Post by Moses on Feb 5, 2005 20:20:59 GMT -5
CourierPress
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URL: www.courierpress.com/ecp/gleaner_business/article/0,1626,ECP_4481_3523977,00.html
McMansions: Communities rising up against too-big houses
By JOAN LOWY, Scripps Howard News Service
February 5, 2005
It's while driving at night through Los Altos Hills, Calif., that Mayor Pro Tem Breene Kerr is most forcibly reminded of the energy that is wasted by the "monster homes" that dominate the upscale community.
"They look like small office buildings glowing in the dark," Kerr said. "Between the outdoor lighting and the light streaming out the windows, they are clearly consuming a lot of kilowatts for what is at most housing for three or four people."
The American appetite for super-sized houses to go with their super-sized SUVs and super-sized meals has begun to provoke a backlash. From Silicon Valley to the Rocky Mountains, communities are imposing restrictions that limit the energy consumption of mega-homes.
In Los Altos Hills, at the epicenter of the dot-com revolution, the typical new home is larger than the town's 8,500-square-foot city hall. Kerr has proposed an ordinance requiring that new homes over 6,000 square feet keep their energy use 25 percent below the maximum that California permits for homes of that size or to generate 25 percent of their own power though renewable energy.
"There is only so much we can do to expand the energy grid or the generation capacity. We need to look at reducing the growth of demand," Kerr said. "We seem to be gridlocked on this at the national level, but communities can create change from the bottom up."
The average new house size has risen from 1,660 square feet in 1973 to about 2,400 square feet in 2004, according to the National Association of Home Builders. But the most startling growth has been in the super-sized houses sometimes dubbed McMansions, starter castles or garage Mahals.
Nineteen percent of the new houses sold in 2003 were greater than 3,000 square feet, compared to 7 percent in 1986. Some builders report their average new-home size has been growing 150 to 200 square feet every few years.
New homes of 10,000 square feet or greater are still only 1 percent of the market, "but 1 percent is big number -- 10,000 homes a year," said Gopal Ahluwalia, vice president for research at the home builders association.
Homebuyers are also demanding higher ceilings, which also boosts home size. Thirty-eight percent of new homes now have 9-foot ceilings, compared to less than 15 percent in the 1980s, Ahluwalia said.
The result: Even though there have been significant gains over the last three decades in residential energy efficiency, these gains have been more than offset by increases in house size and the number of houses.
Overall residential energy use increased 16 percent from 1985 to 2002, even though energy efficiency per square foot improved 15 percent over the same period, according to the Department of Energy.
Meanwhile, the average household size has dropped from 3.35 people in 1960 to 2.58 people in 2002.
"Energy efficiency per square foot has improved, but not enough to keep up with the growth in square footage per home," said Richard Morgan, director of the green-building program in Austin, Texas. "When you consider the decrease in the number of people per house, the per capita increase in energy use has grown a lot."
Nearly 10 percent of new homes built today qualify for the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star, which means they are at least 30 percent more efficient than the national energy code.
Most new homes, however, fall short of the standard. Up to 80 percent of new homes don't meet the energy-efficiency requirements of state and local building codes, according to the EPA.
Water use is another concern. Gary Klein, an expert on residential water use with the California Energy Commission, estimates that the increase in average home size means that the typical U.S. household wastes 10 gallons of water a day -- or 3,650 gallons a year -- just waiting for the hot water to arrive.
"I would say that a typical large house easily wastes 20 gallons per house per day and I wouldn't be surprised if a McMansion wastes double that," Klein said.
There are signs that the popularity of McMansions is declining. Since 2001, the rate of increase in new-home size has slowed, Ahluwalia said. The average new home grew about 20 square feet in 2004, he said.
As energy prices increase and the population ages, super-sized houses may become a drain on the market, said Sam Rashkin, national director of the EPA's new-homes program.
"The baby boomers are becoming empty-nesters," Rashkin said. "They don't want to take care of that big a house and that big a property."
Meanwhile, a small but growing number of communities are taking action. In Colorado, Pitkin County and the town of Aspen charge new homeowners a fee if their homes exceed 5,000 square feet and another fee up to $100,000 if they exceed the "energy budget" allotted to their property by the local building code.
In Marin County north of San Francisco, new homes over 3,500 square feet must be 25 percent more efficient than the state energy code, and homes over 7,500 square feet must install a solar energy system that supplies at least 25 percent of their energy.
But David B. Goldstein, energy program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental group, said the trend may backfire.
"What you are seeing is a 'let's punish the McMansions' philosophy because a lot of people don't like McMansions for a number of reasons," Goldstein said. "When we've stuck to regulating technological efficiency, we've had successful programs. When we've tried to influence people's choices, we haven't done so well."
On the Net: www.nahb.org
www.energystar.gov/
(E-mail Joan Lowy at LowyJ(at)shns.com.)