defend the indefensible: MCMANSIONS

I also hate faux shutters on American brick homes.

!!

I read this in the newspaper the other day. Hardly surprising:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/housing-blamed-for-poor-health/2006/09/03/1157222007440.html

It's bad enough in middle america (or equivalent), but if you're going to pay millions of dollars to live on reclaimed land shaped like a palm tree in the sea by the UAE, do you really want a quarter acre block?

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/EarthObservation/images_of_the_week/20041207_072013_HRC_14776_Dubai-Isl-Palm_H.jpg

The image isn't great but google maps hasn't been updated there for a while.

As houses get larger, gardens are getting smaller. In days of yore, the front garden was seen as a public display of morality and status, while the back yard could have all the utilitarian implements like the compost heap and clothes line (incidentally, he also dispelled the myth that the Hills Hoist is NOT an Australian invention! An Aussie simply coined the term).

So it seems that there has been a reversal - now it is the house which is a statement of status, while the garden shrinks. This is prob. also related to water restrictions. But, "the leafy suburbs" still refers to wealthy areas because there continues to be more greenery in these regions.

On topic: it is difficult to defend McMansions because they have no character. They are aesthetically unappealing and are springing up everywhere, causing immense NOISE POLLUTION, making certain developers v. rich and creating who knows how many future problems.

-- gypsy mothra (meetm...), September 5th, 2006 4:26 PM. (later)

Hope the squatters and artists have cars and plenty of gas. None of this shit's ever built remotely close to any public transport.

"this is my spot, where i ya know reflect and pay my respects to god and shit"

Come on you bastard, SAY SOMETHING DAMMIT.

the arguments AGAINST both (a) and (b), though, are that i'd like to think that i DO know better (and hopefully, some other people do too). the home where i grew up is over 100 years old (built circa 1880) -- so i have some idea about how much money it takes for the upkeep (esp. heating during cold northeastern winters) as well as a vague idea of the workmanship, materials, etc. for the "real deal" as opposed to these slapped-up new constructions. my parent's older homes not only had the older, sturdier construction, but also doesn't have some of the really wasteful and (IMHO) pointless standard McMansion features -- such as needlessly high ceilings (which, besides being ostentatious, makes these places much less energy-efficient), for example. and we also had a REAL yard -- close to an acre -- as opposed to these McMansions on postage-stamp sized lots or (worse yet) attached to another McMansion (which makes them more like McCondos, if you ask me).

also, i may sound snobbish here -- but while i understand the desire for a large house i don't understand the need for a McMansion when you can get large-sized OLDER houses.

drove and walked past some incredible -- and totally indefensible -- MCMANSIONS while visiting my wife's family in LA next month. like building the Taj Mahal or Monticello on a half-acre lot. bizarre.

- Many people hate McMansions because they're oversized in proportion to their lot size and surroundings. However, if the owner was going to buy a house that size anyway it's better that they get one on a 1/4 acre lot than a 5 acre lot.

- In established communities, owners who buy small houses, tear them down, and build large houses in their place are preventing sprawl.

- New homes are, in general, much more energy efficient than old homes. Insulated ductwork, double glazed windows, tighter building envelope, etc.

- There are arguments to be made from an aesthetic and embodied energy standpoint for standard McMansion construction, but overall McMansions aren't really any worse than typical suburban development.

yes, and those of us who choose to live in the city don't want the suburbs moving in next door.

here the 'burbs are a good 15-30 min drive up the freeway. I don't care how many cheap, big houses they build up there. I live about 5 minutes from downtown in an area that was considered suburbs when it was built in the 1940's-1950's. Now it's inner-city and we bought our 1950s home there b/c that's the type of neighboorhood we want to live in. We don't want someone building some (as we call it where I come from) "North Dallas Special" on the small lot next to ours. If we wanted that we would live 30 min north instead.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/binary/b59c5629/pols_feature-34470.jpeg

No, I'm content to see them all burn.

but how much more energy do you need to crank out to heat/cool a monster home?

It's completely advisable for area residents to lobby for changes to local zoning laws! But it's also important to understand what the existing laws allow before moving to an area. Areas should be expected to change in character by default unless mechanisms are put in place to slow it.

Understand that I'm making this argument as a carless person who lives in a studio apartment.

I live in a one-bedroom apartment and frankly living any place larger would feel ridiculous. Living with another person, I'll grant, is another matter.

Read any ballard?

I dunno, some people don't care about style...

In my experience, replacing old windows and adding insulation in existing buildings (residential and commercial) pays for itself within a few years (financially and environmentally). It makes even more sense for new building since they're providing windows/insulation from scratch anyway.

i have certainly been swayed by the modular home mantras of air-tight/made indoors/precision tools/not exposed to the elements(thus no warping of wood)/not worked on haphazardly in the snow by drunk day workers with old saws arguments that the anti-"stick-built" house people like to trot out. makes sense to me. that and the fact that they are half the price of a site-built home.

Millenium People? Couldn't finish it :(

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

here the 'burbs are a good 15-30 min drive up the freeway. I don't care how many cheap, big houses they build up there.

Its all connected. The relentless push outward abandons inner ring suburbs which then have to deal with lowered tax base, it all works towards gentrification within the city, and the loss of public infrastructure for those who can't move out to the mcmansions.

Also I think practically speaking there's got to be a difference in outlook and...expectation of perfect comfort between old house owners and McMansion builders. After all, if you'd just sunk several million dollars into your new dream house, you'd be pissed, too, if it wasn't always just the right temperature inside. It seems plausible that old house owners roll with punches a little more, if for no other reason than because they HAVE to -- you never know what's going to happen in a 100-yr old place.

Most suburban homes don't call to mind McMansion either - the North Dallas Special is large (compared to a shotgun or Craftsman bungalow), but it's not gaudy or upscale enough. They're more of a tract house on steroids (with the same shitty build quality).

the Platonic McMansion = Tony Soprano's house. A bit gaudy, fucking huge, but also plain and banal in that it's got the same colonial accents as every other house on the market and the colors are all these developer-appropriate tans. Ugh.

(wish i had some pix to share - shit is bananas. thank got for russian immigrants and italian americans)

But yeah, space and location. See, I read something like this...

while i understand the desire for a large house i don't understand the need for a McMansion when you can get large-sized OLDER houses

...and it doesn't square at all with lots of places in the U.S. This town where my parents live, for instance -- it's a small town. The "older" houses consist of a kind of main drag of small, squat houses priced solidly for the lower middle class or even rented out for students to ruin; that's "affordable housing." Anything old and large was probably built and owned by the university. So the whole housing system runs on the assumption that middle and upper-middle class people go to one of the many subdivision developments on the edge of the city and build a nice quiet home. Keep in mind that in a small midwestern town, building a house the size of those two at the top costs plenty less than a big-city condo -- $250k, maybe $300k. And of course there are systemic pressures that make you build at that size; it's not like you have a choice. The developer starts off the subdivision with his own inspiring stately mini-mansion, and from there on it's enforced: they aren't going to let you build a mismatched bungalow and ruin the feel of the thing. We can say that results in boring subdivisions where everything looks the same, but for god's sake, that's the point: these are people who don't really want neighbors (and lemme tell you, with good reason), except as a kind of regularized backdrop; the sameness of it all is carefully prescribed and enforced, in order to keep anyone from coming along and doing something silly to remind everyone that there might be freaks living next door. This is basic Americanism.

I dunno -- maybe a lot of that is specific to the kinds of small college towns I've always wound up living in. But the system that creates these things is fairly logical, and it's hard to imagine who would step in and break it down. The city and its zoning control is basically the only way to change that, and what interest does a city have in stopping people from building expensive homes and paying property taxes? Aesthetics, sprawl, environmental impact? But when you have a town of 50,000 people or less, exactly how problematic are those things in the short term? When it's all just trees and fields sprawling everywhere, it's easy: sure, folks, come build a big green-lawned subdivision in our city!

Not to mention the fact that a key ingredient of homes built 30-50 years ago was the size of the yard. the demand has gone way down in this area. Most people who buy McMansions are thrilled that they will have less grass to cut and beds to weed. They'd much rather have square footage than more lawncare to squeeze in on the weekends.

and don and laurel are absolutely correct re the hassles of older houses. my parents bought their house during the early 70s (i was 3 when we moved), when prices were lower (and my hometown was just beginning to turn into the stereotypical sprawling-mess NJ suburb that it has become) and any necessary upkeep and upgrades wouldn't break the bank. (we had our share of plumbing disasters!) as for having a big yard -- well, the upkeep was what us kids had to do for our allowance money :-)

In the long run it's better for a neighborhood to have been built bit by bit over a long period of time - that way there's no cohesive style to the neighborhood that a single misstep can ruin.

anyway fuck all this noise, the place to be is the X-Seed 4000.

And for me, it's the way I was raised. My parents were always buying fixer uppers and living in grand old homes that they would make their own. They held disdain for cookie cutter tract stuff.

They're not really morally defenisble, but meh, what is?

>it is difficult to defend McMansions because they have no
>character. They are aesthetically unappealing...

Emotion, emotion, emotion.

> and are springing up everywhere...making certain developers
>v. rich and creating who knows how many future problems.

Yeah, exactly WHO KNOWS what kind of problems are caused,
nobody knows, because economic growth and population growth
aren't de facto harmful to society.

>I've tried to convince my parents to move out of the
>annoying, suburban sprawland

>living around mcmansions and in a town where everyone has a
>lexus or bmw

Classism?

>The relentless push outward abandons inner ring suburbs which then >have to deal with lowered tax base

This is fakokta. Maybe, for the sake of a secure tax base, we
should pass a law against moving anywhere.

> it all works towards gentrification within the city,
>and the loss of public infrastructure for those who can't
>move out to the mcmansions.

Sounds like classism, and buying into into the idea that
the economy is a small pie and anyone making big bucks
HAS to be fleecing the common working man. It's just too
pat.

You are Dave Sim and I claim my five bucks.

I'm also inclined to wonder at the need for houses so big that the inhabitants never have to interact and, yet, where the opportunity for outdoor living is proscribed. There's no reason to design and nurture a shady garden if you intend to spend the hot months with the A/C on and the cold ones with the heat on.

In the end it comes down to the inane materialist argument of the arriviste that money justifies everything. Since they have been productive (i.e. earned enough) to build their status symbol, they feel they've done enough. However, real refinement doesn't come from the square footage of your house but what you do with it, and, while it requires money and time to make a home nice, no amount of money will compensate for an inartistic or aesthetically indifferent mind.

>I'm also inclined to wonder at the need for houses so big that
>the inhabitants never have to interact

That's what cell phones are for :0)

(wish i had some pix to share - shit is bananas. thank got for russian immigrants and italian americans)

-- jhoshea (totalwizar...), September 5th, 2006. (scoopsnoodle) (later) (link

hah our house (though not huge) is adorned with horses, lions, an eagle and a mary on the halfshell!

And how is this different from the McMansion-dwellers who believe that cities are nothing but crime-infested slums filled with gun-toting poor people?

M. White picked the term I was going to respond with - conspicuous consumption. Tract houses and bungalow styles (which may generally share some connection with regional or national vernacular) may all look the same and they're off-putting in their own way, but McMansions have that extra veneer of privilege and entitlement lacking in solidly middle-class suburban housing.

Lived in too many housing developments growing up. My parents flipped out when we bought the old house, but you have to realize that any house over 20 years old is into the major repair cycles (e.g. roof, HVAC). Only way to avoid that is to keep buying new houses -- your mortgage lender will like you, but buy/sell one house at the wrong time in the wrong market and you'll spend a long time digging out.

My wife is a property claims adjuster and has plenty of horror stories about shoddy original construction in mega-dollar new homes. That, plus my strong disinclination to outmigrate, has kept us here (inner-ring suburb) for 16 years. Just wish our 6-year-old hadn't had so many friends' families move out to the exurbs.

ok, here's the thing with me:

i don't need that much space. i have a 1-bedroom and frankly have no idea what to do with all the square footage. i could make do with a small studio; when i get restless, the outer world is my backyard. i'm not envious of mcmansions at all -- if i could trade up for anything, it'd be a big kitchen, but i don't need the three-car garage or the separate dining room or what have you.

as a dilettante planner-in-training, i hate mcmansions for completely building out their lot size and being really greedy with frontage and side-yard and rear-yard setbacks, and for being single-family homes when the lot could comfortably accommodate medium-sized houses for a couple of young families. a lot of the victorian homes in l.a. that were built before modern size regulations started taking shape got torn down for apartment buildings, but some escaped the bulldozer and got grandfathered in through historic preservation and nonconforming-use exemptions, and houses that used to be the property of one rich family (or person!) ended up being carved into cute little studios and 1-bedrooms for students, yuppie couples, etc. i can't see this happening anytime soon with mcmansions, but who knows? i can't vouch for taste. which is why i wouldn't try to regulate mcmansions on design grounds (aside from land use) -- just because something's visually hideous doesn't mean it should be illegal.

That makes McMansions sound like the pinnacle of New Urbanist planning!

At last the Ryugyong Hotel has a rival!

well, no. "new urbanism" (as a sustainability endeavor) encourages population density, not just building density (and the building density would have to make room for other buildings. new urbanism is also in favor of green space, walkable sidewalks, and the like -- things that occur in traditional neighborhoods.

I mean, maybe these houses have to crowd their lots in city suburbs, but they're not incredibly bad about it in most of the places I've seen them -- say, Bloomington, IL. They don't necessarily have a "veneer of privilege and entitlement lacking in solidly middle-class suburban housing," because in lots of spots they kind of are solidly middle-class suburban housing; maybe upper-middle, fine, but in a small town homes in this style can be accessible to a two-income family bringing in, say, $100k between the two of them. And yes, their lots could possibly accommodate two smaller homes for younger families, but in plenty of the places they're built, there's no force really controlling for space: when there's just endless woods or prairie all around you, there's no real push to conserve land. It creates sprawl, yes it does, but the dirty secret here is that lots of middle-American folks want that sprawl and distance, either in a post-pioneer way or a good-fences-good-neighbors way. The houses are just a symptom of that -- getting rid of them isn't going to fix the psychology that supports them.

And like I said, as a separate issue, it's hard to find a force that can stop this, apart from the pure conscience of Americans deciding they're sick of sprawl and want to live close together again and somehow forcing their towns to pass on easy development -- which seems economically unlikely, especially when you figure that people who cringe at the big-box sprawl landscape have thus far just run off to the cities when young. I mean, yes, I have this terror that we've messed up much of the landscape to the point where we'll get a really bad divide between a wealthy urban elite and everyone else cast out to inhabit a horrible sprawling nothing, though I do hope one result of that would be an actual marketplace of towns trying to design themselves in tighter pedestrian patterns, trying to attract failed city-lovers -- but that requires a whole bunch of economic revision, with regard to where jobs are, and really the main sense in which towns can seize any control of this is when it comes to affordable housing, because they don't have the leverage to interfere too much with big-bucks development. I think the thing will be to see the fate of pre-planned deals like what Denver's doing with the old airport, making a whole pedestrian-friendly campus-type development; I have my doubts about things like that coming out right and aging well, but if they do, they might manage a good enough pull to keep folks fighting their way into cities just to avoid a strip-malled landmass.

that's not a secret, it's a PROBLEM.

I didn't get it - why live 25 minutes from town if my next-door neighbor can see in my bedroom?

Here's an article about Loudon County, a place in NoVa just deemed the nation's richest suburb. There is nothing out there but new houses.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/03/AR2006090300968.html

x-post from way up

actually, that mcmansions are "middle-class" IS part of the problem -- since these things are only affordable to people earning such salaries (and even upper-middle class salaries) through fiscally absurd mortgages. which, in turn, have fueled the fiscally absurd housing bubble.

They still find the cathedral ceilings ridiculous though. And if you took those out and arranged the rooms in a logical fashion, you wouldn't actually have all that big a house.

holy shit, you really ARE d.f. wallace.

not stop it, no, but there are plenty of ways to mitigate it. to take one tiny example: impact fees. one thing that makes these kinds of developments so attrative to developers (i.e. so profitable) is that they have to pay very little of the associated infrastructure costs. like, they buy up a lot of farmland on a narrow two-lane road, and then -- if they're in a county with loose subdivision regulations, which is true of a lot of exurban counties -- they pack the land with houses and effectively quadruple the daily traffic on that stretch of road, but they have no responsibility for the subsequent, inevitable road-widening, traffic lights, etc. -- to say nothing of the strain on the local school system of having a bunch of new kids dumped on them. of course, the news residents pay for some of that in property taxes, but often not enough to cover the infrastructure costs. and more to the point, the developer pays zilch, and skips on down the road to the next pasture.

and there are of course a lot of other kinds of rules and regulations that can provide at least some balance of interests. but there often isn't sufficient political will or incentive to do those things until the problems are already well underway. (the exception, naturally, being in particularly wealthy communities, where development is controlled like a motherfucker.) point being, mcmansions are no force of nature or weird aberration of american character -- they're a market response to market conditions. and market conditions are the product of political decisions.

Trust me on this, older houses - if you're speaking about houses that are 19th century or turn of the century - do not meet our needs: the kitchen's too small, no more than 1 or 2 bathrooms, downstairs you'll have a small living room and maybe a reception room. On top of that you'll need to completely redo the house (as a result of the above but also because electicity/gas and whatnot do not meet the needs of a 21th century family). As a result you're actually paying not only for the house but also the rebuilding which will run into the same amount as building a new house. We did this with our first house. Second house? We didn't bother, we sold it (for various reasons). I know, I know, it looks lovely, has style,... But you're paying so much money which could be spent on a NEW house which doesn't give you as much trouble as the old one.

Also, people who say: Who needs a big house? Who needs anything? Who needs a record collection? Who needs a house when you could live in a tent? The more money you have, the more you'll get accustomed to more luxury.

There might be a jealousy component...

I can't help but roffle at this. Always the jealousy! I mean, ffs, maybe some people just dislike it because it's, well, horrible. That said, some people just don't care about style (whatever that is?). As I said, define style? For some people my house will look like it has style, but to me it doesn't look that stylish, there's tons out there. I mean, *shrug*, maybe these people figure that the outside isn't that important, it's not like they're sitting in a couch looking at their facade all day long. Who cares what others, driving by, think of their house?

I'd say no, it's a classic. but the Apthorp @ 79th & Bway might be, it's similiar to the Dakota and even more over the top IMO.

seems like McMansions are a broader phenomenon. I thought the term applied to the kinds of places I saw in Los Angeles nabes like Beverley Hills & Breantwood, vulgar grandeur on a small lot. some looked like a compact Taj Mahal, others like a glorified Motel 6.

"Beverly Hills restricts new houses to 1,500 square feet plus 40% of the lot size, said Audrey Arlington, a principal planner for the city. That permits a 4,620-square-foot house on a 7,800-square-foot lot. Plans for houses larger than 15,000 square feet have to go through a different process.
If the proposed design does not meet staff approval, it must go before the city's design review commission, created in 2004. The aesthetics-driven commission ensures that new houses have an architectural style that fits the streetscape."

otoh...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_palace

most of the small-lot palaces were in Brentwood, behind gates and shrubs and fences. what older houses remain in that neighborhood are tasteful in comparison -- what a contrast!-- though hardly modest.

i'm no expert on historic preservation yet, but HPOZs (overlay zones for historic neighborhoods) are a common way to protect architecturally important homes while still conforming to present-day ordinances for business, housing, etc. without preservation laws, the idea is one of planned obsolescence... an agreement that eventually the structure/use will reflect the current zoning map.

For a building permit for a new duplex or single-family structure on a lot where a structure has been or will be demolished or relocated, the new structure’s size is limited to the greater of the following:
(a) 0.4 to 1 floor-to-area ratio (aka, “FAR” – the resulting structure can't exceed 40% of the entire plot area)
(b) 2,500 square feet; or
(c) 20% more square feet than the existing or pre-existing structure.

For a remodel permit to increase the size of a duplex or single-family structure, the structure’s size after the remodel is limited to the greater of the following:
(a) 0.4 to 1 floor-to-area ratio;
(b) 2,500 square feet; or
(c) the existing size 1,000 square feet, if the applicant has been granted a homestead exemption.

Sunland and Tujunga just enacted a similar ordinance.

I have trouble defending them, though, just based on my own childhood. I grew up in the neighborhood you can see in the background of this picture -- in fact, you can see my friend Dave's house. (There was no golf course then.)

http://www.pueblo.us/images/album/MoreOfPueblo/slides/Walking%20Stick%20Golf%20Course-2.JPG

I.e., close-set medium-sized homes with nice yards in a system of cul-de-sacs and pre-planned "greenbelt" parks -- this is what I think of as decent and pleasant, I guess. But then at the end of the 80s richer people started a another subdevelopment off to the side, in total McMansion style, with families picking their lots for large spaces between the houses, such that it began to feel just ... dead. I used to hate going there; in my are you were always walking or bike-riding from house to house, an actual neighborhood where each bit of space belonged to someone and was used for a purpose -- but up there, you felt like you were in a bit of a wasteland that just happened to have a bunch of stone edifices scattered around it, with strips and bits of pointless anarchic prairie just sitting between them. Something about that was terrifically unpleasant; it felt like a ragtag pioneer settlement, or something, a bunch of defended forts from which to peek suspiciously out at everyone. Whereas my cul-de-sac had block parties, and people fenced in their yards, instead of just letting their lots trail off toward the next.

I'm not entirely sure I can cosign the aversion to subdivisions flat-out, mostly because there are lots of places where it just isn't feasible to have housing mixed in with commercial stuff -- there isn't enough commercial stuff to go around. This isn't even a new idea, or anything: it's the way towns in America have always been built, especially in the west, with a commercial main street surrounded by pockets of housing. The problem now isn't that the housing's all consolidated into subdivisions, it's that the "commercial main street" has faded off into rows of strip-malls and box stores lining the major roads that take you back to your subdivision.

Quite a bit actually. Not surprisingly, developers love cul-de-sacs because they can charge a 5% markup on cul-de-sac houses. The traffic is horrible though.

I'm still annoyed by one house I lived at in Irvine which was located on a cul-de-sac street. The house was only 100 yards away by-crow-flight from the grocery store, but because of a 15ft high wall in between the house and the store, I had to drive a half-mile to get there.

Hahahaha. Or walk/bike. Not to say that I don't sometimes (usually) drive the mile to my nearest Ralphs or Trader Joe's.

Not really. Towns in America were once small and centralized. You can still see that in the older towns in the Northeast, especially -- for years my grandmother lived in a town in Connecticut that had a town square, and arranged around it were a score of essential life-sustaining businesses. If you couldn't get your truck out of the driveway because of snow, you could still walk a short distance and get food.

It's the way towns have been built since cars, and the way that even major cities were built when we were assuming that gas would always be cheap and plentiful (which is still right now, in many cases).

there are lots of places where it just isn't feasible to have housing mixed in with commercial stuff -- there isn't enough commercial stuff to go around

There isn't enough commercial stuff to fill that much space, true. But again, what made the total separation of residential area and commercial area possible was largely the car. Once you assume that you'll never have to walk to anything important, anything important tends to get further and further away.

really the distinction for me is streets where i can imagine kids playing, and streets that feel totally barren.

i guess i'm not sure what you mean. how/where/why is infrastructure not an issue? what has made mcmansion-style development possible is the public subsidization of the infrastructure that supports it (often done at the behest of developers who buy up big chunks of land and then lobby local and state governments for sewers, roads, highway off-ramps, etc). which tends to happen while other infrastructure needs are neglected. the property-tax recoup is a hard thing to gauge. taxes for a development can easily pay for an access road, but that's just the immediate, direct cost. then you have the ongoing cost of services (which get more expensive to provide per person the more sprawling the population), the longterm environmental impact, education, and so forth. i've seen several cases of once-rural two-lane roads being rapidly built-up, leading to roads being forced to handle way more traffic than they were ever designed for, schools bursting at the seams (go count how many suburban schools are using "temporary" classrooms; i was in one affluent suburban middle school that had FORTY kids per classroom), all of which create crises that the local political structures end up feeling obligated to deal with, at the expense of other needs (often in lower-income areas with less political clout).

I'm not sure, based on this, how it leads to sprawl.

part of the reason there's been so much new construction in california is because prop-13 era homeowners have such a great deal that they refuse to sell and open up existing housing (compare this to rent-control laws where little old bluehairs are still paying $150 a month). sales tax is where the money's at.

That had something to do with the attitudes, I don't doubt, but I still contend that the car made it possible. You don't move 40 minutes away from poor people unless you have a car.

Or the horse, actually -- I said "especially in the west" because I'm talking about areas that have a longer history with the farming model, where a main street center and a core of old homes (for merchants and for the wealthy and important) are surrounded by people spread out on huge parcels of land. Go any place where people grow any kind of grain, and they've been riding carts and horses down into the "centralized" quaint old main street since well before everyone had a truck. I think that idea of town-organization is still lingering in plenty of people's preferences, because it's really recent, and really small towns are still working on it -- I think it's part of why people in mid-Illinois or in Colorado want their private mansions rather than a tighter, more metropolitan organization. (Same goes for the south's planning history.)

how/where/why is infrastructure not an issue?

Gypsy, I was talking here about smaller towns, basically. Those infrastructure and planning impacts are going to be huge and problematic for suburbs and exurbs with large amounts of people moving in and through them -- they have a lot to keep under control. But part of the cultural power of the McMansion also comes from people turning to them in areas where those impacts are lessened, just in terms of pure scale. (Move to a town with only one high school, and what kind of house you choose makes no difference to the school system -- except that if you build a mini-mansion, they'll get more in property taxes.) And as these sorts of designs and developments become standard in places like that, they pick up steam, normality, ease, and efficiency for other places.

A city with streetcars and trains even today looks much different than ones with networks of freeways. The difference is not really one of necessity, either -- New York doesn't have to have subways, but it did, long before cars. So the subways stuck, because they happen to work. Chicago ought to have more trains than it does, but it's relatively younger than New York, so at some point it started to become a weird combination of 19th-century metropolis and 20th-century sprawl. Which is to say, Chicago built a lot of freeways. Los Angeles is a true 20th century city; without freeways, there would be no Los Angeles. The difference between freeway and train is huge in the way is consolidates density and determines where it is convenient for people to live. And not to get all Momus-ey, but density is key to the life of anything you can call a city.

Obviously I'm not saying those dynamics are still at play today -- just that I think they inform Americans' psychological visions of what a town is like (and what a neighborhood is like). And anything approaching city-styled planning is kinda completely foreign and alien to the visions and culture of a lot of the country.

Was the desire really for more space, though, or just more land? This western-town model has a lot to do with trying to grab as much land as possible.

Also! I think another weird problem is that suburbs and exurbs were -- theoretically -- originally supposed to be dormitories for people who worked in cities. But once giant office parks moved in those directions, people could live and work and shop entirely in what was originally thought up as a commuter dorm. It's no wonder they feel so icky to be in.

But isn't that like saying that a dip in car sales is because cars are less then desirable? What you describe was a coincidence, I think. The availability of the technology was all that really determined anything. If people had to keep riding trains because they had no other choice, they wouldn't have noticed how uncomfortable they were.

freeways are cool and all, but there most definitely was a los angeles without them, and that l.a. still exists in certain pockets of the city. as a 20th century city its roots are in the earlier parts of the century -- the megalomaniac/eeevil-modernist coolidge era, and the big-government progressivism of hoover and fdr. the streets downtown are named very optimistic-sadsack 30s things like like "hope" and "flower" and "spring" (and "hoover" too). actually, downtown l.a. is a VERY urban business district, very much like new york or chicago. and it's chock full of subway stops and surface-street transportation.

maybe, i don't know. i don't think that's statistically a big part of the mcmansion phenomenon, which is mostly concentrated in sizable subdivisions that include lots of cars and lots of kids. to the extent that those get built in and around small towns -- which has happened all over the place -- it's usually by way of the existing small towns becoming bedroom communities within a larger metro region. i mean, that what a lot of suburbs and exurbs are -- places that used to be one-stoplight waystations. to the extent that people go and build stand-alone mcmansions on rural scrub land, or on a vacant lot along main street in some small city, i agree that their impact is diminished. but mcmansions tend to travel in packs.

recontextualize this. nobody back then knew anything about urban planning (even the urban planners, who made lots of stupid mistakes and weren't really as formal and academy-recognized and community-oriented as they are today); if people knew that they could protest against major seachanges, they weren't educated enough in the right ways to formulate a traction-gaining argument; any civic engagement whatsoever could get you branded a communist; belonging to the monoculture was seen as a GREAT thing, an ideal, and it was so pervasive and undiluted by counterculture or weird ethnic shit that in most people's minds there weren't any alternatives to drinking the bourgie kool-aid. so it was a black-and-white issue for red car riders -- the service sucked, but they weren't going to demand anything better, so option B was the car, and options C-Z weren't even on the test. if they wanted to continue riding the streetcar, it certainly wasn't the appropriate time to stand up and say so.

ok, this confirms that you have no idea what you're talking about. come to los angeles sometime, get on a metro bus on a weekday during business hours, and see if you can even find a place to STAND. the buses are over capacity, and i've heard that the blue line is the most populous (or something) subway line in the county. the red line does very well and serves some really busy areas. there aren't many rail lines in service right now, but the expo line will be open by 2010, and they're working on the gold line extension to east l.a. as we speak, and it looks like the red line extension down wilshire will be a reality.

country, not county, although it's true of the county too.

About fucking time, too.

(sorry)

Yeah, that happened in a lot of places.

ok, this confirms that you have no idea what you're talking about. come to los angeles sometime, get on a metro bus on a weekday during business hours, and see if you can even find a place to STAND. [...] mayor villaraigosa is radically shaking up the city, and many bratty young-republican types despise him for it.

hm. It's sounding better and better. I haven't been there for about 10 years, and I don't recall having many public transportation options. Or being advised by the locals not to use the ones that existed. If that's all getting radically shaken up, it sounds cool.

where is "everywhere"?

LA's MTA site

Bus system map

"was"? it still seems to get >50% of registered voters, which lots of Dems don't seem to get.

1. exurbs full of cul-de-sacs and identical model homes cheek by jowl
2. pre-existing residential neighborhoods with homes from a certain era/aesthetic that are invaded by new construction of homes much larger, showier than the ones present

I think 2 is more of a problem in the Northeast right now, certainly in North Jersey and surrounding, and there've been articles and essays galore about it. Maybe 1 is more the baby of the mid- and south-west?

word.

3) Farmland, previously rolling hills, that's converted into residential acreage, with McMansions dotted over it, willy-nilly

One of the oldest houses in my mother's neighbourhood has just been McM'd and it is totally fucking with the neighbours' view/light/whatyacallit. I hate them on aesthetic grounds - they are made from poor-quality materials and always seem like you could easily punch a hole through one of the walls. I would rather replace old pipes than build ugly new houses; any family buying a house surely has a survey done to see what work needs doing before they buy? Sheesh.

I like houses with a lot of history; my aunt's was like this (ex mink farm, built-in CEDAR CLOSET, could see cabin beams in basement) and even our family home (built in 1960) has something nicely modern and teaky

Yes, cos the extra space is just sort of blown up into what could be plans for a smaller home. I've toured thru a few model homes in a smaller-end McMansion development (no reason), and what struck me is that (for this development at least) there are so few interior walls. It's all about the "great room", so you have this big angled gabled exterior, open the front door, and boom, it's one room, all the way to the sliding doors/deck/whatever, out the back. Kitchen, dining room, living room, a second dining area, etc. are all just zones of the one big thing (making them much easier to build, i'd imagine). Bedrooms are usually not much bigger than in a littler place, but the bathrooms are frankly pretty great, roomier showers, multiple sinks, good placement of a laundry room--this is hard to argue against or not want.

"Mansion" implies: lots of rooms, corridors, wings, duplication, lots of internal turns and connections, places for different activity totally out of sight and earshot of each other, getting lost even. None of these homes are like that at all, it's just the opposite. These plans were still 2 br, 1.5 ba, (maybe + office, or a bar/half kitchen in the basement, or some other actual add-on), just with the dimensions cranked up a bit.

I have no idea what it's like to live in one of these places... maybe it really does feel roomy and free, maybe after a while it just feels like you only have the same few rooms and you can't get away from each other.

One could argue that a dining room is a duplication if the kitchen already has an island and breakfast nook, ditto the difference between a media room and a living room or den or what have you -- it's all in how specifically you define their functions. But that's not unique to McMs, either.

A lot of the bulk of these things is actually garage -- up to like a third of what you see as exterior space is just a giant fancy garage! And the spot where the hugeness of them starts to get creepy is always the basement, which is usually finished and totally underutilized -- often they fix the grade so that the basement has sliding doors opening onto the yard (and the main floor has a deck), so you get this finished sunfilled carpeted giant expanse filled with, like ... a rug and some exercise equipment on one side, an aborted attempt at some sort of home office or "rumpus room" on the other -- just this clearly uncolonized space. Cause the whole point is that they built the main levels more than big enough for all the good stuff, and nobody has that much square footage in crap to store. (Especially when the garage is already huge!)

But I think by the time you're building a house you already have that psychological tic embedded in you that's all like "storage space, you can never have too much storage space, you just never know."

Yeah, I think the meat of the issue is that the promotion/popularity of McMs doesn't encourage people to ask, "How are the parts of this building going to function together?" or "How much is too much?" or "What's influencing me to think this scale of home is necessary?" Over a certain amount of space per person, excepting households with wheelchair users or families who square-dance together or something, I suspect that NO ONE needs that many cubic feet of interior air to breathe!

But...we're not thrifty anymore, generationally speaking, y'know? Couple of generations back, it would have been considered getting above yourself, or putting on airs, to consume so much, so flagrantly. Not that I'm exempt, either, as anyone who's seen my shoe closet knows.

Laurel OTM about non-thrift - or at least the concept of value for money being completely alien to this 'throw money at our problems' demographic, acch. Spending money deftly is one of the most entertaining things to do whilst wearing clothes, right? People, if I built a house I would employ an architect and not buy some idiocy off the peg from some developer where all the houses look like the tracts in E.T. It just makes sense and in the long run costs the same (and can be less if you are a control freak) if you're any good at sourcing materials, decor, etc - which I am. Open-plan living is something that's been desirable/aspirational since at least the early '80s but I think that sensibility is best when using reclaimed buildings and not new ones.

A custom home takes time to build (especially if the schmuck homeowners can't pick out a motherfucking tile/pattern...), but you will see better return (in workmanship, filling personal needs, and later resale) than in a cookie-cutter McMansion gated community. If you need to move in now, then a house built on spec might be worth the compromises.

xp: How often is the budgeting caused by home-owners with eyes bigger than pockets? I've personally worked on four houses in the last two years that ran into homeowners whose appetites continuously grew throughout the build. When eight feet of built in oak cabinets miraculously becomes an entire wood-panelled study in alder (which is more expensive to build and more expensive to stain/finish), of course your budget is going to be shot to hell.

That's some of it. A lot of it is contractors providing higher prices for work where they're going to have to go through much more coordination and hand-holding. A lot of it is homeowners going into it thinking "we'll cut back on X, don't need the fanciest Y" when prices of things like foundation work and plumbing just aren't going to change substantially. A lot of it is architects assuming that things they custom design are going to be inexpensive just because the materials are low cost, though the labor cost may be much higher.

a bunch of people have echoed this on this thread. could you instant construction specialists tell me exactly what these houses are made of because youre making it seem like the typical mcmansion is made entirely of drywall.

http://www.stuccolaw.com/

Maybe I'm still equating McMansion with something more upscale than most, but that's not my experience at all - stone (manufactured or real) face, brick on the side, hardy board for overhangs and siding are popular in ranch-style developments, brick all around rather than stone if you're not.

No kidding.

So, has all this additional space helped make a happier American home?

Perhaps not quite. Twenty years ago, nearly six in 10 homeowners reported high satisfaction in their houses. Last year, five in 10 did.

but that's just me. i like old stuff.

If it's desireable why not build new homes that way? Every new architect-designed house that I've seen seems to use open plan and they all look great.

I'll just post this, though, for the time being: http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/

xp - I also like old stuff. My parents' house (where I grew up) is about 100 years old, a constant struggle to maintain, but it's a hobby for my parents, so they don't care.

In Bozeman, there's a huge reluctance to pursue intensive, mixed-development in the downtown area, because that would require tall buildings (block views of the mountains), and the destruction of the city's carefully maintained "small-town" charm. Not that anyone wants to knock down all the old Victorian storefronts or anything. It's just that a lot of native Montanans see tall buildings as being too urban, and the recent transplants want to keep pretending they live in A River Runs Through It (filmed about 15 mins outside of town, incidentally). So, the development aprons out, and gobbles up all the ranch/farming land in the surrounding area. Then, everyone complains about sprawl, and blames it on the second-home owners and people from California, nevermind the fact that the loudest critics are those that moved here only 5-10 years ago.

Interestingly, New Urbanism and mixed-development cropped up in a recent local op-ed, and were referred to as "revolutionary new ideas in urban planning."

Basically, people here, and in a lot of other Western towns, are afraid of the inevitable: growth. It's gonna happen eventually, and it's guaranteed to be awful if everyone pretends it isn't happening, and lets the developers run the show.

(ps - I'm still interested in some urban planning book recs, jbr! ....if yr willing)

Basically, the pressure to build out and up and accept oversize as the norm ignores a lot of life-quality sort of enduring human considerations. Please excuse the over-idealization/romanticization/etc but I really, really don't want to live in a house that encourages me to be deaf and blind to myself, if that isn't completely ridiculous.

there are some usc guys that have written great stuff about california history and planning: greg hise, william deverell, kevin starr. james kushner has a terrific casebook called land use regulation that explains everything you could ever want to know about important precedents, zoning, the subdivision process, impact fees and conditions and assessments and so forth. tridib-banerjee co-authored an interesting book about downtown redevelopment, public/private partnerships, BIDs, the nature of public space, urban spatial analysis, etc -- called urban design downtown: poetics and politics of form. dowell myers has interesting, often unconventional ideas about demography, the future, and the public good.

dunno why i put that hyphen in there.

what is in store for mcmansions over the next 25 years?

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime

McMansions: now on the $1 menu

what a very timely thread revival, in light of this news story.

http://ap.google.com/media/ALeqM5hiLgxywBn_qaNgD1gUsYMbjA25sA?size=m

actually, this is a pretty nice visual metaphor of the american economy these days ...

dude, fuck the ELF

maybe if those guys had squirt guns

xpost - im sprry, that just looks funny ("fuck the elf" not the fire)

*sorry

dude, fuck the ELF

i agree ... i just saw the news story, and remembered that this thread was revived.

I feel the same way about the ELF (oh the lawls of that acronym).

Part of me, though, thinks this *may* have been a self-job i.e. the project was doomed because Woodinville is going down teh toilets as an exurb so it was a cash-in on the damage insurance money.

Then again, I wouldn't put it past the ELF to mark themselves this way, either.

tom fucks dudes elves

go fuck your own dudeself

or whatever. Mackro's version is the best so far though

Part of me, though, thinks this *may* have been a self-job i.e. the project was doomed because Woodinville is going down teh toilets as an exurb so it was a cash-in on the damage insurance money.

Then again, I wouldn't put it past the ELF to mark themselves this way, either.

-- Mackro Mackro, Tuesday, 4 March 2008 02:54 (3 minutes ago) Link

My thoughts EXACTLY

I mean wtf why would ELF choose random luxury houses to target - do they have any history of doing that? I thought they just, like, wrecked industrial agricultural machinery and shit.

i seem to recall them doing stuff like this before - as well as targeting a lot full of suvs and a ski lodge maybe?

yeah the ski lodge was the kicker. "ok, you don't give a shit about the planet, you just hate rich people."

not that there's anything wrong with that

Over time after those that could afford to abandon the stranded suburbs and return to the center will the mcmansions be bulldozed or converted into multi-family dwellings? Are they large enough to fulfill that function?

They aren't well constructed enough to undergo conversions. Most will rot where they stand if not lived in and moderately well kept. (see past threads on decline of the suburbs)

not just for exurbia
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/nyregion/05forest.html

seems like a variation on this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_palace

Some have suggested that abandoned McMansion suburbs will be the slums of an energy starved future.

The emphasis placed on the extended family by most Middle Eastern cultures, including that of Persia, means that Persians' houses are typically far larger than those built by Americans in the 1920s and 1930s.

The neutrality or factuality of this article or section may be compromised by weasel words racism, which can allow the implication of unsourced information.

None of the above is as egregious as what you can find driving around or using the local listings.

For example:

<a href="http://s35.photobucket.com/albums/d195/richhunt35/?action=view¤t=sc0110b186.jpg"; target="_blank"><img src="http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d195/richhunt35/sc0110b186.jpg"; border="0" alt="Cloud house"></a>

oops.

<img src="http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d195/richhunt35/sc0110b186.jpg"; >
Sorry about the messed up link.

http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d195/richhunt35/sc0110b186.jpg

DUH. Sorry.

http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d195/richhunt35/sc0110420f.jpg

“Don’t be upset with our people because we like to be large,” pleaded Boris Kandov, president of the Bukharian Jewish Congress of the U.S.A. and Canada

-----------

lol every line in that queens mcmansion nytimes story is a money quote

one lol not mentioned tho: outer borough mcmansions tend because of scarcity of space to be scale replicas. u look at them like oh wow then realize theyre using all sorts of werido perspective tricks like low ceilings small rooms and teeny balconies to trick you into thinking theyre anything but the smallish homes they actually are

McMansions Return: Why Big Houses Are Coming Back

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100321206