You can't look at that perfect house without imagining the perfect family living inside.
Big house equals happiness.
They've been selling us that dream for decades. When I was a kid, my family drove around glitzy subdivisions, and I fantasized how wonderful it would be to live in a house like that. The purpose of this article, of course, is to practice the great American art of making us dissatisfied with what we've got. It's easy to make fun of this pretentiousness, but something in us does get hooked, as one can see by driving around today's glitzy subdivisions. Private palaces sprout like mushrooms on 5-acre lots, spreading over prime farmland, leveling forests.