McMansions Discussion Thread

[ginchael 1]

Date: 1/6/2006 8:35:06 AM
Author: ILL Tonkso
What a waste, a family doesnt need that. Builld Terraced homes with good city infastructure. US urban sprawl makes everthing too spaced out, what happens when you want to walk to the local shop?

quote>

You don't. The local shop is more often than not the local Walmart/Kmart/mall, and most areas don't even have sidewalks or sidewalks on just one side. To survive in the suburbs, you need a car, probably an SUV or minivan.

As a person living in the heart of the McMansion craze--Northern New Jersey--I have a lot of experience with McMansions. The area I live in now used to be a resort community in the 1940s and 50s, kinda like the Catskills or Poconos. As a result, there were bungalow communities and farmland. Now, a lot of the small bungalows are being torn down for extra large mansions, and whole new multimillion dollar neighborhoods are being built on farms that exsisted for over 200 years.

I live in an older area of town, that dates back to the 50s and 60s, and my neighborhood is really close. All the kids hang out, all the parents are friends, and the dogs all run around together; we even have an annual block party. Contrastly, the new McMansion neighborhoods of the last 10 years have no soul--no one talks to one another or even goes outside. These neighborhoods are empty, and its not just the new ones--the ones that have been around for 10 and 20 years still have a distinct lack of bonding between neighbors. It's not just the lack of imagination, it's the lack of a sense of being. Bonds between neighbors are being torn apart by the seams.

[keiferkapper 0]

Date: 1/6/2006 8:35:06 AM Author: ILL Tonkso What a waste, a family doesnt need that. Builld Terraced homes with good city infastructure. US urban sprawl makes everthing too spaced out, what happens when you want to walk to the local shop?

I live in Los Angeles..the capital of entertainment, suburbia, and freeways.  Everyone drives here.  Only the poor use public transit or walk. The real estate market here is out of control...it cost over $400,000 - $800,000 on average just to buy a 70 year old craftsman home or 50 year old ranch style tract housing depending on where you live.  In some areas like in South Orange County and Santa Barbara..the median price for a middle class family home is $1 million.  The McMansions here are going for $1.5 - 3 million on average.  The cost of living continues to go up while wages overall stay the same.  Whenever this real estate bubble eventually burst , the financial implications on the US economy is going to be bad. 

[Emozo 0]

i dont see anything wrong with these houses, they are different sure but not ugly. just because their styles are confused doesnt make them tacky, they may even prove to be a style icon in the future.

all i can say is each to his own, if you dont like them dont live in one.

edit: in the uk $400000 is nothing, you could buy a 2 bed apartment in some places for that much let alone a huge mcmansion family house, just the difference in living cost i suppose

[louisville327 0]

Date: 1/13/2006 7:51:40 PM Author: Emozo i dont see anything wrong with these houses, they are different sure but not ugly. just because their styles are confused doesnt make them tacky, they may even prove to be a style icon in the future. all i can say is each to his own, if you dont like them dont live in one. edit: in the uk $400000 is nothing, you could buy a 2 bed apartment in some places for that much let alone a huge mcmansion family house, just the difference in living cost i suppose

 

Well, in Manhattan, some studio apartments (no bedrooms) are going for over $3 million.  It all depends on the location.  Most McMansions in most suburban areas of most US cities fall somewhere in the $200k to $800k range.  Some are cheaper, some more expensive, but that's a good average range.

[Emozo 0]

thats crazy! personaly though if i had that much money to burn i would spend it on building a nice high quality house that would last, i think that there is an unsubstantional feel to wooden houses.

[acornhp 1]

Wow. I haven't seen a discussion of McMansions like this anywhere on my historic preservation listserves or my planning listserves. Anyway, great discussion. A few points if I may:

First, McMansions, in the way preservationists think about them means to tear down a small house on a lot (generally 1920's bungalows - what beautiful buildings) and build something that goes from lot line to lot line. The stark contrast of small house next to monster is what grabs most people.

Second, one item I noticed on most of the images posted here was that they showed the garage in the front. I dont think many people understand what type of statement that makes. It says I am going to go inside my house without leaving my car and never see my neighboors. It doesn't always have to be that way - generalizations can be bad - but it does promote a certain sense of anti-friendliness.

That said, the British method or the American method of urban planning is not better nor worse than the other. Humans started the first several thousand years of existance as rural people. They were staggered far apart. They were not intended to sit on top of each other, be it in a row house or a suburb. But we are adaptable. We also have aesthetics...which brings me to:

That these buildings tend to be designed from the inside out. Jonathan Hale wrote a book called The Old Way of Seeing. Its a very good book about how in general the people who built houses 200 years ago were doing it not from an architects plan, but from simple math and usefulness. You laid out a building by stretching a line in a diagonal path and then making an even X tht met at a 90 degree angle. That gave you a perfect box. Then you would lay it out using a ROD or a measurement which comes to about 34 feet. That meant most rooms were 11 1/2 feet square. Check it out some time when you are near an old building. Its sort of weird. We still use that measurement for roads.

Anyway, I digress. Here on nantucket we require people to think about the outside of their house first then worry about the inside.

Lastly, on the topic of wood versus brick, I am a wood frame fan. It allows the building to breath better. The wood can be just as solid. I think modern contractors can use crappy material, but I think it feels more organic. That is unless I can raise enough money to build FallingWater Part Duex.

Thanks for listening.
Aaron
Nantucket, MA

[AnarchoPlanner 0]

I agree, this is a fabulous discussion. Before it continues, however, i would like to echo mayormommy's call for a distinction between new construction and what she calls 'mansionization'. I think we are all familiar with both, but they arise in somewhat different circumstances and shouldn't be confused.

The new construction mcmansions are on large, newly subdivided lots (1-2 acres in general), usually fairly far away from the dominant regional center. This is the primary form of real estate development in the U.S. right now for a couple of reasons. First, investors are unsure about the stock market and are putting more and more money into real estate investments. More people are also buying houses than ever because they've been told that it's a good long term investment. This has the effect of keeping the market for large houses boyant despite a not-so-hot demand for larger homes. The second reason has to do with local land use decisions that have the effect of allowing only this type of growth. This is a conscious on the part of local zoning boards to exclude 'undesirable' uses, including multifamily housing or any kind of development that could be classified as 'dense'. The easiest way to do this is to establish minimum lot sizes (as mayormommy pointed out) of an acre or more. SO, investment money gets directed towards housing developers and they do what they do best, given local constraints: they build more houses. Big ones that all have the same interior, with the option of brick or vinyl facade. Don't forget the elegant half-circle window top! The overall effect of this non-system of development is a misallocation of resources on a tremendously shameful scale, aka the failure of capitalism to provide basic housing needs for the lower end of the housing spectrum. While housing starts for multifamily and otherwise affordable homes fail to keep pace with the demand, we have hundreds or thousands of new mcmansions every year in every major MSA.

'Mansionization' on the other hand is the process by which individual landowners with small 1920s-sized lots tear down the existing structure (usually perfectly good, albeit small) in order to build a prefab minicastle that takes up 80% of the lot or more. This happens most frequently in the inner-ring suburbs. Eastern Queens was mentioned earlier. NYC Landmarks Commission just moved to prevent this from happening in Riverdale, The Bronx, by designating it an historic district. But it's most widespread in Southern California, which has a hot market and miles and miles of bungalow streets that are highly susceptible to this kind of redevelopment.

To compare these two forms of mcmansions, I would submit the following: While it's a shame to see the great homes of 'Broadacre City' get torn down, it is infuriating to see farmland and woodland (and in the worst case, previously uninhabitable desert) converted to 2-acre lots for the purpose of building a shoddy (large) house. A shoddy house that represents a huge failure of the housing market and, in my opinion, the nation as a whole.

[mayormommy 8]

Ack, it's finally happening to me! A house three doors down from mine was gutted in a fire 18 months ago and has been abandoned and boarded up ever since. Last weekend a neighbor told me the house has been sold to a real estate agent for $207,000 (basically for the lot only), who already has a contract to sell it to a builder. Note that this is a working class 1940s neighborhood of 1/4 - 1/3 acre lots with tiny Cape Cod houses and little 1 1/2 story brick ramblers. While anything is better than the boarded-up house, I can only imagine what will be sprouting up, as our street is within walking distance of the DC Metro system and has been an previously undiscovered good value for many years.

One possible consolation is this sketch of two other new houses planned for the neighborhood. Although the colonial frame look isn't too jarring, these two houses will be sitting on a lot previously occupied by one house and hence will have giant 0.15 acre lots.



EDIT: Regarding what anarchoplanner said, mansionization is not as bad as that mini-mansion sprawl in my mind, but I sometimes wish they'd just bulldoze the whole neighborhood, convert it to townhouses and get it over with, rather than this piecemeal chipping away at the neighborhood's cohesiveness. At least then we might get some new amenities like park trails or something and things would be planned, not just random.

[hdorriker 190]

I find McMansions to be amomg the least rememberable structures ever to be built. Because they really are, pretty much all the same. The same boring mixes of tired period architecture details slapped together by home buyers who, if left up to them, would probably put the garage in the middle of the house, walled in on all sides and totally useless if the floorplans weren't reviewed by some kind of professional.
I think I might have a better appreciation for a lot of these styles were it not for the fact that they have become the Britney Spears and 50-cent of architecture as an art: Basically popularized to the point of absolute inconspicuousness.


Give me some wood or concrete cubes, with simple windows punched into them, and some brightly colored paint and I'll give a community some real unique character.

[beebs 129]

I guess my house would classify as a McMansion... but at least it's attractive outside. All around my area there's those same boring houses... stucco... same pillar things... 2 car garage.. front door set back, no porch. Ugly!! My dad gave it lots of little details that sets it apart from the other houses on our block, and makes it nice to view.

[SeventhSeal17 0]

I live in Boston, so everytime you leave city limits you pratically get bombarded by McMansions.  Concord and Lexington anyone?