Me Want More Square Footage!

Why following the urge to buy big might not make you happy

by Charles Montgomery

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It’s hard to put happiness theory to work in a personal real estate strategy, especially when you are part of a species programmed to make the wrong decisions. But policy-makers have begun to pick up the slack. Britain’s Labour government used it to reform that country’s unemployment system. The city of Bogotá used research on status to underpin a restructuring of its road system, taking prime space away from cars and giving it to buses, bikes, and pedestrians so poor commuters could feel more equal. Optimism shot up.

How would the lessons from well-being research inform a happier home policy? Would we tax big house lots as we do booze and cigarettes? Slap tolls on highways to push people into denser neighbourhoods? Combine old folks’ homes with child care centres? The theory may actually support such measures, but it could just as easily be used to justify herding the poor into low-income ghettos such as the Downtown Eastside — after all, the jobless feel markedly better when they hang out with other unemployed people. The territory is as risky and uncertain as my own big-house conundrum.

But the market may have been kind to my man and me, in a roundabout way. We weren’t employing happy economics when we chose our new abode. We just couldn’t afford a house of our own. That’s how we came to buy a third of Keri’s 100-year-old creaker in a quiet, leafy nook of East Vancouver, the cheap side of town. The house was cramped, but interest rates were low. It seemed natural to borrow more cash and invest it in a renovation. Everyone else was doing it. Now the place has grown three extra bedrooms. It’s bigger than the neighbours’ houses, bigger than all our friends’ houses, too, and our mortgage payments have grown apace.

According to the arithmetic of well-being, this financial maxing out is a recipe for misery, especially if we decide to feed our monster mortgage by working harder or longer for more money. Instead, we have chosen not to let our house become proof of Rayo’s unhappiness formula.

No, we’re not selling it. We’re filling all those spare rooms with renters.

I never imagined I’d be living with a gaggle of roomies when I hit forty. From a distance, the prospect has the appearance of a kind of half-assed slackerism, a failure to maintain a respectable status trajectory. Yet on good days, I have glimpsed in the half-framed shell and flapping plastic of our house a model straight from the hedonic textbooks. We will fill those rooms with four, five, six bodies. We will all cross paths in the unfinished kitchen. Since we won’t have the money to eat out, we will share meals on an old table alongside our recycled cabinets. There will be wine, too. Lots of wine. Our voices will carry over the arm’s length to our neighbours’ windows, and they will come over to borrow cups of sugar.

Our acquisitive, status-hungry genes may wish for a life more grand, more private, more sweepingly elegant and expansively lonely. But scarcity will have relegated us to a life of conviviality and trust. It will be hard to avoid the shared moments that drench baboons, cavemen, and even middle-aged slackers in feel-good neurotransmitters. If the economists are right, this big house just may render us happy, in spite of our unrealized desires.

Charles Montgomery won the 2005 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction for The Last Heathen. He is currently working on a book about radical cities.

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Comments (4 comments)

Mike: Hello, interesting article. Your big house will not make you any happier than you are already.
My wife and I have been living happily in less than 500sqft condo for more than 2 years. Inner city Calgary

Now we are buying a house...600sqft! Moving up in the world.
Less IS more. Less is also much easier to clean and pay for! Less is also MUCH easier to sell when the time comes.
December 14, 2007 12:42 EST

Shari: As someone who used to work coordinating home sharers with tenants, I'm concerned that the writer may be idealizing a future with strangers living in those rooms. There are a great many problems that arise when tenants fail to respect the boundaries the renter imposes on them and when the renter makes those boundaries unfairly restrictive. The more intertwined the renters and tenants are (e.g., sharing meals), the worse it can be. When you start running out of milk daily or having to wash other people's dishes or finding their personal items cluttering shared spaces, you get a hint of conflict to come. When your washing machine is broken or the plumbing gets backed up and you find that all the friendliness in the world won't translate into consideration and respect for your property, you'll be living in the real world of home sharing. December 14, 2007 20:30 EST

Ken Morris: Think of the following rebuttal as a defense of prosperity. Charles Montgomery’s article “Me Want More Square Footage!” takes an overall playful tone, and is quaint in its imagery of Vancouver, which helped me remember my own experiences as a visitor to that beautiful city. However, he appears uncomfortable with the literal and figurative idea of “more square footage.” I believe his discomfort is based on the following fallacies:

1). The village fallacy: Just as happiness doesn’t necessarily follow living in more square footage, conviviality doesn’t follow being crammed in with a multitude of strangers in a city, a mass-transit automobile, or even a shared house. Woe be to the baboon who scratches another commuter’s back on a NYC subway. In most cases attempting prolonged eye contact or conversation with the suit next to you is inadvisable (“Is that a banana in your pocket, or are you just being convivial with me?”). Living right next door to, or in the room above, a person does not make you that person’s friend or vice versa. Happy people vet their friends and associates more carefully (no research on that, just life experience). Rich people living in large houses on a many-acred spread understand this as well as anyone living in a small apartment in a densely populated downtown.

2). The fallacy that assumes all schools are the same: this article and apparently the research that inspired this article fail to consider differences in public school quality where urban versus suburban areas are concerned. The differences cannot be underestimated when adults consider whether they wish to raise their children in the urban core versus in a less conveniently located outlying area. It may not be true that schools are better in the suburbs versus inner city in all of the cases (i.e., I’m not sure about Canada), but it is true enough most of the time in the U.S. that to overlook this as a driver for human behavior pertaining to domicile selection is unwise.

3) The straw man fallacy: To posit the idea of someone blindly embracing the "bigger = happier" notion, then knock the belief down to size with “research” is an evasive tactic. Only a fool would think a big house means one has finally arrived at happiness and no further insight or work toward the elusive joy goal is necessary. Are we to assume successful people living in big houses are fools, or somehow miss something that we in our smaller abodes see? In my opinion, the “bigger = happier = emptiness” idea is championed by the critics of free markets, which is the only economic model that allows upward mobility. These critics hold a reductive notion that serves to categorize prosperous people (and cultures) as being shallow. If Mr. Montgomery or the research he consults believes growth is bad and we would all do better to live on less (regardless of our ability to pay for better), then that should be clearly stated. If the author is unsure on this position, then points four, five, and six below may help.

4) The fallacy of “simpler” times (related to the “growth is bad” belief): I think the late 20th and early 21st centuries have been and will continue to be marred by the idea that the flourishing of all species except humans is a good thing. One might even trace this critique back to the Romantic movement in Europe. So perhaps this distrust of what is really just humans behaving naturally has been around with us for a while. Let pretty birds start arriving in droves and building impressive nests and the news is good. Let humans do the same, and the news is bad. To me, this is just plain tiring and seldom goes beyond the clichés about human prosperity (the use of the word “sprawlscape” in such a cliché). The romantic attachment to a smaller “ecological footprint” (another cliché) is a terrible naiveté about what life would be like if draconian measures to reduce energy consumption are ever enacted. To take one example of prosperity, the automobile has led to more human happiness than the horse and buggy ever did; otherwise, we would have kept our trusty steeds and our dung shovels.

5) The fallacy that says bettering ones economic standing is purely an exercise in material gain: Prosperous western democracies (especially the U.S.) are decidedly not “victims” of what Rayo calls the “evolutionary hunting strategy” (i.e., ambition to attain more). If we are victims, the rest of the world should be so victimized. Ambition and dissatisfaction with the status quo have resulted in a quality of life that is unparalleled in history. Being motivated by material success has lead to advancements that go beyond cars and houses and other stuff. An expanding economy has lead to (or at the very least goes hand in hand with) science, art, technology, women’s rights, and gay rights – to name just a few. Many materially poor countries are not very far along with these cultural features. Instead, one sees caste, clitorectomies, theology, dirt, and disease as the shining accomplishments of these societies. I don’t know if material prosperity causes cultural advances (or vice versa) but I do believe these things have a complex relationship (i.e., one is part of the other), something that is completely ignored by a dismissal of ambition, which is the fuel that powers all types of attainment, material or otherwise.

6) The fallacy of happiness as the be all and end all: Of course, there may be negatives with prosperity (i.e., the bigger house further away from work, the richer food in our diets, car accidents, etc.), but people will follow their own prerogatives where choosing a lifestyle is concerned. To be sure, someone trying to keep up with the proverbial Joneses can get themselves into a bind. But the moral of this story isn’t that prosperity is bad. Rather, the lesson here is we should live within our means, and we don’t all have the same means within which to live. If my neighbor (let’s call her, uhm… Ms. Jones) has a bigger house and shinier car than I do, then perhaps she is making or has made sacrifices I am not (longer hours at the office, more sleepless nights dogged by work stress, less time for friendships beyond work, less time spent taking care of her health, etc.). To her benefit, she can afford nicer things than I can. Maybe she is unhappy in the cloying new-age sense of the word (beats me). But who knows how society shall increase from those possibly unhappy sacrifices Ms. Jones is making when she puts in those long hours at work. Will she create a new medical device or drug that improves life quality for a sick loved one? A new energy saving invention? A new theory about economics that actually tells us something useful? (“Yes, yes, I know Thomas Edison invented all those light bulbs and such, but was he happy?” Or how about, “Shakespeare may have written all those plays, but what was the size of his carbon footprint?”)

In the west many people have not only kept up with the Joneses but have become the Joneses themselves because many free people behaving rationally have determined that being the Joneses is good. Societies that permit upward mobility are to be celebrated from within and emulated from without. Culture advances and thrives in this climate. A belief system that views upward mobility as a flaw is itself severely flawed. Go ahead, Mr. Montgomery, enjoy your new big house, and look forward to the day you can kick out the boarders and make the mortgage payment yourself.

Ken Morris
Golden, Colorado
December 30, 2007 14:17 EST

Paul Kishimoto: This article resonated very strongly with me and brought to mind John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society and Bernard Wright's A Short History of Progress.

Mr. Montgomery seems to appreciate Mr. Wright's observation that we are "twenty-first century software running on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago." Contrary to Mr. Morris' fourth point, there is no yearning for a return to man's behaviour in a state of nature, but instead a recognition that our biological imperatives are incompatible with the conditions of modern society.

The author also seems to appreciate Galbraith's key point that the situation of the affluent society is not that of the pre-industrial society in which it was necessary to reward the competitive instinct without question. Galbraith's broad economic conclusion was that mere growth as a measure of progress is naive; more specifically there is no longer any utility in converting accrued wealth to more and larger private cars, homes and possessions.

Mr. Montgomery is in in no way opposed to living within whichever means we may have. He merely—and correctly, in my opinion—observes that the traditional ways in which people enjoyed their salaries are yielding rapidly diminishing in today's typical large Western city. There are more rewarding things to do with one's money than compete with the Joneses.
January 14, 2008 22:26 EST

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