The Constrained and Unsustainable Choices of New Home Buying

 

Photo of new construction in Happy Valley Oregon that I took this summer. Houses in the area sell for half a million on up in the crazy Portland metro area market. No matter where you go in North America, you get the same house repackaged in a slightly different configuration.

If we were to build our own house without concern for resale, zoning, or community expectations, it might be a well-designed craft house somewhere around a thousand square feet. We lived in a nice house that size on the Standing Rock Reservation for several years and found it to be an excellent size for two people. It is the standard rectangular house that is reproduced across American Indian reservations. That size house or even a little smaller, merged with lessons from the tiny house movement that has pushed efficient design and use of space to a high level, would be more than adequate. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world, and if we are buying new, we are constrained to purchase something bigger because that is all the market offers.

My wife and I are big fans of the tiny house movement not only for its efficient use of space, and its less is more ethos but the fact that it may be the lightest way to live on the earth in a single occupancy dwelling. Of course, an old house is best because its construction materials are both storing carbon past energy and not using new resources and energy. There may be a balancing point where the efficiency of a new home overtakes an old one, but a retrofitted old house might still be better overall.

 Living in an apartment or condo-style situation where the building is heated and cooled as a whole, and the ratio of outer walls exposed to the environment per capita is small, is much more sustainable than a single family home. The town of Whittier Alaska, lives in just such an arrangement; the whole village lives in the one building pictured below. More small towns, especially in places with wildly variable weather like North Dakota, could benefit from such designs. A structure like this will weather the climate swings much better than the flimsy stick buildings we rely on. Stick buildings are increasingly getting wiped out by every manner of disaster. My wife, from the Philippines, where typhoons hit communities regularly, continually asks why everything in America is built from sticks. We will learn the hard way.
 

Creative Commons License Wikimedia

 

 The single family home is an endlessly inefficient use of materials, space and the ongoing resources to heat, cool and maintain it. Still, there is something about living in ones own house surrounded by land and that is its attraction. Low density living is in every way unsustainable going forward. It is common sense and validated by numerous studies, that high density housing is better. Yet, just like the current boom in buying behemoth vehicles, people don't live by common sense or what might alleviate climate change. 

High density low rise development as opposed to the low density development that characterizes much of America is the best way to build. High rise developments like Manhattan counterintuitively are less sustainable than low rise. The happy medium between towering skyscrapers and spread out McMansions is the best. It is effectively, what we live in currently, a collection of three story apartment blocks surrounded by greenspaces. Low rise high density might also include a compromise with the single family home with closely spaced units, but you won't find that in America outside of a few progressive cities. I keep writing about Tokyo, because they seem to have created the best combination of single family homes and high density. Though, they need to improve the longevity of structures because tearing down and rebuilding is the most unsustainable thing of all.

 

The future could be good if we did it right, but we won't. In North America more than any other part of the world, we have created the most unsustainable, spread out, car centered, and costly development style, every part of which works against moving toward sustainability. It is a system that by its very design marginalizes and separates people exacerbating the fraught state of American society. It is a house of cards that depends on cheap energy to make it even marginally functional.

  So right now, my wife and I are living in the most sustainable configuration and are moving to the most unsustainable configuration: the large single family home on a sizable lot spread out from everything. That said, it is still the smallest lot and house available in new construction in our area. If we had more choice, we would purchase a smaller house on a smaller piece of land, but that is not an option. Here in the Williston, as in most of America, we are constrained by one choice: a single family home on a large lot, and it is the most unsustainable way to live.