On 23 Mar 2004 08:40:41 -0800, shinypenny wrote:
(Doug Miller) wrote in message gy.com...
In article , 127.0.0.1 wrote:

lifestyles change, it wasn't uncommon in the 50's and 60's to have
children share rooms, live in a house with only one bedroom, live in a
house without a "den"/entertainment room. People are more affluent now
and demand more from the home they live in. Maybe you want to remain
stuck in a decades old lifestyle but obviously many others don't.

Actually, if you go back farther than the 50s and 60s to around the
turn of the century, people in my town lived in gargantuan mansions.
Families were bigger and undoubtedly these mansions housed
grandparents and servants, and not just the immediate family. To say
the trend is for larger and larger houses is to only look at the last
50 years. Go back 100 years and the picture is more complicated.


Not quite that simple. The big, quality houses are still around
because, they were built well. The small crappy houses that the
vast majority of people lived in were bulldozed long ago.

It's rather like people thinking that "They made things better in
the good old days, because I still have Great Grandma's cherry
Armoire, and it's still in perfect condition." They forget that just
as much crap was made back then, if not more, but nobody bothered
keeping it, or it broke, long ago, and got tossed out.


I suppose people got tired of living with extended family underfoot,
and started moving out to the 'burbs in the 50s and 60s. Advances such
as washing machines made having servants less of a "need."


Well, yes, but that's only a small part of it. A century ago,
human labor was dirt cheap - so cheap that even a lower middle class
family would have live-in help. How many solidly middle class people
can afford to hire anyone for more than a few hours a week, now?

-Rich