By Rick Hampson | USA TODAY
“A man is not a whole and complete man,” Walt Whitman claimed in 1856, “unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on.’’ In a little more than a century, the single-family house helped make America something new in the world: a nation of suburban homeowners.
Cape or ranch, colonial or contemporary, the house — more even than the car, the skyscraper or the Hollywood movie — is the American idol.
But now, demographic, political and meteorological changes are calling the future of the single-family house into question.
