I live in Japan in an apartment that is 69 square metres. It has a living/dining room, small kitchen, tiny bathroom, toilet, hall and three other small rooms. We have two children, and whilst it is small, it is not tiny and we can manage perfectly well.
I read here about houses or apartments inhabited by dopers that are, say 1000 square feet. Well, that sounds HUGE! Is it really? How many square metres would that be?
We have just bought a house here that by my British standards is a reasonable size - one bathroom and three bedrooms, plus a kitchen, living room, class-room and small Japanese style room downstairs. It seems very spacious to us after our apartment but reading the deeds it still is only 130 square metres. So how many square feet would that be? Is that small by US standards?
I get the impression that American houses are gigantic, but surely that can’t be so? Or can it?
Thank you - that means that our 70 square metre apartment and someone’s 1000 square foot one aren’t wildly different then.
So now, is our 1400 square foot new house small, large, medium by American standards? (I am sure it depends on what part of the US the house is in, but I’d like to have a rough idea.)
Assuming you are in a average middle-America suburban neighborhood, 1400 square feet is comfortably average, and on the large side of average for older subdivisions. Newer homes are tending to be larger, I think, but I remember hearing somewhere that the average (here in Michigan) was something like 950 square feet. (Lots of houses built in the 30’s and 40’s here, and older homes are smaller, bringing down the average.) No cite for you, though.
According to this site, the average floor area per person in the United States is ~70m[sup]2[/sup].
Here’s another link (Warning, PDF file) that shows how the floor area of American homes has varied over time and by region (all numbers are in ft[sup]2[/sup]). Note the steady upward trend.
here’s a link that compares the floor area of Japanese, American, British, German, and French homes (5[sup]th[/sup] paragraph).
All of this information seems to indicate that American homes are quite a bit larger than both British and Japanese homes.
1400 sq. ft. would be just about average here in my neighborhood outside of Boston. Our house is about 2200 sq. ft. but it is larger than most of the others in this town because it is only about 7 years old whereas most of the houses around here were built in the first half of the 20th century, some earlier.
The biggest trend around here and in many other parts of the US is the building of these so called “McMansions”. 3,000, 4,000 and even 5,000 sq. ft. or more is not at all unusual. House builders around here pretty much don’t even bother building affordable housing anymore unless forced to by government regulations.
I have to point out that I live in the northernmost island where there is a lot more space and land is a lot cheaper than the urban areas of Honshu.
My friend bought an older house than ours in a major urban area of Japan, which is fairly small; (two bedrooms, three rooms downstairs) and stands on a tiny amount of land; literally six feet around the sides and back of the house, and a car’s length at the front. It cost her about 450,000 USD.
Our house in a suburb of Sapporo, the main city of Hokkaido, stands on about 3500 square feet of land which is double the normal plot size even in our city (which is why we bought it!) but still only cost us about 210,000 USD.
The frustrating thing about housing in Japan is that the building itself loses value rapidly, only the land keeps its price. Our contract states the price of our 15 year old house was about 45,000 USD and the rest is the price of the land! In some ways this is great, as the land values in that area have not changed or have increased slightly over the past fifty years or so. In other ways, it means that there is little incentive to do major structural work or big improvements on the house as it is just cash down the drain.
I think the way Japanese and Brits/Americans weigh up the decision about whether or not a house is a good bargain is very different. I was lusting after the nice garden and the elbow room that I have missed for 13 years, and also thinking that at least the house was cheap so we weren’t wasting money on a non-re-saleable thing. My husband stood there saying “Two plots of land, very easy to divide between the kids when we die” Ewww!
To get back to floor areas, I called my Dad in England tonight, and he calculated that his house is about 1000 square feet, and would sell at the moment for about the same as our house, though we have one more room each downstairs and upstairs, and our plot is bigger too. I never, ever thought I’d see the day when a house in Japan was better value than a house in England!
I hate to launch a round of oneupmanship, but in many new suburban neighborhoods, the average is 3,500-4,250 sq ft. and these are positively DWARFED by the real McMansions that measure in the 7,000-11,000 sq. ft.
It’s all relative, but I don’t think you can claim to have a McMansion until you’re in the 6,500-7,000+ sq. ft realm. We’re talking three separate furnaces, 3-5 fireplaces, two European dishwashers, media center, rec room, library, two-story family room, at least two staircases, dumb waiter, custom everything, yadda yadda yadda
Yeah, I agree. Before I moved to NYC, I lived in about 3500 sq ft in San Jose. It was big, but not at all considered a mansion. Not even close.
Strangely, the apartment we have here (about 1700 sq ft.) IS considered an mansion…not because of the size, but because of the price we paid for it…the state charges a mansion tax. :mad:
Oneupmanship in the opposite direction. I live in Toronto in a university-housing bachelor apartment. By my measurements it’s about 200 sq. ft (or 19 sq. m).
Well I have been inside some of these houses as they were being built and at open houses and such but I have to confess I didn’t break out my tape measure to get the exact measurements. Let’s just say they are freakin’ huge. And I did use the weasel phrase “5,000 sq. ft. or more”…
In my mind “McMansion” has more to do with a certain mindset than specific things like square footage. Cut down all the trees and build a house too big for the lot, in an architectural style with no reference to either historical context of the area or the other houses around it. Put in a sod lawn on the entire property and an automatic sprinkler system, water shortages be damned. No sidewalks because no one walks in the neighborhood. That kind of thing.
Of course, it all depends. My family (I am 16) just moved into our 6th (?) house that I can remember. I do not remember the house in Texas but i bet it was around 1000. Then a little later we moved to WV in an average house for that area and it was around 1400sf. Then since we moved to NC we have had three houses. I think we went from about 2000 to the current 3700. As far as I can tell, that is a slight bit more than average for this area, but not by much. (the price we paid for it is right at average, go figure.)
As a side note: Some family of ours live in the abandoned coal mining areas of PA and there average house sizes are around 2000 if i was to make a guess.
One thing to keep in mind, at least for dopers who live in areas where cold winters require houses to have deep foundations, is that floor space below grade is not included in the floorspace of the house. For example, according to the realtors, my house is 1,000 square feet. But it has a fully finished basement, which gives me another 1,000 square feet of living space (less a few square feet taken up by the furnace, water heater, main drain pipe, etc). This “bonus” space can make some North American house look really spacious to people accustomed to bungalows or cottages with no basement.
Burntsand makes a very good point. My house is about 1000 square feet, with small rooms. Most people consider it quite small. (Or "nice for a starter house. :rolleyes: ) It does have a pleasant basement, a nice attic, and a 2-car detatched garage with a loft. That adds up to a large amount of storage/workshop space, which makes the house a lot more “livable” than a house/apartment with 1000 square feet total.
For about 50K more than I sold my cookie cutter house for in Colorado, I now have 10 acres and about 5000 square feet in Michigan. Colorado house was in a suburbia type town about 30 miles north of Denver. It was about 2400 square feet finished, with an unfinished 1000 square foot basement. Lot was about 1/5 of an acre, decent sized back yard, but neighbors on both sides.
Up here in the middle of nowhere, land is relatively cheap and houses are big. We’re a 2 minute drive (I timed it!) from a shopping area with Target, grocery stores, restaurants, etc. When you’re in the house, you can’t see the road or any other signs of civilization. We have deer in the backyard, and a trout-filled creek. You’d think you were a millions miles from civilization.
The only reason this was within our price range was that we live in a not-very-popular area. Go us!
“One thing to keep in mind, at least for dopers who live in areas where cold winters require houses to have deep foundations, is that floor space below grade is not included in the floorspace of the house. For example, according to the realtors, my house is 1,000 square feet. But it has a fully finished basement, which gives me another 1,000 square feet of living space.”
There are very few houses in Japan that have basements. In Hokkaido the weather is fairly severe, and houses have foundations which extend about four feet under the ground and stick up about another three feet, so that the actual floor level of the house is three feet above the garden (not great when you try to put in french doors!) Thus we have a crawl space under our house which I think after a bit of rubble was put in there and then it was poly-sheeted, is about 4 feet high. It is very useful for storing things but is not remotely a living area. Such a waste! If they had just dug seven feet down from the surface instead of building foundations up, we could have had a whole extra set of rooms…
It would be great to be able to count a whole basement extra to your floor area. Do most American houses have basements (cellars?) In Japan the only ones I have ever come across have been self-build houses belonging to expat Americans and Canadians! In the UK, some older houses have them (but no windows and fairly dank and unlivable) but most new houses don’t.
I live in Toronto in a university-housing bachelor apartment. By my measurements it’s about 200 sq. ft (or 19 sq. m).