Category Archives: McMansions

Own a houseboat or RV rather than a McMansion

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Instead of building a waterfront McMansion with a boat slip, buy a boat or a RV instead:

But once in the channel, you see a new vista: On the north side there are at least a half-dozen, arrow-straight canals lined with houses. Most of the houses are large, but few are McMansions. Most have docks for their boat, or boats. And most are worth at least $1 million, not counting their nautical toys. If you’ve got the money, owning one of these places would be the start of a great retirement…

So let’s ask a question: Is there a reasonable substitute? Is there a way we can have the same kind of experiences of water, nature and easy living without the very large financial footprint of an expensive house with its monthly operating costs and taxes?…

Take the boat I chartered. At 33 feet, a couple could live on the San Souci. The cost: Maybe $25,000 for the used boat and about $600 a month for the rental slip. A larger powerboat would have more room and wider appeal. The slip for a 36-foot Grand Banks trawler is about $700 a month. You can buy them used for under $100,000. Keep the diesel engine in good shape and you can relocate at will…

Is living on a boat too eccentric for you? Not to worry. Walk up the street and try an RV. The Seabreeze RV and Mobile Home Park is less than a half-mile from Treasure Harbor Marina. Its 7.5 acres are right on the ocean — something you can’t get in a canal home that costs a mere million. Some of the RVs and park models are on the water. (Park models are RVs built to travel just once. They look like beach cabins.) And you can dock your fishing boat on site.

The RV or boat certainly offers less space and lower financial commitment compared to a McMansion. At the same time, McMansions tend to offer some land, a lot more space, and usually a facade intended to impress visitors.

Perhaps one of the biggest issues here is less about the size or financial commitment but about mobility. McMansions can’t really be moved, regardless of their price. In contrast, RVs, boats, and many tiny houses can be moved rather quickly. Mobility allows the owner to move to chase jobs. Mobility allows for a change of scenery – perhaps someone doesn’t want to live along the water forever. Of course, all three options require somewhere to park the habitat and this can cost a decent sum of money. But, if you don’t like the deal or financial circumstances change, the move is relatively easy compared to selling and buying a house.

“25 Lessons You’ll Learn From a McMansion”

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One contributer to MyOldHouseOnline.com finds humor in things you can learn from a McMansion:

1) The builders did not have all the answers.  Sometimes, they didn’t understand any of the questions.  Feel free to display bewilderment and dismay at their cluelessness.

2)  When you find a light or window in an inexplicable location or missing where one should decidedly be, refer to lesson #1.

3) Four words: What Were They Thinking?

4) McMansion owners can be the best-dressed people at the party.  But when the party is at their house, try not to stare, point, or snicker…

The main joke here appears to be that McMansions are not built that well. Hence, be prepared to find lots of things to fix or to have to make major changes to poor decisions by builders.

Argument: we’ve sacrificed everything for McMansions

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Critics of McMansions are not hard to find but Thomas Frank takes the argument further: McMansions are behind a whole host of issues including sprawl and inequality.

Of course there was something different this time around. In the 2008 collapse, the real-estate bust wasn’t the result of some larger economic trend but the cause of it. Although we are accustomed to blaming it all on subprime loans, about half of the disaster was attributable to the less-well-known fiasco in Alt-A instruments which fed the McMansion market, the “liar’s loans” which were securitized and sold off stamped with a big Triple-A. The worst recession of our lifetimes, in other words, was in large part the result of our superiors’ longing to get themselves a piece of the grandiose.

That astounding reversal of the usual chain of cause and effect changed the way I thought about the McMansion. I once believed it would be amusing to track stylistic change in the tract-mansion form—how, say, the fake French simplicity of Newt Gingrich’s 1987 McMansion gave way to the complex multigabled fakery of Michele Bachmann’s 2007 McMansion, with maybe a stop in between to contemplate Ricky Bobby’s McMansion in “Talladega Nights.”

But what I discovered is that the form doesn’t really change. Yes, the houses get bigger every year, gables and gazebos come and go, but what is really striking about the McMansion is its vapid consistency as the decades pass…

This is not some absurdity at the fringe of our way of life. This is civilization’s very center, the only thing that really makes sense in “clusterfuck nation,” the tawdry telos at which all our economic policies aim. Everything we do seems designed to make this thing possible. Cities must sprawl to accommodate its bulk, eight-lane roads must be constructed, gasoline must be kept cheap, coal must be hauled in from Wyoming on mile-long trains. Middle-class taxes must be higher to make up for the deductions given to McMansion owners, lending standards must be diluted so more suckers can purchase them, banks must be propped up, bonuses must go out, stock prices must ascend. Every one of us must work ever longer hours so that this millionaire’s folly can remain viable, can be sold successfully to the next one on the list. This stupendous, staring banality is the final outcome for which we have sacrificed everything else.

This is a strong statement: we created and generally buy into a system whose goal is to grant a privileged few the ability to live in private McMansions in nice neighborhoods. The fulfillment of the American Dream at the turn of the 21st century involves living in a McMansion. It is not just about suburbs, 0wning a car, buying cheap goods at Walmart, and sending your kids to nice schools; it is about having the glitzy, architecturally-dubious but spacious home.

What I don’t see in Frank’s piece is how exactly the dots connect. The number of McMansions are still relatively limited due to their cost. Not all gated communities have McMansions. Not all suburbs are edge cities or vacuous tract neighborhoods like the ones highlighted in Suburban Nation. I’d like to see the data where half of the housing bubble of the late 2000s was due to loans for McMansions. In other words, this may be a populist argument today given the status of McMansions but the true story is likely more complicated.

Crossword puzzle answer for “McMansion’s storage”?

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I ran across this interesting crossword puzzle clue: McMansion’s storage.

The supposed answer: ThreeCarGarage.

That is a rather long answer for a crossword clue. There also could also be other possible answers. WalkinClosets? ExtraRooms? SecondGreatRoom? For those McMansions with oversized garages, just how many people use that for their main source of storage? Since one of the key features of a McMansion is its large square footage, I imagine there is plenty of storage space available elsewhere.

Just a note on how many American homes have three-car garages. This is from the Census Bureau regarding new homes in 2012:

Of the 368,000 single-family homes sold in 2012…259,000 had 2-car garages, whereas 76,000 had garages for three cars or more.

This is a slight uptick from 2009 new homes:

17% of new single-family homes sold in the U.S. had a 3-or-more-car garage. In the Midwest 34% of the new homes sold had a 3-or-more car garage.

This is probably due to more of the new housing market catering to wealthier buyers.

Fighting the “King of McMansions”

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Some well-known residents of Southampton Village, New York are opposed to plans for a new big house proposed by the “King of McMansions:”

What do commodities trader John Paulson, real estate tycoon Harrison LeFrak, CNN morning news show co-anchor Christopher Cuomo, and  President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s granddaughter Anne Eisenhower have in common?

They share an opposition to the “Farrelization” of their neighborhood in historic Southampton Village, where Joe Farrell has proposed building a 5,531 square foot house on a 1.2 acre parcel on Hill Street according to an article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal.

Dubbed “King of McMansions,” Farrell, who was profiled last summer in The New York Times is described as being “a local version of Donald Trump, without the history of debt, the lush hair or the insults.”

Mr. Paulson, Mr. LeFrak, Mr. Cuomo,  and Ms. Eisenhower are just a few of the 85 names who penned letters to a local village review board. The letter writers variously objected to “the size, scale, scope and ‘visual incompatibility’ of a speculative home” proposed for the vacant lot at 483 Hill Street—a neighborhood where ” nearly a dozen nearby residences are more than a century old and roughly half or a third the size.”

And who is this King of McMansions? A developer of big homes in the Hamptons:

But there is no surer sign that the big-spending ways that characterized the pre-financial crisis era have returned to the Hamptons than the blue “Farrell Building” signs multiplying across the pristine landscape here, along with the multimillion-dollar houses they advertise. It is a process some are calling “Farrellization,” and not necessarily happily.

“We’re as busy as we’ve ever been,” said Joe Farrell, the president of Farrell Building, during a recent interview and tour of his $43 million, 17,000-square-foot home here. The estate, called the Sandcastle, features two bowling lanes, a skate ramp, onyx window frames and, just for fun, an A.T.M. regularly restocked with $20,000 in $10 bills…

With a customer base composed largely of Wall Street financiers, Mr. Farrell has more than 20 new homes under construction, or slated for construction, at a time, making him the biggest builder here by far. He has plans for more, many of them speculative homes built before they have buyers.

Some of the biggest controversies about McMansions seem to take place in areas where residents have plenty of money. It is one thing when a teardown McMansion is constructed in an older neighborhood and less wealthy residents are pushed out as the housing stock becomes newer and more expensive. (At the same time, an influx of new big homes could also raise property values and give some options to cash out.) But, this is an example where everyone is pretty well off and it is more about the character of the neighborhood. Perhaps it is about old money versus new money, that an outsider is coming in with new plans and disturbing an area that others paid big money to buy into.

The “King of McMansions” is going to be a negative term for many people yet it also implies a level of success. I haven’t seen too many individuals tagged with such terms and even companies like Toll Brothers who were well-known for building McMansions didn’t necessarily acquire such monikers.

What do McMansions look like on Shutterstock?

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After earlier this week looking at an iconic McMansion photo, I decided to see how Shutterstock, a stock photo site, portrays McMansions. See the results here.

Some patterns:

1. Most of the homes are in suburban settings. While the term McMansion can also apply to teardowns or large homes on small lots in more crowded neighborhoods, these stock photos are primarily about big houses in neighborhoods with larger lots.

2. Most of the homes are “normal” looking McMansions. They share features like a two-story foyer, at least a two-car garage, and multi-terraced roof line. There are few photos of homes with more castle-like features or modern architecture.

3. There appear to be some particular audiences for these photos: real estate agents who need pictures of nice homes with sold signs in the front yard and people who like flagpoles in the front yard (it appears a number of these are the same photoshopped flag).

4. The photos are mostly of lighter-colored houses, either either white or grey siding with some light brick mixed in. Few homes had darker brick or stucco.

All together, there could be a lot more variety of McMansions on this site.

Iconic image of American McMansions from Plano, Texas

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I’ve seen this picture of a Plano, Texas McMansion numerous times around the Internet:

DeanTerryPlanoTXMcMansionI’ve wondered at the origin of this photo and now I see: see this image and others from the same area as part of Dean Terry’s Flickr stream with the photos originating from his 2007 documentary Subdivided.

What makes this particular McMansion photo stand out? Some reasons:

1. The home has a “typical” McMansion design: brick exterior, multi-gabled roof, clearly a big home, lots of big windows in the front at various levels, a two-story foyer.

2. The surrounding area: the looming water tower, the big power lines out nearby, a neighborhood of similar sized houses with little evidence of anyone being around. (Some of the later photos in the Flickr set illustrate this further: the home backs up to a wide right-of-way for power lines and that water tower really is huge.) Setting the picture beneath a stop sign and lamppost seems to add to the ominousness of the photo.

3. This is Texas, a place where everything is big, including the homes, water towers, and sky. And not just any part of Texas: Plano is a booming suburb in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area that went from just 17,872 people in 1970 to 259,841 people in 2010. That is explosive, sprawling suburban growth.

Now, I may just have to get my hands on this documentary to see more of the home and its context…

Advice for how to stop your neighbor from building a McMansion next door

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McMansions can be opposed in a variety of ways but one poster suggests the way to go is to be an undesirable neighbor:

Paint your house bright pink. Put several cars on cinderblocks in the front yard. Have 20 people move in with you. Stop cutting the grass. Park junk cars on the street in front of the vacant house. Blast loud music 24/7. Tie up a pit bull in your front yard. Get someone with a huge gut to hang out in your front yard without a shirt while drinking beer. All of these together may work, but you’ll probably make yourself miserable in the process.

These actions may or may not be possible given local laws and neighborhood regulations but they all have a similar goal: drive down property values so that possible McMansion no longer looks financially appealing. As numerous people will tell you, who wants to have the nicest house on the street, particularly compared to your immediate neighbors? If McMansions are about wealthier people upgrading their property regardless of their surroundings, then such actions could undercut their financial basis.

Claim: end of urban friends TV shows, revival of happy suburban McMansion shows

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With the end of “How I Met Your Mother,” one critic argues TV shows have moved on to happy suburban McMansions and darker shows about urban singles:

The series is among the last of a vanishing breed, the romantic comedy about well-educated, pop culturally attuned young white people trying to find love and sex in the city as they embark on their careers and independent lives. Such sitcoms proliferated after “Friends” became a huge hit for NBC in the 1990s.

But since ABC struck gold with “Modern Family,” networks have traded the urban coffee shops and bars for the suburban McMansion. TV comedies that explore the dating lives of young people now tend to be a lot darker than “How I Met Your Mother.” Take, for instance, HBO’s “Girls,” where the sex is graphic — and often soul-crushing for the characters.

Such a claim might sound true – but where is the data to back this up? Later in the article:

But that distinctive [storytelling] approach may have come at a price. “It’s that kind of innovation that never makes it to huge ratings heights of the good, old-fashioned sitcom,” Thompson said. “They’re very post-modern characters, so steeped in the irony and cynicism of the ’90s they grew up in, that sometimes it’s kind of hard to like them.”

Indeed, “HIMYM” never cracked even the Top 40 in total viewers, consistently averaging around 9 million or so over the course of its run, according to Nielsen. Yet it still occupied an important role for CBS, which is the most-watched network in the U.S. but often has trouble attracting young adults.

So no data on the number of shows with each genre or kind of storyline (young, happy singles vs. suburban McMansion dwelling families vs. unhappy urban singles) and then another knock against HIMYM and “Girls” and similar shows: they often don’t draw big ratings. So, while critics might like these shows (and critics might live in an alternate universe , how many of them are popular? Check out the Nielsen Top 25 for the week ending March 23, 2014: I don’t know all of these shows that well but I don’t see too many suburban McMansions. The suburbs are a common theme on television shows with a long history, dating back to the happy family shows of the 1950s. Yet, they don’t necessarily draw big ratings or the positive attention of critics even if they seem to be fodder for cancellations when the new crop of shows are rolled out each fall.

Tiny houses may be missing TVs, other modern technologies

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Tiny houses differ from McMansions in their size but perhaps also in another feature: a lack of TVs and other modern media technologies.

As I browsed the pages of both company’s full color, Robb Report-quality catalogs, one thing really stood out: In no picture of a fully furnished room did I see a single television. That can’t be a coincidence.

These are not the “Jewel Box” new homes filled with automation and electronics Gordon Gekko and his minions are supposedly building as all Baby Boomers are forced to downsize. Jewel Boxes? More like thumb drives if we are making an accurate size comparison.

There are clearly challenges to designing relevant A/V, home theater, whole house entertainment/convenience and security for a tiny home. Multi-purpose structures and thoughtful use of hydraulics just begin the scratch the surface. An exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York has a full size working model of a mini apartment that shows all sorts of folding and sliding stuff including a television. It almost looks like two different apartments, literally day and night.

This could suggest tiny houses are not just about having smaller houses: it is part of a larger lifestyle package away from consumerism that includes restricting television consumption. However, these two things don’t necessarily have to go together: tiny house or micro-apartment dwellers may have strong interests in different media including streaming TV and video games. I would suspect many tiny house owners have a laptop, tablet, and/or smartphone but I would also guess they don’t want their small homes to be dominated by things like large TVs that are often the focal points of social spaces in McMansions.