The South, like many regions of the country, seems to be buying big. In 2013, 37 percent of new single-family homes sold had three or more bathrooms, compared to just 25 percent in 2005, according to Census data. And in 2013, the last year for which there is data available, 9 percent of homes sold were 4,000 square feet or more, the highest percentage in recent decades. In the South, 11 percent of homes sold were 4,000 square feet or bigger.

When I asked Vinson if the activity in the golf-course development meant people hadn’t learned anything since the recession, he replied that builders were merely returning to normal.

“The big guys just see it as, ‘Yeah, we had our pause, and now we’re going to go back to what we were doing before.'”

Builders say that’s because they know what people want. Studies may show that the younger generation wants small, compact, transit-accessible housing now, Andrews of Pardee, says. But once they decide to have kids and dogs, they’ll want the traditional suburban home with more space.

“Sure, there are people who live downtown forever, but when they say, ‘I want to have a kid or two,’ or, ‘Gee, my girlfriend wants to move in together and we want to have a house,” they’ll move to the suburbs, he said.

Emily Ellis-Santana and Freddy Santana, both 32, may be a case in point. Though they currently live in downtown Las Vegas, renting a 1,500-square-foot house from the 1940s, they recently bought a traditional stucco 2,700 square foot, four-bedroom home, in Inspirada, for $415,000.

“We were once those loft-style kids, but now we’ve grown out of that, we want to be adults,” Ellis-Santana, who is pregnant with the couple’s first child, told me. “We wanted a place we could take our kids out to the park and run around, and not have to get in a car and drive to the park.”

Ellis-Santana admits the couple wouldn’t seem to be the type who would go for a home in Inspirada: They both wear black most of the time, he has long hair and is from New York City and she lived for a long time in downtown Los Angeles.

But the couple visited the development on a lark one day, and said it had a Truman Show feel, of a picture-perfect American suburb where people were walking their dogs, pushing their strollers, and smiling.

“We kind of wanted a neighborhood that was Americana/Truman Show,” she told me.

Some people might shudder at the thought —after all, Jim Carrey’s character in the film, Truman Burbank, becomes desperate to escape the master-planned bubble where he lives. But the couple liked the amenities of the house—being able to unlock their door wirelessly, having a courtyard inside their house, having a touch-screen sink. Yes, the outside is stucco and looks similar to many other houses on the block, but the inside, Ellis-Santana says, they can make their own. She says she wouldn’t mind having a more modern exterior to the house, but her husband, she says, wouldn’t change a thing.