclair 2013; Larraufie and Lui 2018), the environmental dimensions of luxury goods have been a source of confusion among sustainability scholars and the rise of micro-apartments provides an opportunity to provide conceptual clarification. We need to distinguish between, on one hand, luxury in the sense of grandiosity that provides little or no benefit in terms of functional performance or resource utilization. On the other hand, some forms of luxury are predicated on expert design that can provide compensatory advantages and help to overcome conditions initially regarded as constraints. In particular, intelligently crafted products that are durable and sensitive to limiting factors like size can make smaller spaces seem larger and more adequate. Also, germane here is the fact that the purchase and deployment of more expensive (and higher quality) goods can usefully absorb income that might otherwise be spent in more environmentally problematic ways.

18. Other companies with currently active co-living projects include Commonspace (http://www.commonspace.io), Common (https://www.common.com), and Stage 3 Properties (operating under the name Ollie) (http://www.stage3properties.com).

19. At the time of this writing, the future of WeLive (and WeWork) is uncertain due to severe financial and organizational problems.

20. See https://www.fishislandvillage.co.uk.

21. See https://www.roam.co.

22. Bhatia and Steinmuller (2018) assert that we are actually witnessing the implementation of two quite different design strategies – micro-sizing and sharing – to address the sufficient home size (and affordability) dilemma. On one hand, the downsizing of residential space “reduces the unit to its ultimate minimum of individual autonomy.” On the other hand, the sharing option results in “reorganising the relationship between the private and public realm … residents can have access to a form of luxury without the economic burden.”