[quote]… Late Boomers determined that each child MUST have their own room, so mortgages were stretched to cover 2200 to 3000 sf.

Somewhere in there, the McMansion was born, and middle-class families with a couple offspring were trying to fill 4500 to 6000 sf and more with rooms for every possible activity[/quote]

To be fair, there was growth in square footage, but there wasn’t nearly that much of it. Mean square footage of a new SFR grew from 1700 sf under Nixon to 2400 sf under Bush Jr.

In the mean time, we saw the birth of the exurb. We filled all the useful space within reach of major cities, up to the edge of federally protected wilderness, with low-density detached housing. When there was no more room to build, prices of prime real estate started going up, and poorer people started packing up and moving to places where they could have a yard on 1.5 working-class salaries. Lancaster and Corona doubled their population from 1980 to 1990 and then doubled again from 1990 to 2007. In 1980, Temecula was a tiny community with roughly the scope that Pine Valley has today. Today it’s a city with over 100,000 residents. (Not that Pine Valley is in any risk of becoming the next Temecula – precisely because it’s surrounded by national forest on all sides.)

The Bay Area ran out of land around the same time, and that gave birth to Tracy and Morgan Hill.

So what’s going happen next? It’s possible that commuting costs will remain high or go higher. That will make it difficult for all the new people to keep moving to Temeculas and Lancasters of the country. At the same time, we can’t possibly expect to build 10,000 new detached houses every year in San Diego area, we simply don’t have room, not unless we annex Baja. (For perspective, 10,000 new detached houses are the equivalent of building one Otay Ranch/Eastlake every year for the foreseeable future. And 10,000 is what we need to add, given natural population growth.)

Out-migration to other state will remove much of the stress. At the same time, we’ll probably see the growth of “housing projects”, multistory apartment/condo buildings aimed at poor and working-class people, and built on land that’s reclaimed by declaring low-income suburbs blighted and then bulldozing them.

In twenty years time, we’ll see the same pattern that played out here fifty years ago – apartments/condos for the poor, detached for the wealthy.