Housing Preferences

How Big Is the American Dream House?

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.“When I was nine or ten and lived in a dark fourth-floor apartment in a building that had seen better days, I fantasized mansions that were more suited to my romantic nature,” Linda Lewis wrote in The Atlantic in 1978. In adulthood, she got only more covetous—of friends’ gorgeous houses, of French castles, of architectural marvels such as Monticello and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West.As a fellow house envier, I sympathize. I feel, as Lewis did, that I “behave differently in different kinds of rooms”; that I’m “powerfully influenced by shapes and sizes, light and color, by degrees of privacy and security and beauty.” But I’ve never wanted a mansion, let alone a Monticello. I own a row house, and when I fantasize about something more suited to my romantic nature, what I’m picturing is a slightly bigger row house in a neighborhood with more restaurants.This is very Millennial of me. My generation of Americans is the first in decades to collectively abandon the dream of a big house. In part, that’s likely a concession to reality: Real estate is so