After years of saving, Jordyn Carias and her partner purchased a home for the first time last month. To find a place that didn’t break the bank, she said, they had to go smaller. “We had a lot of things we wanted in our first home, but after looking at the price range, we had to reassess,” Carias, a graphic designer who lives in Muscatine, Iowa, said.
Compared to other countries, America is known for bigger cars, portions and take-out coffee cup sizes. For most of recent history, Americans have also wanted bigger homes — but now that’s changing. For most of the last half-century, new single-family homes kept growing.
In 1973, the median size of completed single-family homes was 1,525 square feet, according to US Census data. By 2015, that number had ballooned to 2,467 square feet. But as the cost of buying a home has exploded and McMansions have fallen out of favor, homebuilders have reversed course, building smaller homes with an eye to first-time buyers.
In 2023, the median single-family home built was 2,233 square feet, down 9% from the 2015 peak, with many formal dining rooms and “bonus” rooms disappearing. Carias and her partner ultimately settled on a roughly 920-square-foot home. To maximize space, they decided to use the basement as their primary bedroom.
“The broader trend in larger homes had been driven by what consumers wanted and demanded,” said Alan Ratner, a homebuilder analyst at Zelman & Associates. “More recently, we’ve started to see th.