Living Large

Morley Safer Reports On The Super-Sizing Of U.S. Homes

(CBS) 

Those Joneses are everywhere, in old communities and new developments, building Galacticas or McMansions or starter castles.

Whatever you want to call them, Bob Toll, whose company builds more than 8,000 houses a year, calls them money in the bank.

The "Hampton" is Toll's best selling model. How does it compare in square footage with his best selling model of five or six years ago? "Well, five or six years ago the best selling model had about 3,200 feet in it," Toll says. "And the standard model of this has, I believe, about 4,600 feet."

Fueling this market for larger homes, Toll says, is the fact that the number of families with an income above $100,000 a year has grown six times faster than the overall U.S. population.

A family of 3.6 people is a typical customer for the Hampton model, which has five bedrooms, five bathrooms, kitchen, a dining room, living room, family room, study, conservatory and a nameless room, simply called a bonus.

Paul Knox, the dean of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech, sums up the endless tracts of overweight houses as a new national suburb he calls "Vulgaria."

Of course, vulgar is in the eye of the beholder.

"Exactly," says Knox. "My use of the term has to do with the ensemble. I dare say that this is a landscape not of homes but of funeral homes. They’re on that scale."

Of course, vast ornate houses are nothing new in America, or anywhere else. Rich families like the Vanderbilts brought ostentation to a new level, and the Hearst Castle, San Simeon, left little doubt about who was in charge.

But it’s the sheer magnitude of the demand for ever-larger living space that is changing the face of America. In Texas, big has always been beautiful. But just outside Houston, Robin Beisswanger finds her new, rather "modest" 6,800 square footer just about right for her, her husband and son, the ever-present dog Coco, and her cat.

Beisswanger says the theme for the house is eclectic, drawing on Asian, Italian and Mediterranean designs.

The home has six television sets, though Robin says she and her family are not huge TV fans. And it features seven bathrooms, including a pool bath and a powder room.

Robin’s house seems downright puny compared to the one built in Florida by Scott Sullivan of WorldCom fame and infamy. The house is 30,000 square feet. But Sullivan has moved. His new address is a really big "big house" – federal prison.

And there are others with mega-mansions. Cell phone entrepreneur Allan Goldfield’s pad outside Dallas is 48,000 square feet.

What’s going on?

"Over the last 30 years, almost all of the income gains have gone to people at the very top of the income distribution," says Cornell economics professor Robert Frank. "People at the top have been building much bigger houses. People who are just below the super rich, well, maybe they wanted to build bigger but were afraid it would be unseemly to do so. Now there's this 70,000 foot monster above them. That clears the way for them to build 60,000 square feet. And so it trickles on down, one step at a time."

It trickles down to your neighbor, who doubles the size of his house. Now your house is suddenly small and you build a bigger one.

"It's exactly like a military arms race. One side buys bombs, so does the other. And then they're back where they started. The norm for what constitutes an acceptable house just changes," says Frank.