Bad Manors: The McMansion as Harbinger | Hacker News Reader

Bad Manors: The McMansion as Harbinger

thebaffler.com

69 pointssamclemens210 comments

My personal worry about so called McMansions is that people are buying the largest houses they can possibly afford, and the quality of the building is sacrificed for size. The costs of maintaining these enormous houses can sometimes be absolutely staggering. I worry that in years to come, entire neighbourhoods of these houses will simply fall into disrepair, as nobody will be able to afford the costs of fixing them as they age.

In the 30's lots of large houses were divided into apartments. I'm thinking we're headed there again in some places. This time with McMansions being being divided into smaller units.

The problem is modern homes are for the most part hard to divide. Homes in the 30s often had very defined rooms connected with hallways. Modern homes include mostly open spaces with a few discrete rooms.

Open spaces are pretty easy to divide as long as they're horizontal. Vertical 'lawyer foyers' are a bit harder to use well.

A big reason why is because of the depression. We constructed very few houses in the 1930s and 1940s. What we started building in the 1950s is a completely different thing and why homes pre-war that are well maintained are so prized.

Most of the pre-war houses are gone, because they were crappy. The houses that are still around and prized, or have been divided into multiple units, were the houses that rich people lived in. The houses everyone else lived in were torn down long ago.

Of course there's selection bias. And what was considered a "home" of that era was very wide ranging. A lot of people lived in what was little better than a shack. and yes, many of the pre-war homes that are still standing were for rich people back then and are today. But there are a lot of pre-war homes in areas that are considered undesirable or even slums in many midwestern and east coast cities. Many of them modified for multi-tenancy, yes but also many still standing in a state of dilapidation as old homes cost money to maintain and modernize.

Anyways, most people didn't live in single family homes before the 1950's. Tenements, apartments, and packing multiple families into a single space was very common across classes of people that weren't rich. Single family homes and land ownership that is attainable is a vert post-war idea. The Communists built huge towers with shared spaces (which we also did for our urban lower classes) and we built sprawling subdivisions of vernacular single family homes with private spaces.

Also, from 1930 to about 1947 we built almost nothing due to the depression and then the war. Most of the tenements and apartments and shard living spaces were becoming old and broken down and this combined with the better living conditions a suburban home and a car could provide fueled the great migration out of the cities. Of course, the lower classes were left with the last-gen homes and unable to repair the through thrift or wealth.

That argument scales to any market segment. And it's not always the absolute cost of maintenance, but the decreasing value of performing it. Welcome to American West.

> ... entire neighbourhoods of these houses will simply fall into disrepair, as nobody will be able to afford the costs of fixing them as they age.

Cleveland has this. Atlanta has this. I'm sure most other cities do too.

But there's always a buyer. They may not be able to afford to repaint custom Victorian woodwork every other year, and just let it rot, but someone will live there.

Approximately the same is true of sprawling suburbs. Sprawling suburbs are uneconomical; tax revenue is unable to cover the costs of maintenance. The result is that state and even federal money is needed to subsidize the costs[0]. Not sustainable.

Urban planning is not in good shape and hasn't been since about the 1950s. Worse, the postwar American model has been exported around the world which means these bad practices have been copied elsewhere. Still worse, urban planning decisions are effectively permanent. This is very apparent when you look at old European cities where buildings might have changed, but the layout of roads is either the same or agrees with the contours of previous structures, boundaries of what used to be parcels of farm land, etc.

[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-pon...

Strong Towns makes a compelling case but until (unless?) suburbs truly start bankrupting in the way they describe, and in a way that hurts residents, I kind of think they are preaching to the choir.

Like if they are right but central state / city governments just increase subsidization, maybe that’s just what people want. Despite the fact that I don’t like it myself.

> Sprawling suburbs are uneconomical

That is not what your linked article says. The article says is that US cities have not charged, and are not charging, enough property taxes: because of $reasons. If cities were to charge costs correctly, which must happen eventually, then suburbs are economical.

It is really difficult to compare like with like when it comes to property taxes in different countries. Costs, percentages, house valuations, plus other confounding factors mean we need to take all numbers as indicators only. But let’s compare Kansas City with Christchurch, New Zealand.

KANSAS CITY

[2021] The median property tax in Kansas is $1,625.00 per year for a home worth the median value of $125,500.00. Counties in Kansas collect an average of 1.29% of a property's assesed fair market value as property tax per year. Kansas is ranked number twenty six out of the fifty states, in order of the average amount of property taxes collected.

1625 / 76000 = 2.1% of median household gross income on property taxes[1].

Kansas City, MO's Taxpayer debt is -$8,700[2]. That doesn’t seem outrageous compared with household values and household mortgages.

CHRISTCHURCH

Suburbs pay for themselves in Christchurch, when they are built, and for their ongoing maintenance upkeep.

In 2021 average residential rates (property tax) nationwide [NZD]2,572. That’s about USD1750.

Christchurch is a city with significant and increasing urban sprawl. “Christchurch City Council continues to have the highest liabilities (debt) per household compared to any other council ([NZD]30,096)” with median property price in 2021 of [NZD]650,000 (I am guessing - rose significantly during the year). All new suburban developments in Christchurch have front loaded costs to pay for the extra infrastructure - the city does not subsidise infrastructure. Property taxes in Christchurch are about 5% of household gross income.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSKSA646N

[2] https://www.data-z.org/state_data_and_comparisons/city/kansa...

PS: Strong Towns is epically biased against suburbs - using them as a reference is taking a ridiculously partisan position.

I generally like strongtowns attitude and articles, but a lot of their detailed calculations about the cost of suburbs being unsustainable focus on sidewalk maintenance costs. One example:

https://actionlab.strongtowns.org/hc/en-us/articles/13529213...

Back in 1999, an acquaintance of mine became a paper millionaire of a dot-com and bought a 2.3M home in Boca Raton, Fl, and put in a further half million renovating it. As he was driving me and a few friends through the neighborhood, he indicated that if you don't like the style of house, it could be demolished and a new home built, and pointed out a few homes that were new, the old having been demolished.

He also said that it cost him something like $10,000/month to live here, what with the mortgage and huge electric bill (he had three multi-ton A/C units to cool the almost 10,000 square foot (900 square meters) home.

It was ... something.

Well anecdotally, here in SoCal, McMansion capitol of the planet, I’m not seeing it.

Myself and my circle of friends have had assorted houses of assorted sizes and ages, and save for my 1960 ranch built on truly horrible soil, nobody has encountered any gross problems.

One is over 20 years old with nothing of note. Another is push 35 with nothing of note. My then new and lived in townhouse for 6 years had no issues. My friends in the Inland Empire (where housing was “cheap”) have had no complaints.

Partly I credit the building codes in CA and the communities. A friend recently explored building a house and was required to do an updated soil study, for example.

The expanding clay soil that they dropped my house on 40 years before we bought it converted the slab to gravel. All sorts of movement in that house. At one point you could tell the season based on the size of the crack in the bathroom wall, it moved visibly over time.

The entire neighborhood was like this. And, yea, they were expensive to fix. But the contractor gutting my rooms commented on how well the house itself was built. Today, I think what happened there could (should) not happen.

I had to re-pour foundations, re-line sewers, replace HVAC on that house.

Mind I certainly wouldn’t want to redo the flooring of a 4000 sq ft house. But the bones, core features and fundamentals seem to last.

And, for sure, there are different grades of builders. Homes at different price points. But much of that is fit and finish cosmetics vs fundamentals of the house.

I can’t speak to other neighborhoods. But I imagine it’s more than basic maintenance that’s driving folks away.

Make no mistake, larger houses cost more. More flooring to buy. More walls to paint. Larger HVAC to service. More cu ft to heat and cool.

But I’ll bet the sewer line for the cheap house and expensive house are fundamentally identical.

But I think the baseline, for the big parts, those dictated by codes and inspections, at least, anecdotally, in SoCal, seems pretty solid.

I think there can be some self-selection bias involved in this assessment. Maintenance is something that some people are disinclined to attempt at all: they "consume" their housing, vehicles, furniture etc. instead. In essence what they demand is an IKEA house. The market will meet that demand to the extent that regulation allows it.

As well, each generation of housing stock has a share of survivors that often were invested in more heavily early on, preventing small maintenance issues from developing into bigger ones. Foundation settlement is a common issue, as you point out. But for one example of what can go wrong with a whole generation, the move towards greater insulation ran into a widespread problem of toxic mold in the 2000's, caused by trapped water vapor in the structural materials. Those houses, McMansions among them, were lost, and made their owners sick. Building standards account for this now, but that kind of thing crops up with each change in practices, so I always see the first 5-10 years as a kind of proving ground: if it gets through that without turning into a nightmare it can usually go for many more decades.

I always wondered what a house "designed for maintenance" would look like. I imagine '70's style paneled interiors, but each panel comes off with a couple bolts, and you can rip out the insulation and replace it with state-of-the-art, run new Ethernet or coax trivially, or neatly replace a leaky pipe without huge rework afterwards.

>houses will simply fall into disrepair, as nobody will be able to afford the costs of fixing them as they age

That has been true of mansions for hundreds if not thousands of years ;)

My opinion is that the author is totally off the mark due to conflating two separate aspects of modern home building.

I’ll use these definitions in order to decouple the two aspects.

McMansions are custom homes built by the nouveau rich. They can be in greenfield developments or as teardowns in established neighborhoods.

Spec ("speculative") homes are houses built as a collection by a developer and then sold to their owners. There is usually an HOA.

A McMansion can be built poorly for sure. But more frequently it is built with a "most home for the least cost" mentality. The materials and quality are high but there's something missing. I think what's missing is craftsmanship and architectural finesse.

Spec houses can be built well and may are. But like McMansions - the dominant philosophy is "most home for the least cost". Those that are not built well - and that's is likely the majority - will result in large, unexpected repair costs for future owners.

McMansions and spec houses usually occupy mutually exclusive developments - which make sense since someone building a custom home doesn't want to be next door to a spec house.

A McMansion is only slightly more likely to avoid the "something is missing" aspect of large modern spec houses. And it's from the same root cause - a lack of craftsmanship and architectural finesse. Where I lived until recently and for over twenty years, there were several houses torn down and replace with McMansions. The one beside me was originally a small (~1200 sq ft) brick ranch like mine. It was replaced by a McMansion. The owner/builder told me directly that she builds "the most home for the least cost". She lives in them for three years and then moves and repeats. The one across the street replaced a very charming stone house in the Tutor style. I was sad to see it go. Its replacement was a house that occupies most of the lot - a 3/4 acre lot - but I do include all the ugly "hard" landscaping as occupying the lot. The lot had looked so large and beautiful with the small stone house. Both McMansion were built by the same builder. Neither had an architect (structure or landscape) involved - and it shows.

Another example on my street was truly a head-scratcher. The owners tore down a really nice 3000 sq ft brick house, and replace it with a really ugly 4000 sq ft house of much lower quality design and materials.

I get that the standard use of "McMansion" does encompass both types of building, but I have long distinguished McMansions as those that are custom-built. If someone else builds and then sell you a house, It’s no kind of mansion – it just a large spec house.

I have little experience with spec developments. I've no reason to venture into such exurb wastelands and thankfully all of my friends share that opinion and don't buy them. I assume they exist here - but they are dozens of miles from the city.

I live in a charming and affordable neighborhood that is a 15 minute drive to downtown (with light rail connections too). The houses were built in several generations from the 1920s to the 1970s. The schools consistently rate among the best in the state. McMansions are exceedingly rare here. Houses are rarely cheap and are of high quality. Lots are small and zoning doesn't allow for much of an increase in footprint. Even if it did, it would make no economic or aesthetic sense to tear one down. It does make sense to fix one up.

I've always considered McMansions to be more of style than an actual building type, usually it has to do with a mismatching of architectural styles, almost within the vein of "what a poor person thinks a rich persons house would have". Some of the diagram like posts on McMansion hell are a good example here is one, https://mcmansionhell.com/post/699110995935805440/a-fine-sel...

Also I think many of what is considered a mcmansion to be mass produced, that is if wikipedia is to be believed.

Ah, a rag totally dedicated to harping the virtues of "urbanism" is unloading on actually liveable houses. Shocking. News at 11.

Reality: McMansions are popular because they are comfortable and provide living space for an actual family. While being NOT more expensive on a per-unit basis than tiny condos in major urban centers.

I get it, millenials got screwed by the unfortunate confluence of 2008 and by the economy finally transforming from manufacturing economy into a service-based one. They can't afford large houses, so the psychological defense mechanism kicks in: "Hey, these McMansions are bad anyway. It's good to downsize into a shoebox".

But at this point we perhaps should start answering the question: do we want cities to continue being densified into Manhattan-style concrete canyons, or should we make sure that our children can live in nice houses that our generation was not able to afford?

> Reality: McMansions are popular because they are comfortable and provide living space for an actual family. While being NOT more expensive on a per-unit basis than tiny condos in major urban centers.

> I get it, millenials got screwed by the unfortunate confluence of 2008 and by the economy finally transforming from manufacturing economy into a service-based one. They can't afford large houses, so the psychological defense mechanism kicks in: "Hey, these McMansions are bad anyway. It's good to downsize into a shoebox".

So they're popular because they're affordable, but they're hated because they're expensive? Which is it?

> But at this point we perhaps should start answering the question: do we want cities to continue being densified into Manhattan-style concrete canyons, or should we make sure that our children can live in nice houses that our generation was not able to afford?

Manhattan is popular, aspirational even, for a reason. Every generation before the 1950s was built by gradual densification. The wrongheaded decision to try to pickle cities in aspic via zoning laws is what creates housing unaffordability. A "nice" lifestyle is far more about being able to live somewhere you can work and socialize than about having zillions of sterile square feet to yourself.

Having acres of fertile square feet to yourself is indeed a nice lifestyle.

I'll be honest, that sounds like a ton of work.

Yes but to many it is a relaxing form of work, just like a better form of mental and physical workout combined with “forest bath” or “bird song bathing” — depending on the local biome and season of course

Acres? Those are bona-fide mansions and estates.

The definition of McMansion I’m familiar with, at least in Los Angeles, is demolishing a 2bd/2ba bungalow to build a 5bd/4ba house, usually by getting rid of all fertile backyard/frontyard in the first place. They have another pejorative name, too— “Boxy Moderns”

This is super common in Santa Monica or Beverly Hills, for example. Even San Francisco!

And yet, for some reason, this is completely fine to build without any zoning meetings but the second you propose a 5-unit 1bd/1ba apartment building with the same profile in a “single family neighborhood” it’s ruining the entire “character” of the place and requires 3-5 years of bureaucracy and, depending on the neighbors, litigation.

The number of family units to hold responsible (and to hold each other responsible) accounts for all of the resistance, and quite frankly, there should be more.

You can have a house with a family with kids or you can have a box with a half dozen losers in it, and statistically one of them is a felon. Sane people choose the former.

…?

In these neighborhoods a 1bd condo would still sell for above $800k, minimum. More than likely $1.2-1.5m, looking at Zillow. They’d rent for at least $7k/mo.

If we’re generalizing, like you are, then they’d allow the well-off professional class to live and work in their neighborhood and send their kids to the same schools as the investor-class and trust fund kids-turned-homeowners who haven’t done anything in decades other than be born to the right family.

Unless you’re talking about white-collar convicted felons? Which I can guarantee you, once again, they already live in these neighborhoods and aren’t the ones trying to move into it.

If that sounds like hyperbole, then sure— but so is yours.

It can be, for some people. Rural lifestyles work, urban lifestyles work; suburbia gets the worst of both worlds, even with the messed up economics that subsidise it it's still not a pleasant way of living (AIUI there's an established bias that people naturally underestimate how long they'll be stuck in traffic commuting and how miserable it will make them).

> AIUI there's an established bias that people naturally underestimate how long they'll be stuck in traffic commuting and how miserable it will make them

Grew up in the burbs of southern California so I had 22 years of experience with the traffic there. Turned me into an urban or rural dweller. Nothing in between. It's just not worth it.

> So they're popular because they're affordable, but they're hated because they're expensive? Which is it?

Millenials can't afford to buy either a McMansion, or a condo in a city. They can afford to rent an apartment.

> Manhattan is popular, aspirational even, for a reason. Every generation before the 1950s was built by gradual densification.

Yup. And there's a reason why the US became the world leading power with unparalleled quality of life after 1950-s.

American post-war affluence is because of McMansions? That’s certainly a novel theory.

Yup. They just were not called "McMansions" at the time.

Affluence definitely followed the conscious policy decision to build a network of freeways and highways, with a focus on suburban lifestyle.

To expand a bit on that, car-oriented cities allowed US citizens to:

1. Have shorter commutes than Europeans. This _still_ holds true!

2. Be able to access more businesses within the "reasonable commute" range.

> car-oriented cities allowed US citizens to:

> 1. Have shorter commutes than Europeans. This _still_ holds true!

> 2. Be able to access more businesses within the "reasonable commute" range.

Citation? That's the opposite of everything I've seen here and elsewhere; Americans seem to see an hour-or-more commute as normal. Car-based cities give you great commute times until those pesky other cars start commuting and filling up the roads.

For 1980 the US average commute time was 21 minutes. For Paris that was 38 minutes. For London it was 40 minutes.

For the current state of affairs: Commute time in Paris: 32 minutes, commute time in Berlin: 31 minutes, commute time in London: 47 minutes. US average: 27 minutes.

For reachability: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-021-00020-2

> Car-based cities give you great commute times until those pesky other cars start commuting and filling up the roads.

Even bad car-based cities are generally _better_ than the best transit-oriented cities. Even with congestion and decades of neglect, forced by anti-people pro-urbanism crowd.

Just look up commute times and think. I suggest looking up Houston, TX (so-called "car hell") and comparing it with major European cities.

Paris commute times are much higher than in the rest of the country. France's average commute time is currently at 25 min, which lower than US average. Ergo… Also excellent transit-oriented cities are just that, excellent. Had a 20 min commute in Singapore a while, it was just terrific – excellent flow, perfectly convenient, great selection of hawkers to start the day with a curry puff or whatever suits your fancy before popping into the ultrareliable and silent MRT… Beats driving any day, and especially what you get in a bad car-based city like Jakarta with its average driving speed on weekday mornings of 5 km/h…

No offense intended, but the second leg of cyberax’ point still stands — quoted below — higher percentages of the total jobs in a metro area are within the average range of an average US metro dwelling household also, as long as they don’t have to worry about costs of car repair and insurance.

If Paris’ airport built two new runways and they both filled up with international flights immediately, would this be taken as evidence that their construction was an irresponsible waste of scarce public investment? It would rather be celebrated as a validation of forecast utility to the public and to the economy. Same for urban condo buildings filling up. Yet American traffic jams are gross and different from runways? How so?

> Affluence definitely followed [as well as preceded; but, in any case, a set of feedback loops, not simply affluence preceding networks’ construction —-Ed.] the conscious policy decision to build a network of freeways and highways, with a focus on suburban lifestyle.

> To expand a bit on that, car-oriented cities allowed US citizens to:

> 1. Have shorter commutes than Europeans. This _still_ holds true!

> 2. Be able to access more businesses within the "reasonable commute" range.

> No offense intended, but the second leg of cyberax’ point still stands — quoted below — higher percentages of the total jobs in a metro area are within the average range of an average US metro dwelling household also, as long as they don’t have to worry about costs of car repair and insurance.

I don't think it does though? Figure 4 on their link shows the transit-oriented cities in Europe and China doing a lot better on that metric than US cities.

> I don't think it does though? Figure 4 on their link shows the transit-oriented cities in Europe and China doing a lot better on that metric than US cities.

The axes have different scales, look again. The Figure 4 shows that the US cities cluster around 500000 jobs accessible by car. And cars are the main mode of transportation in the US.

Figure 3 shows that European cities cluster around 100000-200000 jobs accessible by public transit.

It's also true that many European cities are actually competitive when you do use a car. But we're looking at transit vs. car use.

> The axes have different scales, look again.

Within each graph the scale is the same, and the European/Chinese cities do significantly better (are higher up the graph) than the US cities. (I do wonder why London and Paris are missing from Figure 4).

> It's also true that many European cities are actually competitive when you do use a car. But we're looking at transit vs. car use.

They're better than competitive; their trendline for job accessibility is 2x or more better than the US one. Car-oriented city design results in much worse job accessibility, even for car users.

> Paris commute times are much higher than in the rest of the country.

Do you think urbanization cancer will spare you, if you have an Eiffel Tower in your country? Paris metro area is about 1/6-th of France in population, and it's growing. That's why commute times will keep getting worse, while commutes themselves are going to get more and more miserable.

The US average commute time is weighted down by large coastal cities, that are growing like a cancer, following anti-human urbanist policies. If you look at smaller cities in the US, then it's basically a commute heaven. E.g. Salt Lake City is at 20 minutes, Boise ID is at 15 minutes.

> For 1980 the US average commute time was 21 minutes. For Paris that was 38 minutes. For London it was 40 minutes.

> For the current state of affairs: Commute time in Paris: 32 minutes, commute time in Berlin: 31 minutes, commute time in London: 47 minutes. US average: 27 minutes.

As the other reply said, misleading to compare a city average with a national average.

> For reachability: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-021-00020-2

As far as I can see that's showing reachability, including by car, is much better in transit-oriented cities in Europe and China than in the US? Why do you think that supports your argument?

Most Millenials who can afford to rent an apartment can afford to buy a condo in a city - maybe not SF or NY, but a studio condo on Chicago's North Side, or in older buildings in the Loop, can be had under $150k. A newer studio or older one-bedroom can be had under $200k. Sure, there's a HOA, but it usually includes some amenities; the key difference in affordability is the dramatically lower down payment (the largest barrier to home ownership for most young people) than a large suburban house. A mid-six-figure McMansion is in a completely different price class - especially when accounting for the heating, cooling, and insurance costs of the much larger home.

Sorry, but you’re creating a false dichotomy.

The _vast majority_ of land in the US, urban centers included, including NYC, is zoned for low density single family homes. Manhattan is only 1 of 5 boroughs in NYC, remember.

There is NO shortage of single family homes.

There IS a shortage of absolute number of units in urbanized areas.

This is because, contrary to what you claim, the only thing allowed to be built in many areas is exclusively single family homes.

> Should we make sure that our children can live in nice houses that our generation was not able to afford

I say this as a relatively fortunate homeowner in Los Angeles who is part of “this generation”: if we do not allow more homes to be built, the next generation will not be able to live in the city at all.

I myself would not have been able to afford my home in the city and neighborhood I love had the recent state zoning changes (sb9) which allowed me to convert my single family home into to a duplex not occurred.

I think people are even indifferent to single-family homes. Many people would be happy living in a duplex or any of the various structures of the missing middle. You can raise a family under those conditions. What difference does it make if your child plays soccer with their friends in the shared courtyard or your own private backyard?

I think what the article is trying to say is more affordable/modest new construction is needed to improve current housing issues in many areas. Cheaply built giants, made to maximize contractor profits, only serve a small income demographic at the end of the day.

Even embracing for a second the notion that spreading municipalities out over vast tracts of land connected by cars is ethical and sustainable (which I don't)... the stereotypical midwestern suburb I grew up in had a lot of modest single family homes. The developers kept large stands of original trees. Homes backed up into forests, parks, and (natural) ponds.

The houses were generously proportioned for four people.

Then the wave of McMansions hit. The contrast was night and day. Same families, but the houses were twice as large, adorned with like... Fake columns and endless unnecessary fake architectural flourishes and ugly facade exteriors. The houses were jammed into tiny lots with no trees and no yards. The developers cut down all of the natural landscape and installed ridiculous fountain jets in drainage ponds. Side by side with the rest of the neighbourhood it was (and remains) ugly, excessive and soulless.

That's what a McMansion means to me. It's the white collar commuter's Ford F150 of a house.

And to be clear people have hated McMansions since long before the "millenials," what a weird "fuck you, got mine" take.

> endless unnecessary fake flourishes

So... Like pretty much all art?

With you until the last sentence. The high prices for small condos in urban centers are an indication that there are fewer of them in supply relative to what the market demands. There's nothing wrong with letting urban centers densify and serve as a containment zone for childless 20-somethings (in fact, this would mean more affordable single family homes for those that need them). And who knows, if there's enough dense urban housing to meet demand, then those residents could have an easier saving up money themselves, with which to later purchase some more space in which to raise a family

> The high prices for small condos in urban centers are an indication that there are fewer of them in supply relative to what the market demands.

Be careful trying to apply ECON101 micro principles when looking at property markets: property markets are neither efficient, nor rational.

> those residents could have an easier saving up money themselves

In desirable property markets, people bid against each other as much as they can afford to pay for a mortgage - so your cause and effect is wrong - most people don’t get to save. Same analyses if renting, because landlords and renters do much the same behaviour. You get to save if (a) you are an undesirable market or time, or (b) your wages are enough to beat the majority, or (c) you stay in a lower status home compared to your peers.

People bidding whatever they can afford is largely a lack-of-supply problem, is it not? If more housing of a given status level were available, eventually it wouldn't be necessary for everyone to spend everything they can on bidding wars. And sure, then you might say "well then the relative status of that housing has shifted and your peers still aren't saving, they're just spending their money on nicer housing", but I still see that as an absolute win. I have much more empathy for a person not saving money when saving money means "living in a dump and commuting 90 minutes each way" than when it means "living more than half an hour away from Central Park".

> People bidding whatever they can afford is largely a lack-of-supply problem, is it not?

ECON101 thinking. Tokyo is given as an example of enough supply, but something like 25% of the nation lives there, and Tokyo doesn’t have the same pressure of young working age people moving as other countries due to their aging population. Imagine even 10% of the USA moving to New York, and say 20% of all 2x year olds per year. How does NY double or triple the number of residences?

And as you say, status drives prices. In Christchurch we have a desirable suburb Merivale, where people bid rediculous prices because it has money status. The exact same house in another suburb, closer to town, can be a lot cheaper.

In NZ people want their kids to go to high decile schools. A high decile school is one where the parents are in the top 10% of earners. There is natural price discrimination working in the housing market to keep prices just barely affordable at every wage.

In New Zealand and Australia we have major cities where houses are 10x earnings, bigger multiples than most of the USA, and you will be surprised how much more US house prices can go up. New York doesn’t make the top ten list for unaffordability in the world: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/least-affordable-cities-to-...

New Zealand’s major city has 20% of the country’s population, and is also ridiculously expensive compared to household earnings. I wonder how many more houses it needs before prices would drop?

We are building new houses at a fucking insane rate in Christchurch (lag from Earthquakes a decade ago) - yet prices are still chronically hiking.

NY is very dense, yet prices are very high, so it breaks ECON101 assumptions since prices must have gone up as density went up. One theory is that houses are Veblen goods - which totally fucks with supply/demand curves.

Actually NY stopped growing about 50 years ago - perhaps not a great example.

> The high prices for small condos in urban centers are an indication that there are fewer of them in supply relative to what the market demands.

Here's a simple fact. Densification never leads to lower prices. As you build more housing, it _always_ becomes more expensive faster than you can build it.

I analyzed the database of all real estate sales in the US for the last 25 years, and I have not found a single example where densification led to price drops. Other scholarly literature found similar results, at most you can expect single-digit percentage drops on rents from new construction.

> There's nothing wrong with letting urban centers densify

Yes, there is. Densification forces jobs to migrate to urban centers, because companies in dense cores have a competitive advantage in the access to a larger pool of talent.

So your choices are:

1. Densify to hell and then in a couple of generations your children will live in apartments where you can shit into your toilet, while cooking food at the same time. See: microapartments in Tokyo.

2. Limit density and promote suburban lifestyle.

That's it. It's not a false dilemma, there are really no in-between choices that are stable long-term.

I’ll take Tokyo over the car-dependent sprawl of the suburbs. That’s a really easy choice to make

You have the cause and effect reversed. Areas densify because they become more expensive. This is the classic “more medicine causes higher mortality” Simpson's paradox.

Edit: Also, looking at one country for less than a generation is not conclusive enough to make a general rule.

> You have the cause and effect reversed. Areas densify because they become more expensive.

The thing is, with Simpson's paradox you'd expect at least _some_ inversions. You'll have at least _some_ people who are eating a lot of medicine and not dying.

There are _no_ examples of higher density leading to lower prices in the US. This strongly suggests a causal relationship.

And some examples are rather extreme. The number of units in Seattle has been growing by about 2.2% YoY for the last ~12 years. This is already at the upper range of the possible construction rate. Yet Seattle's price growth curve has been basically mirroring SF.

> Edit: Also, looking at one country for less than a generation is not conclusive enough to make a general rule.

I don't have data for more than 25 years and for other countries. And probably you can find counterexamples somewhere in Brazil.

Urbanism is unnatural, i.e. it's an anti-nature lifestyle. Rather than squashing people into concrete hives, the gov should be promoting small minimum-footprint houses on large lots. Brutalistic master-trucks as personal commute vehicles should go away for the same reason.

Everything modern humans do is "unnatural", but I'd sure prefer most of it over being a hunter-gatherer with hookworms.

Amitermes meridionalis and many other insects build huge urban environments that house hundreds of thousands to millions of their fellows (and farmed "animals").

Hunter gathers in Australia didn't see hookworm until colonists arrived with free ranging sheep and cattle.

Pre colonialism people were healthy and spent approx four hours a day gathering food from known managed resources.

The (North) American South was rife with hookworm in the 1910's prompting John D. Rockefeller to fund a massive public health and education program [1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3800113/

Great! Let's go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle then. To make it work, since the ecosystem can't support very many people living that way, we'll have to trim the global population down to about 1 million, so we'll have to set up some big death camps to eliminate billions of excess people. You're volunteering to be first in the gas chamber, right?

Odd comment.

Where I live I grew up mingled with hunter gathers and to this day a large number are still there .. so I don't see any need for death camps and slaughtering billions.

This is something you often think of then?

If you think the planet can sustain 8 billion people in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, you're so ignorant that there's no point in this conversation.

You're off on a tangent all of your own.

I'm not that bright, obviously, perhaps you can explain how you made the journey from a comment about hookworm not being a feature of pre colonial huneter gather existence and termites building urban structure to your claim about my thoughts on the planet and 8 billion people.

I look forward to your reply so that I may become less ignorant.

That is a lot of words to just say “cope+seethe”. Are macMansion suburbs even sustainable (i.e can cover infrastructure cost via taxes)? Do children who have no freedom and have to be driven everywhere turn out to be better adults? How does this additional work affect women and their place in the work force? Low density suburbs have quite a lot to prove in order to justify their existence.

I was excited to see that Kate Wagner was contributing to this most recent issue of the Baffler. A related article from the same issue discusses the cheapness of the construction in modern housing: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/construction-time-again-sisson

The custom vs mass-produced perspective is more interesting to me, bcause generally everything in recent architecture has distilled down to -- can it be mass-produced?

Plaster and lath? Can't be mass produced/installed. Out of style.

Crown moulding? Can't be mass produced/installed. Out of style.

Solid wood flooring? Can't be mass produced/installed. Out of style.

Brick? Can't be mass produced/installed. Out of style.

One begins to see a pattern and wonder if "style" is actually "what makes more profit for builders."

It's less builder profit and more "how can we maximize the things people compare". Builders hate finicky stupid shit [1], and charge accordingly, but big empty rooms are easy. People ask "how much house can I buy" and get $400k, say, and choose the largest sq ft with the amenities they want, instead of smaller with more design/amenities.

And that's not even to say they're always entirely wrong; you should spend on the things that are expensive to change later (location, foundation, etc) perhaps; like a church that is built with plain windows because you can always add stained glass later.

[1] an example my friend hated as a roofer were the little decorative things on the corners of a roof (corner gables? no idea) - he charged something like $2k per because of the absolute huge amount of absolutely fiddly labor required to build and roof them, and hated every minute of it.

Remember that a 4000 sq ft house without a basement (common in the South) has around the same interior square footage as a 2000 sq ft house with a basement (common in the North). The Southerner's house looks a lot larger from the street, but it's actually around the same size inside as the "modest" house and is therefore not a "mansion".

Most of the "McMansion" photos I've seen criticized on architecture blogs are either middle-class houses from areas where basements are uncommon or cherry-picked examples of unusually bad design (many of which are actually custom builds!).

> it's actually around the same size inside as the "modest" house and is therefore not a "mansion".

I think there's an issue with this premise. McMansions are not 'mansions' and the criticism stems from that fact. They are too small for the architectural features they try to cram into their facades (balustrades, numerous columns, far too many windows of awkward sizes). Also because they are small, they try to maximize the use of space leading to the exterior looking very weird due to overlapping roofs so individual rooms can be as large and tall as possible.

The article makes an interesting argument that the typical McMansion design, internally, can be distinguished by being more-or-less the same as a suburban home floor plan but inflated beyond all sense: an entry hallway turned into a grand foyer with a huge staircase (which, obviously, never actually gets used for anything, because it's still too small for actual parties), chains of special-purpose rooms stapled on to the same core set of rooms from the original nuclear family concept, access to the bedrooms stretched and stretched out as all the other spaces get bigger, etc.

It strikes me as, conceptually, a distinct contrast to an 'average' Victorian home floor plan (which is probably the other closest thing to 'mansion' that an average person might think of living in), where even a very large home is going to have pretty tight and efficient layouts meant to maximize collective practical use of the space (especially with a large family or guests), rather than just giving a ton of square footage to each individual inhabitant.

> far too many windows of awkward sizes

Hmmm, actually it’s usually the case they have too few windows because windows (carpentry to house them and the actual window) is far more expensive than just having a wall.

But you’re right, they’ll often have a window that is incoherent with the rest of the house and/or in a weird spot when viewing the home from outside.

Wouldn't that be if it's a one-story house?

If it's got a 2000 sq ft footprint, with one story above ground and one below, that fits your description, but I don't think most McMansions tend to be one story—if they're 4000 sq ft, I would guess that many are likely to have about a 2-3000 sq foot footprint, with part or all of it having a second story (actually, rarely all, because a full-height foyer is a fairly common feature, from what I've seen).

I obviously can't comment on what you've seen derided as "McMansions", but I've seen a bunch of the stuff on McMansion Hell specifically (the blog the author of TFA maintains), and in general I wouldn't say they fit what you describe. Or, at least, some of them may not have a much larger livable square footage than a rural/suburban middle-class house, but they certainly cost appreciably more, because that middle-class house is built in a more or less standard manner, and the McMansion has a three-stall garage, four separate sets of pillared porches on the front, and three bay windows (in three completely different styles).

McMansions are a very specific thing that "you know when you see" - and they are in no way "all houses currently being built".

Go here: https://www.wausauhomes.com/search?& and play around, you don't really start seeing things I'd definitely call "McMansion" until you're in the 4+ bedroom category, and many of the 3+ are quite nice looking.

(I personally get much more annoyed by "attached/built in garage" because I know what that can do to the mechanical envelope of a house.)

In my city a couple of miles from me is a new housing community with $1M houses; only a few different models are available, featuring minimal paint color options, all on zero lot line spaces, any closer together they would be one giant condo. A friend toured the model and reported how cheaply it was built. Yet they sold out. The average price of a house nearby is closer to $400k. I bet the developer made a fortune.

Check out this "Summit Park" development: https://goo.gl/maps/Eherg24AUS4V1aX67?coh=178571&entry=tt

Someone finagled permission to build on Brotherhood Way and this is what they made. The houses themselves seem nice, but the neighborhood (if you can call it that) has a horror movie vibe to it.

These are mega-townhomes, right?

Throw in a small cafe, local pub, and corner store, and that looks like a really nice little spot. Give it 30-50 years and people will have painted them different colors, and it won’t look like a retirement home

> Throw in a small cafe, local pub, and corner store, and that looks like a really nice little spot.

Where? As in, where would you "throw" them? The buildings don't have space. There's nothing for a mile or more. This is a drive-in only development. (The road is called Brotherhood Way because there's nothing on it but churches and temples. Until they built this.)

> Give it 30-50 years and people will have painted them different colors, and it won’t look like a retirement home

It's really creepy there. It's hard to convey, even google street view doesn't give you the full effect. Did you watch that movie "Vivarium"? It's the shape of the place. The way it's just houses with no integration with the world outside themselves or even with each other. Packed together tightly, so tall that they block the sun, no space to expand. The park next door might as well be a million miles away. They are lockers for people, not homes.

I looked at some of these on Zillow. I see attractive, modern homes, in a lovely neighborhood with lots of green space, at a reasonable price by local standards. Looks like a good value to me.

I dunno what to tell you. Visit in person and get back to me?

I'm not actually trying to shun or shame people who are happy to live in such a place, there's no use arguing over matters of taste, eh?

FWIW I've lived in a few places and I find I'm happier the more "homey" the neighborhood. I'd rather live in a smaller or less fancy place in a living neighborhood than a big fancy place in a dead zone. But that's me, eh?

People have downvoted this, but the "where?" is a very good question, considering that half the problem with places like these is that the zoning typically forbids anything that would give anyone any reason to actually walk around the neighborhood.

Those are not mansions by any means - I see some multi-story homes typical of San Francisco. This is a peaceful little corner of the city, I'm not sure how you get "horror movie vibe".

I walked through it.

The Summit Park development (https://www.fletcher.studio/summit-park) is actually pretty thoughtfully planned out imo. There are definitely compromises that have been made, and the developers are obviously not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but they have spent time to address community concerns and seem to have tried to balance their bottom line against livability, sustainability, and affordability considerations. There are maybe 100 units in this entire phase of the project, and aside from a few apartment towers a quarter mile or more up a steep hillside, there's nothing else in the area. What kind of businesses could this realistically support, a 7-11? They threw in a dog park and a playground, probably because that is what a family oriented neighborhood is most likely to need/want.

But then people like Kate Wagner come along and see the lack of a coffee shop and houses that don't look like they belong in the Mission, and immediately pooh pooh it (and implicitly the people who choose to live there). All while ignoring the fact that this used to be a ditch next to what is essentially a 4 lane highway...

Despite Wagner's claims to the contrary, I can't help but conclude that all of this "thoughtful urbanism" is just thin veneer over a core of elitism.

> pretty thoughtfully planned

Depends on your goals, eh?

> What kind of businesses could this realistically support, a 7-11?

That's kind of my point, they built a pile of houses and nothing else. Even the yards are abbreviated.

> a ditch

I played in the area that was destroyed to make way for this development as a kid, and calling it "a ditch" does it a disservice. It was thick with life. It was part of a wildlife corridor. I remember all the skunks and raccoons and even possums that wandered the neighborhood when they razed that area.

Now it's people-lockers.

There was no particular reason why this parcel had to be developed. The developers must have gotten a good fixer, greased the right palms, and made a quick buck. Park Merced up the street (the "few apartment towers") has been trying to rebuild for two decades? There's plenty of room to build w/o destroying wildlife habitat.

> a core of elitism

Who me? If anything the people buying these houses are the elite, surely?

A wildlife corridor? Doesn't look like it from this 2011 streetview: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7143712,-122.4757819,3a,90y,...

Regardless, your preference for preserving the status quo is absolutely valid. But other people's preferences for building SFHs is also valid. Maybe they would prefer the option not to live in large apartment complexes because of family or health or noise reasons. We live in a society, and part of that means sometimes other people get what they want even if it not something we want, and it is good and healthy to disagree with outcomes. But my point is that I think it is elitist to tell them that actually, their preferences are wrong (not just different).

> Who me? If anything the people buying these houses are the elite, surely?

Elitism isn't exclusively about money.

> A wildlife corridor? Doesn't look like it...

It's the bit between the grass and the buildings. If you turn to the left (downhill, West) you can follow it all the way along to Lake Merced. It's the very Northern tip of the forest that stretches down past Santa Cruz. Rumor has it there's a den of coyotes on that hillside. We've seen 'em walking down our street.

(Not to nitpick, but 2011 is after they razed it. You can't see the huge flat spot of bare dirt dotted with huge piles of dirt and trees they left behind for several years (a decade?) before coming back and building that development, that used to be a dense thicket of trees and shrubs and animals etc., but you can kind of make out the break in the slope it causes. On the right, as you look up towards the apt. towers, you can see there's one hillside and then behind it another, in between them is the flat spot that was razed. We played on those slash piles too.)

> preserving the status quo

SF doesn't have a status quo, it's been changing rapidly ever since the Spanish took it from the Ohlone.

> your preference for preserving the status quo is absolutely valid. But other people's preferences for building SFHs is also valid

Well, again, it depends on your goals, eh? Like I said in a sib comment, I'm not trying to dis the people that prefer to live in what I call "people lockers", nor am I trying to argue matters of taste.

I'm sure there are objective measures that could show that this arrangement of (arguably very nice houses) is, uh, not as good as it could be. But I'm really just going off of the "vibe" of the place. As I said, it's creepy.

> But my point is that I think it is elitist to tell them that actually, their preferences are wrong (not just different).

I don't know if that's quite the right word then? I don't mean to quibble. Anyway, like I said, that's not what I'm doing, and I'm sorry I made it sounds that way.

There is one thing though, and if this makes me "elitist" so be it, SF is the largest metropolitan area with the most wilderness around it in the world. I am concerned that if too many people move here who do not share the fairly common respect for nature that is a hallmark of California (I'm think of the California Coastal Commission, one of the most powerful political blocs in the state) that we'll see the urbanization of the remaining open space.

Not only would that be sad on a personal and ecological level, it would destroy the agricultural output of the Central Valley. The coastal forest generate inland rain, you see. If we cut them down, CA becomes NV, in terms of climate and moisture.

This is eerily similar from Street View images to the Mueller neighborhood in Austin. I imagine a South Park episode about all of this is not far behind.

They're the Microsoft Word of houses. Famously, people only use 20% of Word's features, but that subset varies depending on whether the user is a legal secretary or elementary school teacher or whatever.

McMansions have all the features - the 3-car garage, the almost commercial kitchen, the vast gathering spaces, the rec room, the home office, etc. Not everyone needs it all - but some car guy will demand that third garage spot or some foodie will demand the oversized Viking appliances or some family with multiple kids will demand the big play area, etc. This way these houses meet the needs (and way beyond) of 90%+ of the upper-middle to upper-class homebuyers, so they retain their value and are way more easy to sell than the weird custom 1800sqft home with 4-car-garage, or 1-bedroom condo with commercial kitchen, or whatever.

Kate is an amazing writer.

I loved how seamlessly she floated between academic architectural review to "McMansion bad" comedy, with almost no effort.

That said, I 100% agree. Mansions are beautiful and powerful in presence. McMansions are a blight and, in my opinion, incredibly cheap-looking cancerous blobs.

I live in Houston, which has an example of both.

River Oaks is our friendly "rich person" neighborhood. There, you'll see some _really_ nice looking custom big houses. Proper mansions, as it were.

We recently moved from Richmond, an exurb about 45 minutes south towards the abyss between Houston and Mexico. Like Kate illustrated here, a McMansion neighborhood was right off of our exit. The houses are gigantic, but look incredibly, incredibly cheap.

Funny enough, a large apartment complex is being built right by one of them. I wonder what that will do to their value.

> incredibly cheap-looking cancerous blobs.

Oh I assure you, they're cheap all the way through. Take the mass-produced bottom of the barrel construction practices of modern developers, the architectural sense of gluing pre-made block of house together, and then just keep gluing until you hit the target square footage.

It's all limestone concrete, softwood, asphalt shingles, hollow doors, plastic floors, drywall, spray painted hardware, a single layer of brick if you're feeling adventurous, a chimney that doesn't actually work, a fireplace that's electric.

It's unbelievably depressing that for how expensive they are you can't actually pay for quality only for more house.

And I don't really think it's anyone's fault per se but more the reality of mass-produced junk getting cheaper and human labor getting so much more expensive relative to it.

There are a bunch of issues bunched up together here. Large houses are not only possible with good land use patterns, but as older cities grow the average unit size also increases. When I was young we moved from a trailer into a huge old house. It was difficult to keep up properly and seemed to always need to be repainted, but having plenty of space and more rooms than we actually needed on a regular basis was hugely liberating. With careful planning, construction, and use of materials it should be possible for most of the population to live in relatively large residences. This might be beneficial enough to specifically aim for as we make social and technological progress.

The hilarious thing to me about these new neighborhoods, is you can easily find their 'end game' state by just going to one that was built 12-15 years ago.

You will find the same story, brand new -> rusted out fences, broken lights, old pavement, irrigation problems.

The maintenance of these communities is outrageously expensive. Without an HOA fee of $400-$600 a month, they rapidly fall apart (~10 years). Yet you typically see figures closer to $200 a month.

Here in Central Florida, the second wealthiest "McMansion" neighborhood had to increase HOA dues and have a special assessment to finally pave its pot hole ridden roads. Mind you the dues are typically near $800 per month.

BUT THE PROPERTY TAXES ARE CHEAP!!!

> Architecturally speaking, the reason for the McMansion’s persistence is that it is the path of least resistance for building a house of a certain size. It’s hard to be efficient when forcing four thousand-plus square feet under one roof. Tailor-made architectural creations remain out of reach (or undesirable) for many people. The McMansion is a structurally stable, if visually clunky, formula. Contrary to almost four decades of urbanistic thought highlighting the need for walkability, density, and transit-oriented development, companies like Pulte Homes continue to construct McMansion neighborhoods near highway off-ramps and high-traffic arterial roads. They do this because people buy these houses and drive to work...

Yeah, screw them for ignoring decades of urbanistic thought and continuing to buy houses they want and can afford. It's like they're not even considering what decades of academics and ideologues have been telling them to do with their lives. Does urbanistic thought not count for anything anymore?!

Ah, the good ol' "freedom trumps a well-functioning society" argument

Describe some of the specific, concrete ways people buying a house with a particular architectural style damages society.

The vernacular is the mass-produced architecture of the everyday.

This is not remotely what vernacular architecture means. (And trailer parks are not vernacular architecture.)

https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Vernacular_archite...

> It is a type of architecture which is indigenous to a specific time and place and not replicated from elsewhere

As a British outsider, it kind of does sound like trailer parks are American vernacular architecture. Why aren't they?

The benefits of vernacular architecture include:
Capitalising on local knowledge and traditions.
Taking advantage of local materials and resources, meaning that they are relatively energy efficient and sustainable.
Providing a vital connection between humans and the environment in which they live.

They can be designed specifically with the local climatic conditions in mind, and often perform well.

Vernacular architecture is associated with regional styles using local materials to build homes for ordinary people. Trailers are not any of the above.

I generally like the comments posted here by DoreenMichelle. I would cite the historic cobblestone or quarried Belgian Block pavements in American port cities like Philadelphia and Savannah as examples of locally available materials that were not local materials (many arrived as ballasts unloaded from the hulls of ships that were departing town heavier and more stable than they had arrived) but economic afterthoughts. Is it still a vernacular practice of local knowledge and local conditions that prevail in the built environment, if instead the citizens had simply used them as earthfill rubble to create new land out of wetlands? I would say no; practices that have left a trace only in being cheaper than other methods of earthfill don't meet my criteria for a vernacular practice, although they may have still been performed by some of the same families who would be continuing to pass down that pattern of form in that same tradition.

On the other hand, if forestry and agriculture oriented areas of the USA find their local furniture and textile manufacturing tooling falling out of demand as furniture production goes offshore, is it possible to call it local knowhow if they repurpose those manufacturing plants to produce wood-framed, furnished turnkey mobile home trailers? It is still vernacular practice but at one remove, its nature changed by one layer (at least) of abstraction from a vernacular /tradition/, and its patterns denatured by that change as much as they were denatured by mass financing of managed mass production.

The author probably wanted vulgar, not vernacular.

Not likely:

I disagree with Hubka’s rejection of the McMansion as a topic of vernacular study, but I agree that it is not quite vernacular, either. However, I think there are some things about the McMansion that can only be understood through a more vernacular framework, such as their ubiquity and the means by which they are built. McMansions are not usually designed by architects but by builders, most of them massive corporations like Toll Brothers, Pulte Homes, and Ryan Homes that traffic exclusively in master-planned tract communities. Like most vernacular architecture, the McMansion might best be considered a typology—an architectural configuration that adapts over time but remains generally stable.

If you kidnap an architect and force them to design a building and keep adding requirements like people do to the builders, you'll end up with something very McMansion-like.

A good architect will try to convince you that what you say you want is not actually what you want, but they'll eventually quit or acquiesce.

(Some of the best "super large houses" are the ones that have other design limitations, such as some of the log homes you see.)

speaking from direct experience coming from a family that builds homes in suburban southern california, it's sorta self-reinforcing and circular people expect familiar floorplans,

planning departments approve them faster if the same elements are repeated,

HVAC, plumbing and fire mitigation regulations generally require a hub and spoke architecture

appraisers (and more importantly bank loan approvals) are based primarily on square feet, not quality (and also bathrooms)

so we add a bonus room that is likely never to be used, to bump up valuation to spend on better plumbing (developers are liable for 20 years of defects on new homes). we also build a minimum of 4 car garages, usually 6, because it's a cheap way to add square footage without added plumbing and mainly going to be used for storage anyway...

Meh, people were saying this in the late 19th century as power tools made intricate carving and woodwork available to wealthy people and nit just the ultra wealthy. The types of homes they built were thought to be gauche and without pure style by those ultra wealthy and the usual critiques of “new money” (success envy by failures) being uncultured rang through.

But a funny thing happened - those homes are now praised and lauded over by people like the “McMansion Rheee” lady.

I agree a large home made of cheap materials with no landscaping and in a shit location is pretentious. But most people on Earth would trade their homes for one. I don’t want one but I get why people would rather have a huge house and a big car than a small apartment and public transit - it’s a better way to live for many people.

I would classify anything that tries to butt up against the edge of a lot to be the first sign of grotesqueness. I will never understand the American obsession with quantity over quality.

Why do you care if other people buy mcmansions? The sorts of neighborhoods where they tend to crop up already have a million identical cookie cutter houses anyways.

I don't care myself — I'm living in one right now. Sadly the older homes in the city had only a single-car garage and I do woodworking.

It does seem though like we're heading toward either trailer park or mansion.

Seventy year ago they built real starter homes for newlyweds that did not yet have 2.4 kids. I'm not sure where those people go now. I have three daughters that are in their 20s now though so I guess I can watch and see.

It's not economical to build small houses; price them out sometime and the cost to "make it a 3 bedroom" is not much at all.

The closest I've seen is "modern manufactured" and you still have lot/utilities, and they still cost close to stickbuilt.

The only thing I did not like about these is how close they were built to each other on a small plot of land. Plus all the trees were removed.

I know of a family who lives in a neighborhood like what you describe.

They complain they never see any birds or wildlife when the nearest batch of trees is at least a half mile away.

It's odd how the complaints are never about actual mansions. No, it's only when the middle-class gets bigger houses do we have journalists handwringing endlessly about gauche they are.

Isn't the typical McMansion people complain about $1M+?

That's definitely not text-book middle class - which would be closer to the median house - which is less than half that price.

There's not many places you're getting a 4 bedroom clown-house with a clown pool and 5 clown-y bathrooms and a 3-car clown garage for your 3 clown cars for $450k. And if you are, there's very few places this is a new-ish build.

Most of the places you're getting something like this - it's like a 20+ year-old home in Montgomery Alabama or Akron Ohio or something... And usually this was once a nice house that someone renovated in the style of a clown for the McMansion buyer...

You're either considering the average suburban home a McMansion or you think the top 10% is middle class.

In fairness, both of these are common conceptions - but I think they're both worth critiquing.

> You're either considering the average suburban home a McMansion or you think the top 10% is middle class.

If wealth were normally distributed, then the top 10% definitely wouldn't be the middle class. However, the way wealth is distributed, the average earner in the top 10% makes about $173K in 2020 dollars. Which is a lot in Louisiana, but not so much in SF or New York.

https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increa...

You're not building a McMansion for less than $250 per square foot. And a McMansion is usually 3000+ sqft.

In New York or LA or The Bay, you're not getting a McMansion for less than $2.5M.

In Louisiana, you're not getting it for less than $800k.

If anything - I think this pushes out who's buying a "real" McMansion probably closer to the top 5%.

It's less affordable given where people live and how much more they cost where people make more money.

Unless we're calling ugly 1800 sqft 3-bedroom suburban development houses "McMansions" - middle class people aren't buying them.

> If anything - I think this pushes out who's buying a "real" McMansion probably closer to the top 5%.

Yeah, I think you're right. I don't think America even has a middle class any more. The insanity of the housing market has really put that in stark contrast.

> Isn't the typical McMansion people complain about $1M+?

The same style problems are heavily present in houses down to the high-$300k range around here. Straight-up visual gibberish, and not in the name of some kind of practical improvements as a trade-off—the contrary, if anything.

Best I can tell, this has happened because complex façades and rooflines make a house look bigger. I've done a lot of house shopping over the years, and find that if I apply a McMansion-style-tuned eye to classically-styled houses, my guesstimate of square footage is consistently something like 30-40% low. Houses with a balanced and regular appearance and without a bunch of shit jutting out everywhere for no reason look smaller—by a lot—than a same-size McMansion.

I do think it is very much a classism thing. Plant of "McMansion style" homes that Architectural Digest type snobs punch down on that are not $1M. Remember vast areas of this country have very cheap land.

The demographics of people who enjoy writings like McMansion Hell skew much richer than the people living in that style of home. A McMansion style home in the burbs can cost about the same as a mediocre 1-2 bed / 1.5 bath in NYC.

Actual mansions are several orders of magnitude less common.

This has gone on for over a hundred years in the US. Victorian homes were greatly shit upon by the upper classes in the late 1800's.

Citation? Anything other than moaning about the emergence of a middle class?

Here's some of it - https://www.oldhouseguy.com/hatred-for-victorian-homes-in-19... - but it goes back further and has echoes of the same McMansion complaints (they were builder/craftsman built instead of architecturally designed, often the buyers outstripped their ability to properly maintain, etc).

Being extremely concerned about appearing rich but having absolutely no idea how to do it is basically the defining outwardly-visible characteristic of the middle class (in a Fussellian sense of "middle class").

McMansions are a perfect expression of this: trying to look bigger and fancier than they are while being extremely cheap in every way that matters, and getting every "fanciness" signal all wrong. They're a common target because plainly-inept pretentiousness is very funny—it's a staple trope in comedy for a reason.

It's not the size of the house per se that draws comment on McMansions. It's the intense and desperate but hopelessly misguided social signaling in their styling.

Sure, they're gauche, but when you're looking for a place to raise a family that's near good schools, near a grocery, doesn't require a remodel or update, has room for you to work remotely, and you can't afford to just "buy land and build something that fancy magazine editors would approve of", then you're limited to "gauche McMansions". Could we live in a 2,000 sqft house that was built in 1940? Sure! Would it cost us our savings and sanity to bring it up to code? Probably!

Never? Really? There’s plenty of complaints of the 1% and their excess.

There is a valid criticism of mcmansions but this article turned this into more criticism of the homeowners. I am sure that if suburban houses used a classical style they would be writing about the fascists who live in them or if the homes were brutalist how the style had sold out.

But that said I think there is a valid critique of modern builders and homeowners in 2023. A family member's old home in a neighborhood they have lived in forever had a bunch of new people move in during 2021 and 2022 when interest rates were low. They brought giant lifted trucks that block sidewalks, put trailers and RVs and giant boats all over, tore down old trees to make way for chicken shacks and trampolines and plastic sheds. All of this violated the HOA contract but they know the HOA has a few hundred dollars to its name so they gave it the middle finger. Builders built new houses on odd empty lots that tore up landscape to add long driveways to get behind houses and now giant out-of-place houses overlook the backyards of old 100 year old houses.

Builders don't care. That's why mcmansions exist in the first place. The homeowners don't care either. It's all perfectly legal but something still isn't right.

I disagree that the McMansion is back. Leave it in the 1990-2008-ish time frame. The “new ones” I’ve seen going up are genuinely better, have much more sensible layouts, and don’t try the same goofy throw-design-out-the-window stuff the McMansions did.

> What was once a mix of modest, low-slung ranch-style houses

And when those ranch-style houses were new, architecture snobs were decrying them as as soulless cookie-cutter crap.

Here's a novel idea: if you don't want to live in a "McMansion", don't buy one.

As always, we must consider the actual alternatives and not just our imaginary ideal scenario.

What is the alternative for the relatively large population looking to start families in a neighborhood with a good school district and child care on 1-2 working to middle class salaries while building some equity?

Can you point us to someplace where there is quality, affordable, and aesthetically pleasing new home construction happening at scale?

One consideration is that "new homes" have historically been something of a "luxury good" but somehow become so normalized in the last couple decades, that people argue "middle class salary" should be able to buy one.

Growing up, no one in my family lived in a new construction home, nor did any of my friends.

New construction needs to happen to increase aggregate supply to deal with incremental increases of demand. That supply though, may be more high end than median. Even this works fine because it means someone will buy a pricey new construction home rather than a cheap home and gut renovate it. The lack of new construction causes high income buyers to move further and further down market to buy-to-reno.

In many places (where building is still happening) the cost of new vs old construction is surprisingly close; so why not get a brand new 2023 house instead of that older 2003 one?

if it is, then great.

but the baseline built in assumption that all home buyers should be able to afford new homes when people complain that new homes are too expensive is what misses the point.

New homes are built on the expensive side because that's what allows developers to turn a profit in areas where development plots are scarce to come by. That is - where land is the constraint, why would a developer choose to have a lower ROI?

Areas that new & old homes don't price too differently & there is still building happening are likely not in land/development/zoning constrained with undersupply.

Also laughing/crying internally as you describe 2003 as old (from my 1970s home).. Never lived in a building that wasn't older than me..

Heh my last few houses have pre-nuclear steel in them, since they were built before the bombs dropped.

And yes, the "standard" (hard to call something a standard that only really existed for 50 or so years of the modern USA) of houses going out of style and passing down as starter homes, etc has been sadly disrupted.

And many of those starter homes are now held out as rentals, which further distorts it.

(We're actually in a "starter home" now and considering what the next step should be, and the vast improvements in energy, etc over the last 20 years alone is making me heavily lean toward building, especially as I can sit on the design and get something more reasonable for the cost.)

Because new construction is not necessarily built with the same materials and expertise as old construction. Good bones and all. Although I think you'd have to go back further than 2003 to get a meaningful difference in construction practices.

That may be the case, but you have to take survivorship bias into account, and the vast differences in available equipment and materials.

A modern double-paned house with R20 insulation and a well designed heat pump system is going to blow(er test) the doors off an immaculate mansion built in the 1900s with single pane glass and a gravity furnace.

Survivors are the only ones on the market so its already accounted for I guess. I think I misread your original comment, are you saying price for a well-built new home is similar to pre-owned good bones?

I was just noting that the prices are much closer now than they had been in the past (on a sq ft to sq ft even 10 years ago a 1970s house would be a good $50-100k less than a new house, though it was hard to compare because location, lot size, etc).

In my experience, "good bones" houses are harder to find than people realize, and there are lots of things that can wear out over time that you don't realize until you have one wear out.

For example, behold the glory of Orangeburg sewer lines, relatively common in some areas between the 40s and 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangeburg_pipe - a cool $10k+ when that finally eats it.

"The old ones are better" is sometimes true and in some cases; for example, an old plywood sided house will handle sustained water intrusion much better than a modern OSB sided house, but modern siding may prevent the water intrusion much better. There are also things that look really great but are actually disasters waiting to happen - river rock foundations, for example. A contractor friend once mentioned that the old victorians in our area were amazing except for the roof and foundation, both which can be annoyingly expensive to fix.

Based on my personal observations, assuming you avoid asbestos and aluminum wiring, the houses before the 80s are better than 80-2010s or so, especially 80-90s, as I've seen many, many cases of those houses built with newer materials that clearly the builders didn't understand or care how to correctly install.

That stuff can still happen on a modern house (hire a home inspector to inspect during build if you can) but they seem to have a better handle on how to do things right for the long-term.

Early 90s is about how far back you have to go, around here, to get an appreciably better-built house. Solid wood trim and doors! Cabinets that don't fall apart when you so much as look at them! All in working-class houses of that age. I swear even the light switches feel like they're built better.

As long as it doesn't have a wood-single roof. Those haven't been good since some time in the '70s. Demand shot up in the '80s and they built a shitload of houses with fancy "50-year" wood roofs, but there wasn't enough lumber of the quality required to make them actually last 50 years (both increase in demand and an ever-declining quality of lumber in general caused this, I think) like older wooden roofs did, so they all started leaking after like 10-15 years. But at this point most of those have been replaced with regular ol' asphalt.

They unironically don't build them like they used. A house built and standing in 2003 is likely on good structural foundation.

With a rapidly growing population[1] new housing isn't a "luxury good," but rather a necessity.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183457/united-states-res...

> One consideration is that "new homes" have historically been something of a "luxury good" but somehow become so normalized in the last couple decades, that people argue "middle class salary" should be able to buy one.

Yes, how dare the proles expect to live like the "best people".

McMansions are aesthetically pleasing to the average taste, which is out of alignment with coastal elite modernism. If your taste is out of the mainstream, then it is harder to find houses, and they will be more expensive. There are the occasional attempts at the non-standard suburban subdivision style. I liked these:

https://starlightvillagehomes.com/

> which is out of alignment with coastal elite modernism

Most coastal areas I've been to typically value their historical architecture and maintain those aesthetics.

Really not sure where you're getting that from. If you go to areas in Michigan such as Troy, most of the houses are of a mid-century modern design similar to what you're sharing.

The design language of a McMansion inherently lacks cohesion. Its not an elitist take to say "taking various design elements from 6 different eras of building and inflating them all up to 150% scale" is a bad design.

If a design lacks any kind of symmetry, has windows that dont line up that are all different sizes, misplaced features, etc; its an ugly design. Not sure what else to say.

Midwesterners are not immune to good design practice, and its bizarre to suggest that people outside of the coasts are incapable of making a cohesive design.

> Most coastal areas I've been to typically value their historical architecture and maintain those aesthetics

Given that virtually all new construction in coastal cities is five over one crapboxes along with the occasional uninspired at best highrise, I don't see it. Certainly nobody is putting up what one might consider well built aesthetically pleasing mansions in downtown San Wherever.

5-over-1s are basically universal in the United States. You might see them more in coastal areas but that's because its where the population gravitates to.

I don't like 5-over-1s either but they're a product of zoning laws that tried to legislate out more compact housing.

I much rather have a couple duplex/quadplexes on each suburban block but a lot of folks really don't like that idea.

Bring up the idea of putting a cafe or convenience store inside a suburban culdesac hell and people will lose their mind.

> 5-over-1s are basically universal in the United States. You might see them more in coastal areas but that's because its where the population gravitates to.

Yes I'm aware. The point is that the coastal cities are not in fact trying to maintain their historic aesthetic. They're building the same crapboxes everywhere else is.

This isn't a dumb flyover hicks vs sophisticated coast tech bros issue. It's an observable fact that architecture and construction virtually everywhere in the USA and the West in general has been garbage for over half a century. McMansions are just a symptom of a deeper rot.

I'll regularly go to estate sales in McMansions. It's really amazing to see.

Master Bedrooms the size of my apartment that are mostly empty.

Huge tall ceilings with poorly assembled trim to break up the monotony. Two extra large AC units needed to cool all that air.

Basement bars that have gone unused for years, expansive basements with old kids toys laying about, so roomy that it feels almost commercial.

So many extra sitting rooms just there as a place to put things. Its amazing how wasteful they are, how they basically just exist to say "look, big house". Nothing in them is practical, they're difficult to navigate because you need to make room for the massive foyer staircase and inexplicable loft/bridge to overlook your leather couches with USB ports in them, sitting across from a tv mounted 3 feet too high to ever have a comfortable viewing angle.

I've seen the ugliest ceiling mural, attempting to emulate an Italian fresco with all the skill of a high school drug PSA mural.

These homes just reek of desperation, like they've accrued all this wealth and have found themselves sitting at the back of the bus in "The Graduate", without any purpose and unsure why they fought so hard.

Its really interesting seeing a bathroom with enough open space to store an old beetle, with 30 drawers under the acreage of counter top. Mostly empty but dispersed with normal human items, like they're trying so hard to make it seem like any of this was necessary.

All of these places are devoid of any kind of design, it all feels like a simulacra of old wealth, like its what they "should" be buying and decorating with, but then you see personal items and realize they're no better than the average person, they have the same interests and hobbies, only now they're buried deep inside this dryrock dungeon, hidden away so they can appear high class and fancy.

The worst thing about them? How cheap it all feels, and how much it feels like a normal house scaled up beyond any purpose. Sure the first floor may have some kind of granite tile, but every other floor seems to bow and give under your feet like you're on a rubber running track. Noises reverberate if there's no carpet, but if there is, it most likely came with the home and has not been taken care of.

McMansions are an amazing symbol of the hollowness of seeking wealth. You could have a much nicer, bespoke and practical home if you wanted. For the money you could hire a real designer, real craftsmen to build your hardwood features or master plaster craftsman to make real ceiling moldings.

Instead of ordering a steak from a fine restaurant, the McMansion is spending the equivalent money at a McDonalds.

I once rented a basement bedroom from a couple when I had to do an internship. The house was a ginormous McMansion just like you described. I would occasionally go up to the main part of the house and it dawned on me that the couple had no furniture. Just this giant 5000 square foot house with seemingly dozens of empty rooms. They had two patio lounge chairs in the family room and a cheap (for the time) TV, and that was pretty much all I saw. Imagine leveraging yourself to the hilt, getting a mortgage that two people had to work to pay (and still having to rent rooms to others)... simply to get a huge box made of cheap lumber and drywall, and not even being able to live in it like civilized people.

I once checked out a similar basement apartment for a friend. There were three or four bedrooms within this basement, taking up maybe 30% of the total basement square footage. The rest was absolutely unusable open space with tons of support beams breaking it up, and an extremely slippery granite floor. The kitchen was nice and you could theoretically see the TV in the "living room" zone, but it was like 30-40 feet away so it was too far to be useful.

Just a big ole batcave under a giant home.

Selection bias though, right? Anyone who leverages up to buy a home and then has to rent out a part of it to a stranger is, probably, by definition, having cashflow issues?

Ever see a nice floor globe, or just the fake ones for storing booze in?

Come to think of it, no actually. The items in these homes are so incredibly mundane its shocking.

I like checking out the "Studies" or home offices out of curiosity. Typically they're adorned with various right leaning politco books of the last couple decades. Maybe a model boat.

More often than not, the home offices are weirdly cramped, the computer desk shoved in a closet or weirdly placed in the middle of the room.

It truly is wasted on them. Even a boor like me would throw in some cheap vases, busts, imitation statues, etc.

Wealth is always wasted on the wealthy.

If you're grinding, you don't have time to be creative.

If you're creative, you don't want to grind.

I doubt it’s the equivalent money, the stuff you’re talking about (hiring master craftsmen) probably costs 5x-10x what a large house built the way you’re describing does.

I think you'd be surprised. Maybe double and that's assuming same square footage.

I'm talking "turn of the 20th century business man" size. You could cut down the average mcmansion size in half and have an overall nicer house with fine materials and it'd still be bigger than most homes built before 1990.

Arguably worse than the house itself: owners who stay in precarious financial situations to pay off too much house. Yeah, it's their decision and they're probably learning a lesson, but...for what? Signaling to a select few people that they've made it? How is it worth the stress? Do they realize how time and effort they put into what is empty posturing?

Little wonder why some people's midlife crisis is explosive.

I would argue that the problem with McMansions has less to do with their sheer size (though on the larger end, their size truly is ridiculous) and more to do with how badly utilized it all is.

One of these days I hope to be fortunate enough to design and build my own house, and so it's a subject I think about frequently. I'd like it to be a bit larger than average, but the allocation of space is determined almost entirely on practicality. So for example, rather than having a cavernous reception/living room and a dining room that's rarely used, the ground floor would have a small living room with the extra space instead going towards a kitchen with ample counterspace to do serious cooking in (something that's oddly skimped on not only in McMansions, but also more traditional houses) and a mudroom at the entrance so guests have a place to put their bags, coats, etc and have room to take their shoes off without stumbling over each other.

I suspect that there's demand for sizable, yet practically-designed houses like that but nobody's building them so people instead buy what is being built.

> has less to do with their sheer size(...) and more to do with how badly utilized it all is.

That's basically what I'm getting at. I've been in close to a dozen mcmansions, only one actually felt like it was a home rather than a catalogue ad.

I don't think the average McMansion owner has any intention of utilizing the space, and I'd argue they're designed in a way antithetical to utilizing the space.

Large open areas aren't suitable for living space unless you want a full living room in every room. If you were to say, convert one into an office, it'd be an interesting arrangement.

They're basically designed with the kind of banquet you see in movies, in mind. Once the party is over, you just have empty space.

> Large open areas aren't suitable for living space unless you want a full living room in every room. If you were to say, convert one into an office, it'd be an interesting arrangement.

Oh my god, the move away from having actual rooms is so awful.

But as long as people keep falling for the "wow" factor (in real estate photos and on first-viewings) of big, useless open spaces and cavernous open living/dining/kitchen combo rooms and signing on the dotted line, it's what we're gonna keep getting :-/

I agree with you here but I think you might be more horrified with the image I actually was trying to draw.

These houses have distinct rooms(not open concept)a, but they're all so big that most of it is empty space.

Ah, yeah, that sucks too. A small count of enormous rooms where a larger count of normal-sized rooms would be way more useful.

"Open concept" is way more horrible than anything McMansions have ever done (except themselves having open concept).

Make all the rooms have no walls, and then make the house even bigger so you can get away from all the noise! Brilliant.

I too want to design and build my own (modest) house.

Maybe I should get cracking....

The "barndominum" craze around here is getting kinda interesting; especially as you can build in "steps" depending on how you design it.

To me it sounds mostly like you're describing a well-planned Victorian. There's of course some unpleasant cross-pollination with McMansion designs, but the more sensible floor plans still follow the practice of a bunch of smallish, specialized but not hyper-specialized, efficiently laid-out rooms that are easy to move between.

It's worth pointing out that nobody is building "well-planned Victorian" houses, either.

Of course, another question there is, how much of that is the result of local zoning and permitting processes banning all the stuff that people actually like? I know I've seen a lot of complaints about basic stuff with stairs, windows, and bedroom sizes in older plans that have been rendered illegal by newer zoning.

I haven't seen such complaints about basic stuff. Maybe it's just my own bias, but whenever I see people complaining about "regulations" choking out The Way Things Used To Be, it's usually actually about cost to the producer, whether houses or soda or anything else. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35894852

Everything that made century homes desirable isn't mass-producible, and therefore untenable.

Estate sales are commonly held by the estates of the recently deceased. So, there may be some bias in your sampling, since you're walking around the house of someone who was at the end of their life, not right in the heart of it.

And, I'm not sure large houses are as wasteful as you let on. After all, the floor area of a room grows quicker than the perimeter does. A 100 sq ft room could have 40' of walls, but a room with 4x the area could only have 2x the length of walls.

And it might just be my area, but there is no way you can get a bespoke home of equivalent square footage as you could a pre-built mcmansion.

In this area, people will do estate sales when they move as well. These are very much alive families, maybe their kids have mostly moved out. Totally not dead people homes. Those are a lot smaller and quaint.

if only you could decide on what other people could spend their money on, then the world would be such a better place, right? and, you seem to have no problem enjoying the downstream effects of their "estate".

btw, that thing you're undoubtedly alluding to, the 1-story craftsman bungalow with custom woodwork and detached garage/shed, gravel driveway and on half an acre with a perfectly manicured herb garden and tomato beds is more expensive and probably located in a jurisdiction with much higher taxes.

i live in a concrete loft which is basically the polar opposite of a mcmansion but can you enlighten me how i'm doing my entire life wrong also?

different types of housing exist because people have different tastes.

I almost never find anything good at these estate sales, its purely for entertainment when I see a sign as I drive by.

Most of the items there are really cheaply made and have way too high an asking price, or are well made but some of the tackiest design trends of the 80s/90s/2000s.

I've already refinished one solid wood piece of furniture with the black splatter marks added to invoke a fake "old". Not doing that nonsense again.

Estate sales are the code word for "way too expensive, don't even bother", especially if it's being run by a "firm".

Now if they call it a garage sale you might get a deal.

I understand the allure...I need a McMansion to store all of my kids toys.

That's what a good basement with no pillars is for! Just a huge toy room.

> the massive foyer staircase and inexplicable loft/bridge to overlook your leather couches with USB ports in them, sitting across from a tv mounted 3 feet too high to ever have a comfortable viewing angle

I'm rolling, LOL. Nailed it.

My main problem with living in houses built post-McMansion-influence (so, a great deal of what's been built for the last 25 years or so) is how terrible the layouts are. You'll have 3,500 sqft but it feels about as usable and spacious when you're actually living in it as a well-laid-out 2,200.

And to contrast that, I've been friends with someone who made significantly more money than I do (or likely ever will), and while their house was in a nice, upscale neighbourhood and was somewhat bigger than mine, overall it was a pretty normal suburban design.

What they had was taste, and good priorities.

Rather than put money into lots of space, or showy exterior features, they put it into the kitchen, and the bathroom. I was lucky enough to be able to stay at their house a few times (visiting the area for reenacting purposes—that's how I met them), and use their absolutely palatial shower. They are also foodies, and love to cook good food and cook it well, so they made their kitchen both beautiful and functional. (They also make stained glass as a hobby; I have no idea how expensive that is, nor how it would compare to buying a similar piece, but they had installed some of their work in their own windows, which added to the class of the place.)

I believe the difference between someone with a McMansion and people who own houses like that one is a sense of security in their own position in the world. McMansions are entirely about conspicuous consumption—about showing off your wealth, so that you can brag about it and rub the noses of lesser beings in it.

> What they had was taste, and good priorities.

Upper-middle-class sensibilities and attitudes, rather than middle.

> They also make stained glass as a hobby; I have no idea how expensive that is, nor how it would compare to buying a similar piece, but they had installed some of their work in their own windows, which added to the class of the place.

Pretty accessible, actually. My wife does it off-and-on and is always shocked at how much people charge for not-especially-well-made pieces at e.g. art fairs. The equipment and materials are cheap, as hobbies go. Buying decent finished stained glass pieces is expensive—but getting decent at making it's not all that hard and doesn't take too long, and the materials are cheap. It's one of those "very cheap if you DIY and count the hours as fun hobby-time, pretty expensive if you don't" things. It's especially easy if you just use pre-made templates rather than designing your own, and there are tons of those cheap or free online (and nobody who doesn't do stained glass will think anything of it).

I think she only made a half-dozen pieces or so before she was roughly matching the quality of stuff we'd see at art fairs and such. Maybe 30ish hours to reach that level. Very-good tools might run you as much as $1,000 total, but you can get started for more like $150-200 (shop used for the grinder, especially). Glass is glass, it's not really that expensive when you're just buying sheets of it.

The biggest pain with it is materials storage and little glass bits getting on the ground in the work area (and sometimes tracked outside of it...) making it kinda hazardous. :-/

> Upper-middle-class sensibilities and attitudes, rather than middle.

Not really.

It's not a "middle-class sensibility or attitude" to like mashed-together architectural styles, or rooms three times larger than the furniture you've got to fill it, or a cluster of rooflets overlapping in apparently random ways.

Aesthetics certainly have cultural elements to them, but those aesthetic choices really only appeal to the subset of people who...own or aspire to McMansions.

I've never been anything but middle-class myself, nor has nearly anyone I knew, and I've never personally known anyone to perceive McMansions as something good.

For a while, every place I moved to was slightly larger than the last. This is culturally what we're directed to: have a guest room. Build a man cave. Two ovens in your kitchen, why not? An office with a library. A room for the piano. There's always a way to put that money into stuff.

My first house was modest. About 700sqft semi-detached, built in 1905 as housing for mill workers, in the Philly exurbs. Good bones but a total gut job. The appeal was mostly that I could walk to the train station in three minutes. Cute backyard, but barely one parking spot per house.

Next place we got was 1300sqft (not including the full basement) - three bedrooms! My wife and I each had a space. Two car driveway a mile from city hall in what's barely north Philadelphia. Mid-1990s construction, weirdly suburban - I think it had more of a lawn than we had in the exurbs. So much room for stuff! Especially in the basement with its ceilings!

By a quirk, we came across a building in the historic district. It needed a ton of work, but the price was too good to pass up. We had been renting our first house out, but the tenant had broke her lease, so we moved back to the exurbs, sold our Philly house, and bought this weird property... 16'x100' venue space on the first floor, with a 16'x30' apartment on the second floor. We added a third floor (approx 1200sqft, single bedroom), rent out the second floor as an airbnb, and will be making the first floor a venue again.

Moving from 1300sqft back down to 700sqft, then up to 1200sqft (but with no basement) was a master course in space optimization and mindfulness about consumerism. When I see these McMansions, I think: that's a lot of air to heat & cool. Those are a lot of rooms to fill with junk. That's a lot to dust and vacuum. And let's not even talk about design and architectural choices, or how everything interesting is a fifteen minute drive - at least.

I didn't think I'd have a custom home built in my 30s, let alone adaptive reuse of what turned out to be an 18th century building, but I feel like I accidentally stumbled out of a consumerism trap and into a kind of Goldilocks zone. When someone from NYC visits, they think our place is huge. When someone from central PA visits, they think it's kind of cramped. McMansions baffle me. There are so many more interesting things you can do with money, and so many more interesting places you can live - but I get how it's hard to break the spell of "get a bigger house, buy more stuff." And I'm not saying I made a better choice... I also think about how much money I spent to live in the spacial equivalent of a trailer home.

As much as I couldn't go back to the suburbs, suburban people often have trouble adapting to this kind of space. We had Airbnb guests a couple of years ago, who were gifted a weekend stay by their daughter. On the first night, they used Ubereats to order McDonalds, stayed inside and watched TV. In the morning, they told us they were checking out early, and that it was no fault of ours. I don't know if I can properly express to you how absurd it is to order McDonalds in a town with world class food options, or to stay inside watching TV in one of the most walkable, historic, and street-level active cities in the country. But hey, "Country Mouse & Town Mouse" is a fable that's at least 2000 years old. To each their own, I suppose.

Fun fact: the term "Victorian" for that type of house (IIRC) was intended to disparage them, as they were considered tacky and cheap.

Yeah, this is my takeaway whenever someone uses “McMansion” in a disparaging way - it’s mostly to sneer at some “lower class”.

It really is not. That's a made up defense.

The people who devalue mcmansions largely do so because these houses are the material legacy this country is leaving, and it's objectively shit. They are an irresponsible way to build and organize neighborhoods.

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. McMansions are defined by their attempts to outwardly demonstrate wealth, which makes deriding them easy but justifiable. Many of the kinds of homes the author discusses here are multimillion dollar properties. Yes, there's a little snobbery involved, but I don't find it classist to point out the irony in wealthy folks appearing cheap by yelling "LOOK HOW WEALTHY I AM!"

The lower classes don't live in McMansions. Unless it's one in an older neighborhood without an HOA that's been carved up into six rental units.

Yep. Not everyone wants to pay $5,000/month to live in a jumped-up coat closet in a "trendy" part of Manhattan.

Me, I live in a late '50s tract house and it suits me fine. I don't actually care what kinds of housing other people want to live in -- because it's none of my business. Manhattan coat closet or suburban "McMansion" -- whatever floats your boat.

A huge part of the point here is that McMansions create unattractive, difficult to use, and costly to maintain infrastructure. And the residents who live in the McMansions aren't really the people who are bearing the full brunt of these costs.

My favorite thing was a culdesac of McMansions that had a gravel entrance road.

You could almost hear the arguments of "who will pay for it?" echoing the halls like a ghost.

Here's a novel idea: if you don't want to live in a "McMansion", don't buy one.

Shopping for houses isn't like shopping on Amazon. You can't just pick what you want and have it ready on a lot of your choice in two days. If the only housing stock available/being built is houses you don't want to live in, whether they're too big, too poorly built, too ugly, not oriented on the lot right, not exactly where you want it, you're going to have to buy one anyway.

> You can't just pick what you want and have it ready on a lot of your choice in two days

No kidding. And?

> If the only housing stock available/being built is houses you don't want to live in

These houses are exactly what their owners want to live in. Exactly. If the market demand weren't there, the contractors would be building something else.

This article has a lot of words but it doesn't say much and the title is misleading.

tldr;

Americans are building large, ugly homes out of cheap materials that have environmental impacts due to heating/cooling costs and distances required to drive.

moby dick is the story of a guy on a boat who tries to hunt a whale

I get the joke but sometimes writing is bad

How's that work out for him?

good or bad depending on who you are rooting for

>The solutions to these problems are equally obvious: more density; preserving existing green space to allow for stormwater runoff; better public transportation to decrease reliance on cars; the decommissioning of urban highways; comprehensively transforming the energy sector in pursuit of a post-oil world; and, most of all, building affordable, livable, and—dare I say it—rent-controlled or even government-funded housing.

All of these urbanist types always come to the exact same collectivist conclusions. It treats human culture as a mathematical optimization problem, which it isn't. Everything would just be so much better if we all lived in 20 story 800sqft apartments and took the bus everywhere.

I don't want to live like that. I want a car, maybe two for my family so that we can go where we want when we want. I want a home large enough to entertain friends, host holidays, and house my children. I want a yard with grass, and I want to spend my saturday mornings mowing it. And I think that's exactly what most other Americans want.

There has to be a solution that doesn't involve the loss of individual autonomy, privacy, and freedom that we value in the US. I will not eat the bugs. I will not get into the pod.

The American lifestyle you describe is going to end and probably sooner rather than later.

I think what gets lost in this debate is the fact that in most major US cities you can have two cars, a yard with a lawn you can mow and a guest room without sacrificing walkability and public transportation.

I live in a working class neighborhood in a major coastal city and still have everything I listed above: I bike or ride the bus to work but a lot of my coworkers drive; I have front and backyards (with lawns!) but I can walk a few blocks to a commercial district with dozens of shops and restaurants. Not every city looks like Manhattan. Not even all of NYC looks like Manhattan.

> I think what gets lost in this debate is the fact that in most major US cities you can have two cars, a yard with a lawn you can mow and a guest room without sacrificing walkability and public transportation.

My city qualifies! The house might even be pretty damn cheap and surprisingly big!

But the schools will suck. You have to move somewhere with terrible walkability to get decent public schools.

> I want a car, maybe two for my family so that we can go where we want when we want.

You want a car because it's not possible to live in the US without them. So that's rational.

> I want a yard with grass, and I want to spend my saturday mornings mowing it. And I think that's exactly what most other Americans want.

Nope. I skipped out on "grass" a long time ago. Water costs, time expenditure, grubs in your lawn causing local wildlife to dig it up - yeah, I don't want that. And actually lots of people around me don't either.

> I will not eat the bugs. I will not get into the pod.

Ok pal. Nothing you say is going to be forced on you.

> I don't want that.

Maybe you should give the same consideration to the tastes of other people?

I think you’re strawmaning, and extrapolating the worst possible argument from the broad statement. I’ve not seen western urbanists who are extreme. I think every one would say “ya, that sounds nice”.

For example, it’s usually the conservatives that want to zone a town so that it’s literally impossible, even with massive free market demand, to build anything but large houses on large plots. A hell of a lot of urbanists just want the government to stop telling them that they can’t build a 4-plex or open a coffee shop on their property because it’s not zoned for it, or doesn’t have the government-approved-totally-well-thought-out number of parking spaces.

Instead of spending 2 billion building a bigger highway, how about 1 billion to get people off of the highway in the first place?

None of these restrict personal liberty.

Only the ever terrifying Straw Man is about restricting liberties. Especially when it comes to land use, (most) actual modern urbanists are individual autonomy and freedom oriented.

See, for example, the Japanese zoning plans that a lot of progressives in the US are in love with, which amount to setting a maximum density/nuisance level for a fairly large area and letting people just build whatever as long as it falls within that bound.

> I don't want to live like that. I want a car, maybe two for my family so that we can go where we want when we want. I want a home large enough to entertain friends, host holidays, and house my children. I want a yard with grass, and I want to spend my saturday mornings mowing it. And I think that's exactly what most other Americans want.

Cool, whatever, but people trying to enforce that on everyone else is exactly what's landed us in the current hellscape of wildly overpriced homes everywhere people want to actually live, because everything is zoned to only allow single family homes and as it turns you can't actually physically fit enough of those to cover the demand for everyone who wants to live in most big cities.

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