The Housing Bomb: Why Our Addiction to Houses Is Destroying the Environment and Threatening Our Society

1. Household Dynamics and Their Contribution to the Housing Bomb

C h a p t e r o n e Household Dynamics and Their Contribution to the Housing Bomb Unsustainable patterns in human relationships with the Earth fill the literature propagated by virtually every environmental science discipline and every environmental organization. Changing these patterns requires altering household dynamics (making temporal changes in household numbers, types, and locations). Household dynamics may have already supplanted (or soon will supplant) population growth as the primary environmental threat posed by humanity. The relationship between human population size and natural resource consumption has concerned scientists since 1798, when Thomas Malthus published his seminal work, An Essay on the Principle of Population.1 In the 1970s Paul Ehrlich helped frame perceptions of the influence of overpopulation on the environment with his model I  PAT, hypothesizing that impact (I)  population (P)  affluence (A)  technology (T).2 Since the early 1970s, research has consistently supported the idea that population size determines resource use and environmental impacts in multiple areas, ranging from water use, to pollution, to plant and wildlife extinction.3 Population growth rates, however, are slowing, without concomitant declines in negative environmental impacts. Throughout most of the world, population growth has decreased as the human condition improves. The opposite relationship holds true for households : as the human condition improves, households proliferate. During the second half of the twentieth century, fundamental changes in our culture, economics, education, and technology combined to drastically alter household dynamics. In an ironic twist on the attempt to moderate the rate of population increases, aging has led to drastic increases in the number of households per capita.4 Other cultural phenomena, including increasing divorce rates and decreasing incidences of multigenerational households, also contribute 16 The Housing Bomb to household proliferation.5 Even though population growth has been flattening out, human relationships with nature are becoming progressively more destructive.6 A growing body of research suggests that “households” can supplant “population ” in the I  PAT model, and average household size has an even larger effect on resource consumption and biodiversity than does population.7 Similarly, households appear to better predict amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) emissions, fuelwood consumption, per capita use of automobiles, and species endangerment.8 Energy consumption increased by 2.1% annually in the 1970s and 1980s, and population growth only accounted for 0.6% of that amount; the remainder (three times more) was related to per capita increases in energy use propelled largely by households.9 These findings are alarming, because while population growth has been a problem that is coming into check, the growth in household numbers is not. The number of people living in each house (household size) is declining around the world, and it appears to be declining fastest in biodiversity hotspots (places with high numbers of rare and unique animal and plant species).10 Households are the primary CO2 emitters, and they are the basic socioeconomic units of resource consumption.11 In the United States, direct and indirect energy consumption by households makes up 85% of total energy use.12 U.S. households directly contribute almost 40% of the nation’s carbon emissions, which is higher than the percentage of emissions from the entire industrial sector in the United States, as well as the amount of emissions from any other country except China.13 In India, households use over 70% of that nation’s total primary energy.14 Thus households will significantly shape global CO2 emissions in the future.15 Despite the implications of global declines in household size, far more research focuses on population dynamics. Although most high school social studies courses teach their students about demographic transition theory as it applies to population, few address whether there is a demographic transition theory for household dynamics. In the case of population, extensive research has documented how factors such as the education of women, decreasing infant mortality, and urbanization are able to drive down the rate of population growth to replacement levels (2.1 children per family) or even lower across diverse cultures and nations. The possibility that similar factors could drive down household sizes to some as-yet-unknown size is both intriguing and important to explore. Few regional and national studies have focused on household dynamics, Household Dynamics and Their Contribution to the Housing Bomb 17 and virtually none have examined historical patterns in household dynamics and their relationship with the environment.16 The little information that does exist is limited to particular...