An investigation of the effects of large houses on occupant behaviour and resource-use in New Zealand

<p>According to Statistics New Zealand the average size of new New Zealand houses almost doubled from 1974‐2011 at the same time that occupancy reduced, meaning fewer people live in larger houses. Features of large houses are extra bedrooms, specialised rooms (e.g. study, media room), more than one living space, several bathrooms (including en‐suites), and double/triple garages. This contrasts with what is defined in this thesis as the “core house”, which is a house (or part of a house) consisting of a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bedroom for each occupant (assuming couples share a bedroom). Based on this, houses with more space than the appropriate core house for each household are considered as living in some level of large housing. Living in larger houses than necessary means use of more natural resources in terms of construction materials, operating energy and the additional furniture and appliances needed. This study, therefore, aimed to measure resource‐use efficiency in different sized houses and rooms found in NZ houses to show the significance of human decisions on housing energy use. To do this, it used a life‐cycle energy approach to measure resource‐use and reveal the long term environmental impact of house size decision. A 100 year cycle was used to cover typical human lifespan. Using grounded theory, the research developed into four studies: 1‐ An observation of the features of New Zealand houses: Houses advertised for sale in TradeMe website were studied to show the features of New Zealand houses and types of furniture and appliances people keep in their houses. 2‐ Study 1: Based on the observation study, a questionnaire was prepared for a pilot study of 7 households living in small and large houses asking about occupants, type/number of rooms and types/number/location of furniture/appliances in their house. Each occupant also reported where he/she spend his/her time at home indoor for 14 consecutive days. This study revealed any problems with the preliminary questionnaire and also set strategy for the large time‐use survey. 3‐ Study 2: Based on the results of study 1, an online questionnaire based survey was undertaken by families with 4 or fewer members living in NZ owner‐occupied houses. The questionnaire asked for information about family members, type/number of spaces in their home, furniture and its location and the time spent in each room of the house, outdoors, and out of home by each occupant over one day. This survey provided a reliable data set about the features of New Zealand owner‐occupied houses and their occupants, the type an number of furniture items, appliances and tools in them and where/for how long each household member spent his/her daily time in the house. 4‐ Floor plan study: To get a better understanding of the size of rooms in NZ houses, a floor plan study of 287 houses was performed. Floor plans were redrawn in AutoCAD and the floor area of each room and the whole house were extracted for mapping with house size in SPSS. Results of the time‐use study indicate New Zealanders on average spend 15.94 hours/day at home indoor and house size does not affect this. On average 54.7% of this is spent in usual bedrooms, 29.9% in the usual living room, dining room and kitchen, and use of other rooms including bathrooms accounts for 15.4% of time at home indoors. Using a life cycle analysis approach, selecting to live in a house with 3 extra rooms, a single person, couple, couple with one child and couple with two children will use 66%, 66%, 75% and 66% more energy for housing over 100 years. By combining time‐use and energy use results, a sample person living in a house with no extra rooms for their whole life will have a housing energy of 1.59GJ/hour which increases to 2.68GJ/hour by living in a house with 3 extra rooms. Based on resources for construction, refurbishment and heating and the time occupants spend in each room over the life the house, for each hour of using a master bedroom New Zealanders use 0.9MJ, and this increases to 9.3MJ for an hour of using a study and 5.1MJ for a play room. This research suggests more public awareness is needed regarding the role of human behaviour in achieving a sustainable architecture and perhaps it is time for governments to control use of natural resources by restricting house sizes where applicable.</p>

An investigation of the effects of large houses on occupant behaviour and resource-use in New Zealand

<p>According to Statistics New Zealand the average size of new New Zealand houses almost doubled from 1974‐2011 at the same time that occupancy reduced, meaning fewer people live in larger houses. Features of large houses are extra bedrooms, specialised rooms (e.g. study, media room), more than one living space, several bathrooms (including en‐suites), and double/triple garages. This contrasts with what is defined in this thesis as the “core house”, which is a house (or part of a house) consisting of a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bedroom for each occupant (assuming couples share a bedroom). Based on this, houses with more space than the appropriate core house for each household are considered as living in some level of large housing. Living in larger houses than necessary means use of more natural resources in terms of construction materials, operating energy and the additional furniture and appliances needed. This study, therefore, aimed to measure resource‐use efficiency in different sized houses and rooms found in NZ houses to show the significance of human decisions on housing energy use. To do this, it used a life‐cycle energy approach to measure resource‐use and reveal the long term environmental impact of house size decision. A 100 year cycle was used to cover typical human lifespan. Using grounded theory, the research developed into four studies: 1‐ An observation of the features of New Zealand houses: Houses advertised for sale in TradeMe website were studied to show the features of New Zealand houses and types of furniture and appliances people keep in their houses. 2‐ Study 1: Based on the observation study, a questionnaire was prepared for a pilot study of 7 households living in small and large houses asking about occupants, type/number of rooms and types/number/location of furniture/appliances in their house. Each occupant also reported where he/she spend his/her time at home indoor for 14 consecutive days. This study revealed any problems with the preliminary questionnaire and also set strategy for the large time‐use survey. 3‐ Study 2: Based on the results of study 1, an online questionnaire based survey was undertaken by families with 4 or fewer members living in NZ owner‐occupied houses. The questionnaire asked for information about family members, type/number of spaces in their home, furniture and its location and the time spent in each room of the house, outdoors, and out of home by each occupant over one day. This survey provided a reliable data set about the features of New Zealand owner‐occupied houses and their occupants, the type an number of furniture items, appliances and tools in them and where/for how long each household member spent his/her daily time in the house. 4‐ Floor plan study: To get a better understanding of the size of rooms in NZ houses, a floor plan study of 287 houses was performed. Floor plans were redrawn in AutoCAD and the floor area of each room and the whole house were extracted for mapping with house size in SPSS. Results of the time‐use study indicate New Zealanders on average spend 15.94 hours/day at home indoor and house size does not affect this. On average 54.7% of this is spent in usual bedrooms, 29.9% in the usual living room, dining room and kitchen, and use of other rooms including bathrooms accounts for 15.4% of time at home indoors. Using a life cycle analysis approach, selecting to live in a house with 3 extra rooms, a single person, couple, couple with one child and couple with two children will use 66%, 66%, 75% and 66% more energy for housing over 100 years. By combining time‐use and energy use results, a sample person living in a house with no extra rooms for their whole life will have a housing energy of 1.59GJ/hour which increases to 2.68GJ/hour by living in a house with 3 extra rooms. Based on resources for construction, refurbishment and heating and the time occupants spend in each room over the life the house, for each hour of using a master bedroom New Zealanders use 0.9MJ, and this increases to 9.3MJ for an hour of using a study and 5.1MJ for a play room. This research suggests more public awareness is needed regarding the role of human behaviour in achieving a sustainable architecture and perhaps it is time for governments to control use of natural resources by restricting house sizes where applicable.</p>

A Comparison of Life Cycle Energy and Carbon Impacts for Passive Detached Accessory Dwelling Units and Their Design Implications

Detached accessory dwelling units are a building typology that, when built to passive design standards, can help reduce GHG emissions while addressing the socioeconomic pressures facing many housing markets. Energy performance metrics like those used in passive design standards are based on per unit of floor area and lead to a size-bias against smaller housing typologies. A life cycle assessment of cost-optimal passive house sizes ranging from 230 m² (2,500 ft²) to 30 m² (300 ft²) is performed to understand their total life cycle energy use and GHG emissions implications. Additionally, an analysis using BEopt examines operational energy use for 10 cost-optimal passive house sizes ranging from 230 m² (2,500 ft²) to 30 m² (300 ft²) across all 17 climate zones and examines how cost-optimal passive design changes with house size. The results show that per-occupant energy use and GHG emissions are similar or better for small house sizes and that cost-optimal passive design does not change significantly with house size.

A Comparison of Life Cycle Energy and Carbon Impacts for Passive Detached Accessory Dwelling Units and Their Design Implications

Detached accessory dwelling units are a building typology that, when built to passive design standards, can help reduce GHG emissions while addressing the socioeconomic pressures facing many housing markets. Energy performance metrics like those used in passive design standards are based on per unit of floor area and lead to a size-bias against smaller housing typologies. A life cycle assessment of cost-optimal passive house sizes ranging from 230 m² (2,500 ft²) to 30 m² (300 ft²) is performed to understand their total life cycle energy use and GHG emissions implications. Additionally, an analysis using BEopt examines operational energy use for 10 cost-optimal passive house sizes ranging from 230 m² (2,500 ft²) to 30 m² (300 ft²) across all 17 climate zones and examines how cost-optimal passive design changes with house size. The results show that per-occupant energy use and GHG emissions are similar or better for small house sizes and that cost-optimal passive design does not change significantly with house size.

NON-LINEAR RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN HOUSE SIZE AND PRICE

This study reexamines the relationship between house size and price by using the quantile regression model. Housing transactions data of the National Taipei University Special Zone in Taiwan are adopted, and the findings are as follows. First, the total price of a smaller housing unit will increase at a decreasing rate as its size increases. The decrease in marginal price might be due to the declining marginal utility of the property right. Secondly, the total price of a larger housing unit will increase at an increasing rate as its size increases. The size premium effect might be due to the influence of conspicuous consumption. Thirdly, housing with a lower square meter price is subject to greater price competitiveness in the market, and the price will increase at a decreasing rate as the size increases. Conversely, a housing unit with a higher square meter price will decrease at an increasing rate as its size increases. This might be due to the constraint imposed by the purchaser’s housing affordability. These findings clarify the nonlinear relationships between housing size and price, and provide very useful information for decision making of the developers, home purchasers, real estate appraisers, and the governments.

Assessing Classic Maya multi-scalar household inequality in southern Belize

Inequality is present to varying degrees in all human societies, pre-modern and contemporary. For archaeological contexts, variation in house size reflects differences in labor investments and serves as a robust means to assess wealth across populations small and large. The Gini coefficient, which measures the degree of concentration in the distribution of units within a population, has been employed as a standardized metric to evaluate the extent of inequality. Here, we employ Gini coefficients to assess wealth inequality at four nested socio-spatial scales–the micro-region, the polity, the district, and the neighborhood–at two medium size, peripheral Classic Maya polities located in southern Belize. We then compare our findings to Gini coefficients for other Classic Maya polities in the Maya heartland and to contemporaneous polities across Mesoamerica. We see the patterning of wealth inequality across the polities as a consequence of variable access to networks of exchange. Different forms of governance played a role in the degree of wealth inequality in Mesoamerica. More autocratic Classic Maya polities, where principals exercised degrees of control over exclusionary exchange networks, maintained high degrees of wealth inequality compared to most other Mesoamerican states, which generally are characterized by more collective forms of governance. We examine how household wealth inequality was reproduced at peripheral Classic Maya polities, and illustrate that economic inequity trickled down to local socio-spatial units in this prehispanic context.

Tenement Size and Social Structure: Reflections on Chepstow in 1901

This interdisciplinary study focuses on tenement (house) size, as recorded in the census in 1901, to explore demographic and social contrasts in Chepstow, an historic market town and river port in south-east Monmouthshire. For three contrasting enumeration districts, it contextualises this measure of housing status against the characteristics of the built environment, and applies the technique of house repopulation to derive spatial patterns of social difference and inequality from residents' age, household formation, net lifetime migration, and employment circumstances in the stagnating local economy. The study re-scales the investigative methods used by urban historians in city-wide studies of urban ecology and demonstrates how tenement size, a crude but under-utilised measure of housing stock, can support micro-scale studies of social differentiation in small but regionally significant towns. Equally as important, it provides an insight into the case-specific processes and particular outcomes of urbanisation during the nineteenth century in rural Monmouthshire.

Status of Food Security in Kerman, Iran During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Background and Aim: Food security at individual, family, national, regional and global levels can be achieved when all people at all times have physical and economic access to adequate and healthy food to meet their nutritional needs and priorities for a healthy and active life. This study aims to investigate the status of food security and its related socioeconomic factors in households during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-9) pandemic in Kerman, Iran. Methods & Materials: This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on 500 households selected randomly from five comprehensive health centers in five districts of Kerman city in Iran. A demographic/socioeconomic questionnaires and the Persian version of the 18-item USDA Household Food Security Survey (HFSS) were used for collecting data. Ethical Considerations: All ethical principles are considered in this article. The participants were informed about the purpose of the research and its implementation stages. They were also assured about the confidentiality of their information and were free to leave the study whenever they wished, and if desired, the research results would be available to them. Results: There was a significant relationship between the socioeconomic factors (household size, house size, and number of amenities) and the food security. There correlation between the household size and food security was positive (R= 0.142, P<0.001), while the correlation of house size (R= -0.093, P<0.005) and number of amenities (R= -0.73, P<0.001) with food security was negative. Conclusion: By increasing the awareness of people and improving their economic situation, it is possible to improve the food security situation of households in Kerman city.