Housing Sizes – How big is big enough?

Lately, I have been noticing a lot of new student housing going up in Waterloo, which I think is great. I love living in a city with a vibrant education scene, and having 2 major universities within a few blocks of each other is great. The student housing is all apartment blocks. At the same time, certain parts of town are either already filled with – or expanding to add more single family dwellings. Many of them look huge from the outside. Based on occasionally looking some places up on the realtor website – my totally unscientific survey – it appears that they are frequently over 2,500 square feet of living space (including the basement) and many are probably well over  3,000 sq. feet.
Based on a very rough guess from my student days, I’m guessing that the student apartments are pretty tight (apartments under 1,000 square feet, shared by several people). So, students are perhaps getting 350 square feet per person, probably often less. Then, somehow, to fill these new places, people are supposed to “graduate” out of student housing to single family dwelling with well over 500 square feet per person, and still be able to afford the mortgage etc.  Also, what does it say about our priorities if so much of our collectives resources are going towards our own, large dwellings instead of donating the money or using it to build community? Why aren’t more apartment buildings sized for and aimed at families with children?
According to this article https://www.point2homes.com/news/canada-real-estate/how-large-are-canadian-homes.html, this isn’t all in my imagination. They are suggesting that the size of new homes has doubled since the 1970’s, and homes in Canada are the US are larger, on average, than other parts of the world, including Europe. So, what can we as Canadians do to live more simply and match our international neighours in our housing choices? 🙂
Extra Info:
This UN report http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/charting/14.pdf ranks countries, in one chart based on whether people have more or less than 20 sq metres/215 sq. feet/person, which equals around 1,000 sq ft for a family of 4.