by 'Rick Gray

Created on: August 17, 2010   Last Updated: November 07, 2010

Are modern American homes too large?

Absolutely. From every possible perspective, the over-sized and often architecturally hideous McMansion has outlived any possible usefulness.

Americans' bloated suburban houses, and the lots they sit on, represent an unconscionable waste of energy, land, water, and natural resources. They destroy the habitats of hundreds of useful species in order to provide an excess of shelter for America's shrinking family unit.

They represent an outdated psychology which equates happiness with conspicuous consumption – and a distorted economics premised on the bizarre notion that a people can borrow and spend their way to national prosperity.

Further, though this consideration is often overlooked, costly suburban houses contribute to the widening gap between the funding of public schools in the prosperous suburbs and those in inner cities and poor rural areas. School funding is tied to real estate taxes almost everywhere in the United States, with the result that suburban school districts have a strong financial incentive to encourage suburban sprawl. And, in a vicious cycle, many families have felt compelled to purchase McMansions they do not need in order to send their children to better-funded schools. This school-funding cycle helps to explain the popularity of sububan living and the decay of many of America's cities.

Since the onset of the present recession, Americans finally seem to have grasped that a house is an asset, to the extent that it provides necessary and comfortable shelter – but that it is only rarely an investment. With this realization, Americans have begun to outgrow their addiction to buying “too much house” with borrowed money.

The real estate market – long over-stimulated by all manner of Federal, state and local subsidies – is at long last responding to economic reality. The McMansion now seems an endangered species.

Yet the McMansion will almost certainly die hard. From the White House to the courthouse, politicians and their long-time allies – the home-builders, the realtors, the mortgage industry, the road-builders, and the automobile industry – will continue seeking ways to promote the “American Dream” of a oversized house on an oversized lot, located many increasingly expensive commuter miles from places of work.

No one in Washington – liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican – is talking about the policies American really

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