Nobody starts out wanting a 30,000 square foot home

VANITY FAIR has a feature article about property values in my wife's home town:

On average, the price paid for a house in Greenwich last year was $2.5 million, up 40 percent in just two years. (Of all the houses sold in 2005, only seven fetched less than $500,000.) If houses worth more than $10 million used to be big news, they're not these days. The number that sold for $10 million or more in Greenwich has climbed more than fivefold in two years, from 3 houses in 2003 to 16 in 2005, according to a search of the town's Multiple Listing Service.

The average sized new home is 15,000 square feet, compared to the U.S. average of 2,400. The population of Greenwich is 63,000.