You love your private bathroom, don’t you? Not to mention having virtually no contact with your annoying sibling(s). It’s great, isn’t it? But it’s not sustainable.

Last week, Maritza Mestre wrote about sprawl, also called "growth" by some. Given the fact that the population is increasing it’s inevitable that people will want places to live, shop, and go to school. Of course you need roads and other infrastructure to connect all this.

Although we can’t develop without using space, we have to make smarter choices about how we use space. Think about it — how do we live now? Many families live in enormous houses. There is a private bathroom and walk-in closet for every member of the family — some rooms in these mansions are hardly ever used, and let’s not forget the three- or four-car or perhaps I should say SUV garages.

It’s not even as if families have gotten bigger. In fact, they have gotten smaller. Yet houses have more than doubled in square footage!

We complain that our cars guzzle gas and shoot fumes into the atmosphere, but houses that are unnecessarily big also damage the environment.

I don’t know what caused the trend in bigger houses; maybe it's because families have bigger incomes. But why spend your money in this irresponsible, unsustainable way? Why not travel, invest in your community — in the slow food movement, for example, or lobby your lawmakers to get a grip and change zoning laws. Zoning laws in Illinois are partly to blame for urban sprawl and the disappearance of some of the world’s most fertile agricultural land.

It is time for a "New Urbanism." We must slow down urban sprawl. We must renovate existing developments and we must look into "green building."