I saw a news report last week that said that a majority of women now live alone without a spouse. Now I know enough about the warping that can occur in the collection of statistics and I know that writers love to grab something sensational for a headline, but this one interests me.

First, it appears that the study included widows who live alone. That certainly warps the result, by which I mean that you weren&39;t thinking about that possibility when YOU read the statistic. It also doesn&39;t mean that women in general aren&39;t getting married.

This is just a reflection one of the demographic changes underway in out society. Some are huge! How about the Baby Boomer Generation hitting retirement age? That&39;s a biggie.  We also have young people deferring marriage until their careers are a little more developed.  We also, certainly, have men and women who either don&39;t want to get married or who want to but it just won&39;t turn out that way for them.

What it does do, in my mind, is illuminate the fact that a "typical household" isn&39;t what we used to think it was: a man and his wife and two kids and a Cocker Spaniel. It turns out that that description fits fewer than 20% of households today.

But my perception of American homebuilders is that they are still building a majority of their homes for that family. It may be that they are right, that regardless of the difference in households, it&39;s that IDEAL family who shows up as homebuyers at the model home complex.

There are ways of meeting the needs of different segments of the marketplace. I can remember a homebuilder in Irvine, CA, pretty much a Yuppie town, who included some models whose floor plans include a two bedroom home with two identical master bedroom suites. They intended to sell to two homebuyers who didn&39;t want to face the issue of two adult homebuyers who had to say, "We&39;re buying this together but who gets the big bedroom and who settles for one designed for the kids?"

I thought that was innovative and I hope builders do more imaginative thinking like that.

I would especially like to hear from people who either haven&39;t found a floor plan that suits their needs or have found some creative builder who has done something different that did meet those needs.