摘要：This paper decomposes the growth in land occupied by residences in the United
States to give the relative contributions of changing demographics versus
increases in the land area used by individual households. Between 1976 and 1992
the amount of residential land in the United States grew 47.5% while population
only grew 17.8%. At first glance, this suggests an important role for
per-household increases. However, the calculations in this paper show that only
24.3% of the growth in residential land area can be attributed to State level
changes in land per household. 37.5% is due to overall population growth, 5.9%
to the shift of population towards States with larger houses, 22.7% to an
increase in the number of households over this period, and the remaining 9.5% to
interactions between these changes. There are large differences across states
and metropolitan areas in the relative importance of these components.
