There's no doubt that homes are getting bigger, but should the laws require larger houses? For brokers and builders in the Wisconsin suburb of Franklin, just outside Milwaukee, the answer is "no."

The City of Franklin proposes that from now on you can't build there unless the property is valued at $360,000 or more. Such homes, claim local officials, place the least stress on local schools and roads.

But local brokers and builders disagree. According to Mike Ruzicka, executive director of the Metropolitan Association of Realtors of Milwaukee and Waukesha Counties, a study by a local planning research firm shows that larger houses lead to higher infrastructure costs and property taxes per resident.

The logic, says Ruzicka, is this: If you have a one-acre lot that pays a given property tax, that tax is typically less than three or four properties occupying the same amount of land. Meanwhile, infrastructure costs -- as examples, the street and sewers in front of the lot or lots -- are largely identical.

Larger lots also create environmental issues, one reason local brokers, builders, and environmentalists -- folks who "historically don't get along," says Ruzicka -- have combined to oppose the proposed Franklin rule.

The Wisconsin brokers are plainly on to something. According to the National Association of Home Builders, the average home measured 1,645 sq. feet in 1975 versus 2,190 square feet in 1998 -- a 33 percent increase. Meanwhile, household size has declined. The Census Bureau says that while an average household had 2.94 people in 1975, that number slipped to and average size of just 2.62 in 1998.

Seen another way, we allocated 559 square feet of space per person when building homes in 1975 versus 836 square feet per occupant in 1998. That's a 49.5 percent increase per person, a huge expansion.

Such figures mean that the home you occupy today is likely far larger than the home in which you grew up. Not only that, but today's homes surely seem more spacious if only because there are typically fewer people in each unit.

But should we make general preferences into hard and fast legal requirements, hammering in stone somewhere the pronouncement that "thou shall not occupy a home which costs less than $360,000 to erect or has a certain minimum size (and thus a certain minimum cost)?"

If the answer is "yes," then how are we to house singles? Empty-nesters? Those who simply do not want to purchase suburban castles? Or, those enlightened souls who follow Miller's seventh law of homeownership -- never buy a home you don't want to clean.

Do we say those who want to save money and not have a finished basement or bigger great room are banned unless they spend $360,000? What if a home is valued at $358,000 -- should it be denied a building permit? Why $360,000 and not $350,000 or $460,000?

And, given that minority incomes are lower than majority white incomes, does not a standard which mandates home prices effectively limit minority purchasing? Think about it this way: the Census Bureau reports that 23.6 percent of all African Americans live in poverty versus 8.4 percent for whites.

The fact is that both brokers and builders make more money selling larger homes. And yet in Wisconsin we see industry professionals arguing for the common good and community benefit. There is an example here to admire.

Published: December 22, 1999

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