Sometimes I think my friend Ariel sends me links just to get me going.

Well, it worked this time. A story from Columbia, South Carolina's Free Times, titled America's McMansion Problem has inspired the following  rant/stats post — the first time all year that I've felt like ranting about mere data.

Try these stats on for size:

• 42 percent of newly built houses now have more than 2,400 square feet of floorspace, compared with only 10 percent in 1970.
• In the America of 1950, single-family dwellings were being 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.
• Since 1940, the average number of people living in an American home has dropped from 3.7 to 2.6, but the average size of new houses has doubled.
• The manufacture and transportation of concrete to build a typical 2,500-square-foot house generates the equivalent of 36 metric tons of carbon dioxide.
• Construction and remodeling of residences accounts for three-fourths of all the lumber consumed each year in the United States.
• For as environmentally significant as construction materials are, it’s estimated that only about one-tenth of a house’s total energy consumption occurs while it’s being built; the other 90 percent happens while it’s being lived in. That can be reduced by “green” construction, but making green houses too big can cancel out all of those gains.
• A 1,500-square-foot house with mediocre energy-performance standards will use far less energy for heating and cooling than a 3,000-square-foot house of comparable geometry with much better energy detailing.

Of course, the article from South Carolina didn't address regional extravagances like heated driveways for mountain "hideaways" — a particularly galling trend in the Rocky Mountain West — and only touched upon another unfortunate statistic:

• Americans now own 5.7 million non-rental vacation houses with a median size of 1,300 square feet; together, those second homes represent enough surplus living space to accommodate the nation’s homeless population 10 times over.

Is there any bigger symbol of our out-of-control lust for more, more, more than the homes we're currently building?

Carbon Neutral Journal's stats are brought to you by Blue Spruce Cleaners.

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