It's time to rethink the single-family home as the American dream, author says

[hunter]

95. We should pay people to experiment with lifestyles having very small environmental footprints.

The success of those experiments would be judged in terms of happiness, not by any false measures of productivity. Economic productivity as we now define it is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to Earth's biosphere and our own human spirit.

Almost everyone should have an opportunity to own the space they live in, a place where they can paint the walls whatever color they want, install or remove flooring and carpeting as they please, etc.., including people who are, for various reasons, unemployable. Nobody should be homeless. Everybody should have a safe, secure, comfortable place they can truly call their own, enjoying the benefits of any improvements they make.

This could all be accomplished by urban infill; by converting parking lot wastelands to very desirable walkable communities where people don't need to own cars.

I live in a high density suburban neighborhood that's not being utilized as it was designed. It was built for two parent families, with two or three children, a dog, and two cars. We raised our children here.

Most of our neighbors are extended families of various sorts, many with grandparents or other relatives living with them and taking care of the children while the parents work. Housing is so expensive here in California that a significant number of our own children's K-12 classmates still haven't left home. I remember them trick-or-treating, now they bring their own children around trick-or-treating.

Our children did not return home after college. Once they'd experienced big city life they didn't want to come back.

The biggest problem in our neighborhood is parking. Adults who work generally need cars. When five or six adults live in a house and they all have their own cars there's no place to put them all.

We'd greatly reduce the environmental footprint of the "average" U.S. American if we restructured our communities such that automobile ownership wasn't a necessity.