The Housing Bomb: Why Our Addiction to Houses Is Destroying the Environment and Threatening Our Society

THE HOUSING BOMB: Why Our Addiction to Houses Is Destroying the Environment and Threatening Our Society. By M. Nils Peterson, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Jianguo Liu. viii and 212 pp.; maps, diagrs., ills., bibliog., index. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. $ 29.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781421410654. In The Housing Bomb, M. Nils Peterson, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Jianguo Liu argue that continuing the contemporary patterns of housing construction will fundamentally undermine the environmental and economic foundations of the global era. The concern here is with the inefficient ways people consume energy in and through their dwellings, as well as the ways in which sprawling development further amplifies inefficient use of resources. In addition to these inefficiencies in technology and infrastructure, the authors present data clearly showing that the rate of increase in number of households is rising even while the population rates are tapering off. The proliferation of households compounds inefficiencies in the way people consume, to create a situation that is wholly unsustainable--the overconsumption of energy and the production of climate-changing greenhouse gases portends disaster. Ultimately, the authors are sounding the alarm for the entire globe, though they give the situation in the United States special attention. At the same time, they believe adopting new technology, changing the configuration of infrastructure, shifting how society values housing, and modifying households' behavior can avert disaster. Indeed, the book's title is a play on Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968), which they cite as a model for raising awareness of a problem and motivating action sufficient to solve it. The Housing Bomb is an ambitious project. The book's argument describes the nature of the problem and then offers potential solutions. The authors use the introduction to impress upon the reader the significance of households as essential drivers of energy consumption. Moreover, they argue that the desire for householders to locate close to nature and travel long distances by automobile is leading to a dangerous combination of deforestation and increases in C[O.sub.2]. The principal cause of this is a cultural fetish with housing, which the authors term "housaholism"--an especially pernicious condition that feeds our voracious consumption of energy. Indeed, Americans' fixation with building increasingly larger single-family homes, which are treated as a form of investment and placed far from urban cores and closer to nature, is placed at the crux of the problem. An important aspect of the book is to show that how Americans live is fundamentally unhealthy for the places in which they live. The first chapter addresses the extent of housing addiction, while the second demonstrates how various institutions in the United States have enabled and encouraged housaholism. National-level data is deployed for several countries to show how housing proliferation continues even as population increase slows. The authors explore how aging processes, the division of single households (through divorce, progression through the life cycle) into multiple households, increasing size of homes, and sprawling construction contribute to overconsumption even while population growth is reigned in. They then describe the ways that governments and private interests work to incentivize and protect homeownership and frame it variably as a right or the fulfillment of making it in America. This deftly links racist thought and fear with regulative institutions and the demand for housing at the urban fringe. It illustrates how the government has institutionalized the factors that created the housing bomb. The next two chapters offer case studies of housing development--one in the United States and a second in China--which tell compelling stories of how geographical communities experience and react to the destructive forces of household proliferation and overconsumption. …