Study Finds We’Re A Nation Of Happy Homebodies

Jim Lummy could not be more pleased with his home or his neighborhood. After all, the three-bedroom Cape Cod where he has lived for 35 years in Old Saybrook, Conn., is only a few blocks from Long Island Sound. “We’re delighted with where we live,” he said.

He is hardly alone in liking his community, a government report finds.

Asked to rate their homes and neighborhoods on a scale from 1 to 10, 69 percent of Americans rated their houses 8 or better and 67 percent gave that endorsement to their neighborhood.

The results are in the massive “American Housing Survey for the United States: 1997,” released last week by the Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

By a narrow margin, Midwesterners are the happiest with their homes, with 70.3 percent rating them 8 or higher. Some 70 percent of folks in the Northeast gave their houses similar approval ratings, as did 69.9 percent in the South.

On the other hand, Westerners seem somewhat less satisfied, with 65.8 percent giving their homes ratings of 8 or better.

Curt Hensley, schoolteacher from Carrollton, Ohio, is happy with his community. He and his wife built a two-bedroom home in a neighborhood where every lot is an acre. “We know everybody. You have neighbors, but you have a little bit of land, too. It’s the best of both worlds.”

Turning to neighborhoods, Midwesterners were once again happiest, with 69.3 percent giving a rating of 8 or more. That level of satisfaction was expressed by 68.4 percent of Southerners and 65.7 percent of Northeast residents.

Westerners were least satisfied, with just 62.7 percent giving their neighborhood a rating of 8 or more.

Other findings of the report included:

There are 99.5 million occupied housing units in the United States, with owners living in 65.5 million and renters in the rest.

The housing stock includes 62.1 million single detached homes, 6.5 million mobile homes and the rest in attached homes and apartments.

Some 77 million homes are in metropolitan areas, and 22 million in rural locations.

The median home size was 5.4 rooms. That means half had more than that and half fewer.

There were 286,000 homes without a toilet, 328,000 did not have a tub or shower and 385,000 were without piped hot water.

Safeco has leased 95,000 square feet of space in the Gentronics Wang building at Liberty Lake for its new call center that is expected to open next July.

Plans for the call center, which could employ up to 375 within three years, were announced in August.

Safeco has signed a 12-year lease on the space, located at 22425 E. Appleway, and will occupy the first floor of the two-story building.

The Seattle-based insurance and financial company plans to transfer some of its 300-plus employees from its regional office in the Spokane Valley to the call center next year.

Staff writer Mike Roarke contributed to this report.