Housing space can also be measured by the number of square feet per person. The Residential Energy Consumption survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy shows that Americans have an average of 721 square feet of living space per per*son. Poor Americans have 439 square feet.[14] Rea*sonably comparable international square-footage data are provided by the Housing Indicator Program of the United Nations Center for Human Settle*ments, which surveyed housing conditions in major cities in 54 different nations. This survey showed the United States to have, by far, the most spacious housing units, with 50 percent to 100 percent more square footage per capita than city dwellers in other industrialized nations.[15](See Table 2.)

America's poor compare favorably with the gen*eral population of other nations in square footage of living space. The average poor American has more square footage of living space than does the average person living in London, Paris, Vienna, and Munich. Poor Americans have nearly three times the living space of average urban citizens in middle-income countries such as Mexico and Turkey. Poor American households have seven times more hous*ing space per person than the general urban popu*lation of very-low-income countries such as India and China. (See the appendix table for more detailed information.)

Some critics have argued that the comparisons in Table 2 are mislead*ing.[16] These critics claim that U.S. housing in general cannot be com*pared to housing in specific Euro*pean cities such as Paris or London because housing in these cities is unusually small and does not repre*sent the European housing stock overall. To assess the validity of this argument, Table 3 presents national housing data for 15 West European countries. These data represent the entire national housing stock in each of the 15 countries. In general, the national data on housing size are similar to the data on specific Euro*pean cities presented in Table 2 and the appendix table.

As Table 3 shows, U.S. housing (with an aver*age size of 1,875 square feet per unit) is nearly twice as large as European housing (with an aver*age size of 976 square feet per unit.) After adjust*ing for the number of persons in each dwelling unit, Americans have an average of 721 square feet per person, compared to 396 square feet for the average European.

The housing of poor Americans (with an average of 1,228 square feet per unit) is smaller than that of the average American but larger than that of the average European (who has 976 square feet per unit). Overall, poor Americans have an average of 439 square feet of living space per person, which is as much as or more than the average citizen in most West European countries. (This comparison is to the average European, not poor Europeans.)



Housing Quality

Of course, it might be possible that the housing of poor American households could be spacious but still dilapidated or unsafe. However, data from the American Housing Survey indicate that such is not the case. For example, the survey provides a tally of households with "severe physical prob*lems." Only a tiny portion of poor households and an even smaller portion of total households fall into that category.

The most common "severe problem," according to the American Housing Survey, is a shared bath*room, which occurs when occupants lack a bath*room and must share bathroom facilities with individuals in a neighboring unit. This condition affects about 1 percent of all U.S. households and 1.6 percent of all poor households. About one per*cent of all households and 2.3 percent of poor households have other "severe physi*cal problems." The most common are repeated heating breakdowns and multiple upkeep problems.

The American Housing Survey also provides a count of households affected by "moderate physical prob*lems." A wider range of households falls into this category—9 percent of the poor and 4 percent of total households. However, the problems affecting these units are clearly mod*est. While living in such units might be disagreeable by modern middle-class standards, they are a far cry from Dickensian squalor. The most common problems are upkeep, lack of a full kitchen, and use of unvented oil, kerosene or gas heaters as the pri*mary heat source. (The last condition occurs almost exclusively in the South.)

Poverty and Malnutrition

Malnutrition (also called undernu*trition) is a condition of reduced health due to a chronic shortage of calories and nutriments. There is little or no evidence of poverty-induced malnutrition in the United States. It is often believed that a lack of financial resources forces poor people to eat low-quality diets that are defi*cient in nutriments and high in fat. However, survey data show that nutriment density (amount of vita*mins, minerals, and protein per kilocalorie of food) does not vary by income class.[17] Nor do the poor consume higher-fat diets than do the middle class; the percentage of persons with high fat intake (as a share of total calories) is virtually the same for low-income and upper-middle-income persons.[18] Over-consumption of calories in general, however, is a major problem among the poor, as it is within the general U.S. population.