120 Years of U.S. Residential Housing Stock and Floor Space

Abstract

Residential buildings are a key driver of energy consumption and also impact transportation and land-use. Energy consumption in the residential sector accounts for one-fifth of total U.S. energy consumption and energy-related CO2 emissions, with floor space a major driver of building energy demands. In this work a consistent, vintage-disaggregated, annual long-term series of U.S. housing stock and residential floor space for 1891–2010 is presented. An attempt was made to minimize the effects of the incompleteness and inconsistencies present in the national housing survey data. Over the 1891–2010 period, floor space increased almost tenfold, from approximately 24,700 to 235,150 million square feet, corresponding to a doubling of floor space per capita from approximately 400 to 800 square feet. While population increased five times over the period, a 50% decrease in household size contributed towards a tenfold increase in the number of housing units and floor space, while average floor space per unit remains surprisingly constant, as a result of housing retirement dynamics. In the last 30 years, however, these trends appear to be changing, as household size shows signs of leveling off, or even increasing again, while average floor space per unit has been increasing. GDP and total floor space show a remarkably constant growth trend over the period and total residential sector primary energy consumption and floor space show a similar growth trend over the last 60 years, decoupling only within the last decade.

Material efficiency strategies to reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with buildings, vehicles, and electronics—a review

“…Per capita floor area trends upwards with time and increasing GDP [48], but average floor area range from 30-70 m 2 per person in countries with a GDP of $50 000 per capita and year, indicating that different conditions and policies result in very different material requirements [49]. Although urban dwellers have less floor space per person than rural dwellers [50,51], the ongoing transition of humanity to cities is not enough to counterbalance the overall trend of increasing per capita floor area.…”

“…In the US, the average lifetime of residential buildings is 50-60 years [43,48,60], in Europe it exceeds 100 years [61][62][63], while recent historical building lifetimes have been 30-40 years in Japan [64,65] and just 25 years in China [66][67][68]. While short historical building lifetimes in emerging Asian countries can be explained by the inadequacy and inflexibility of buildings built during rapid early urbanization and industrialization, the question arises whether and how the rapid obsolescence of currently constructed buildings can be avoided and how new buildings can be more flexibly designed and easily modified to meet evolving demands.…”

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

“…These circumstances have combined to contribute to a general pattern in which the average size of residential constructions in most high-income countries has been steadily increasing over the past few decades. For instance, in the United States, the typical newly built house nearly tripled from 91 square metres (m 2 )/983 square feet (ft 2 ) in 1950 to 255 m 2 /2,740 ft 2 in 2015 (Wilson and Boehland 2005;Moura et al 2015). These expanding dimensions are the result of industrial design preferences, lifestyle expectations, marketing promotionalism, and financial considerations that have led to the enlarging of room sizes, the creation of spaces to accommodate special functions (playrooms, home offices, in-house theatres), and the proliferation of bathrooms (Devlin 2010;McMullan and Fuller 2015).…”

A Probabilistic Dynamic Material Flow Analysis Model for Chinese Urban Housing Stock

“…Additionally, a dynamic stock‐driven material model has been widely exploited to simulate and forecast the evolution of building stocks in several other countries, such as the United States (Moura et al. ), Chile (Gallardo et al. ), Germany and Czech Republic (Vásquez et al.…”

“…This dynamic segmented model has been further applied to simulate the development of dwelling stocks in 11 European countries (Sandberg et al 2016a). Additionally, a dynamic stock-driven material model has been widely exploited to simulate and forecast the evolution of building stocks in several other countries, such as the United States (Moura et al 2015), Chile (Gallardo et al 2014), Germany and Czech Republic (Vásquez et al 2016), and Japan (Hatayama and Tahara 2016).…”