What to do if “a McMansion is going up next door”

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If a McMansion is built next to existing houses, what can neighbors do?

“It’s built so much higher than my house, virtually every window looks out into my backyard,” she says. Desperate to protect her privacy, she planted Italian cypress trees as a natural barrier. She tried to reason with the builder, whose unsympathetic response was: “Shouldn’t everyone be able to build their dream home?”

What’s going on in Mountain View is an extreme version of a problem cropping up all over the country: Huge houses are being built on plots of land originally meant to accommodate smaller dwellings, sparking a heated debate over what’s best for the community. Some argue that owners of larger homes pay more taxes, which can benefit all. But if your home happens to have its air and light blocked by a behemoth next door, you would likely be very, very upset — and can most likely kiss the idea of cashing out on your home sale goodbye…

A similar drama is playing out in Arcadia, CA, where more than 30 homes larger than 5,000 square feet (some as large as 8,000 — 9,000) have been proposed in the 850-home community over the past six years. In response, a group of longtime residents formed Saving Arcadia, which is currently battling the municipal government and City Council. Its argument: Overly lenient rules for developers have led to the proliferation of McMansions on lots that were zoned back in the 1950s for smaller homes. Plus, these oversize dwellings overburden the city’s water, gas, electricity, and other utility services…

Another option is finding a creative solution. One example is building downward (if a property is set on a hill) in order to increase square footage while preserving neighboring views, which is increasingly happening in various areas near Newport Beach. So maybe there’s hope that we can all play nice after all?

A homeowner who doesn’t like the nearby McMansion has a number of options available to them – these are sorted roughly in order of severity:

  1. Talk to the neighbor and builder. Might they be willing to make changes? They don’t have to but perhaps they are also unaware of what neighbors think of their actions.
  2. Modify your own lot or house to avoid having to see the new dwelling (if this is possible given its new size). For example, buy some artificial plants.
  3. Fight for local regulations. Many communities (see examples like Austin and Los Angeles) have considered rules about teardowns in recent decades and try to balance the interests of property owners versus those of neighborhoods. A variety of tools can be used including design guidelines, lot to house size ratios, approval processes, and historic districts.
  4. Buy up the properties that may become McMansions. This requires money but then you can control the fate of the nearby properties. See examples here and here.
  5. Sue your neighbor. You have to have resources to fight this out and it is likely to sour relations for a long time. But, some neighbors choose this option. See an example here.
  6. Move away. This is what the resident in this particular article does. This may be a last resort option or one favorable to those who don’t like open conflict (which is often minimized in suburbia).

In many places, the teardown McMansion cannot be stopped, particularly if there are not existing guidelines which are likely based off earlier cases or if the neighbor is not independently wealthy. Still, the neighbor who does not like it can pursue a number of options and each is likely to affect their relationship with the teardown neighbor.

“Housing Bust Lingers for Generation X”

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The Wall Street Journal discusses how Generation X’s ability to own a home was significantly affected by the housing bubble:

The data show an enormous swing in the fortunes of people born between 1965 and 1984, the group defined by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies as Generation X.

Compared with previous generations, Generation X went from the most successful in terms of homeownership rates in 2004 to the least successful by 2015, according to the data, which date to the early 1980s.

The culprit: a historic bull market for housing, fueled in part by easy-to-get mortgages, that encouraged record levels of home buying until the financial system cracked and the housing market collapsed. Earlier generations such as baby boomers, who entered the market before the frenzy of the early 2000s, have fared better.

Wrong place, wrong time? The effects of this could be long lasting:

  1. Less wealth in the long run since owning a home is one of the biggest investments Americans make.
  2. What does this mean for retirement, both for the money that could be gained in selling a home and the need for different housing options as people age?
  3. With the assumptions Americans make about community involvement and homeownership (as compared to renting), does this mean a whole generation is less involved in community life?
  4. Will economic changes like this affect future decision making both for Generation X and their children who saw what happened?

In other words, we won’t know how important this change is for quite a while.

When money is tight in NYC, cut spending on critical water infrastructure

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All big cities need water but when budget priorities were determined, New York City chose to delay building some key water infrastructure:

Mayor Bill de Blasio has postponed work to finish New York’s third water tunnel, a project that for more than half a century has been regarded as essential to the survival of the city if either of the two existing, and now aged, tunnels should fail…

But last year, Mr. de Blasio’s administration, eager to keep a lid on water and sewer rates that had grown by an average of 8 percent annually under Mr. Bloomberg, moved financing for the third tunnel to other projects, Amy Spitalnick, a de Blasio spokeswoman, said.

The city intends to finish the remaining portions of the tunnel sometime in the 2020s, but it has not set a date for completion nor allocated money in the budget to carry out the work. For the foreseeable future, the $6 billion tunnel will remain dry in the two largest boroughs, where well over half the city’s population lives.

“You look back over the last 50 years, whenever there were fiscal pressures, the unseen world of the municipal water system is where weak city leaders turned to cut spending,” said Kevin Bone, a professor of architecture at Cooper Union and an editor of “Water-Works: The Architecture and Engineering of the New York City Water Supply.” “I’m disappointed to hear that they’ve deferred it. It is symptomatic about planning for the future in America.”

Let’s hope that this doesn’t lead to disaster: imagine Queens and Brooklyn without water for three months (which would happen if aging Tunnel 2 fails). This is one of the issues with infrastructure and why the public would be furious if something happened: people don’t pay attention to this stuff until it fails but the issues are largely preventable as long as communities keep up with the necessary maintenance and new construction.

Imagine New York City, the top global city, being incapacitated by not having enough water because city leaders didn’t have enough foresight…

Google exploring constructing their own city

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A new Google city would allow the company to test ideas:

The boss of Sidewalk Labs, the firm’s New York City firm described as an ‘urban innovation’ company mentioned the idea at a summit hosted by The Information. 

‘Thinking about a city from the Internet up is really compelling,’ Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff said at the event…

Later he added that building a new city could help test solutions to cybersecurity and privacy issues: ‘If you could create a place, it’d be a laboratory to experiment with these problems.’…

‘Sidewalk will focus on improving city life for everyone by developing and incubating urban technologies to address issues like cost of living, efficient transportation and energy usage,’ chief executive Larry Page said in a post at the Internet titan’s Google+ social network.

On the one hand, it would be difficult to test certain products – like a self-driving car – without having your own city that mimics real life.

On the other hand, I could see certain issues arising:

  1. If people lived in this city, what kind of rights would they have?
  2. For those who are already worried about the lack of public spaces in many big cities, what about a big city owned by a globally powerful corporation?
  3. Could such a model of corporations building cities offer benefits such that they become more attractive than what we have now where cities are theoretically for residents?

See an earlier post about Google planning its own city.

Infographic: “Is Your McMansion Killing You?”

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Put together a number of statistics about large American homes and an infographic can point the way towards death. These factors – everything from more TV watching, eating poorly, not getting much exercise, and paying more for space that isn’t necessarily needed – are not necessarily related to McMansions. You could do all of this and live in a more modest home or have a really large home that is more architecturally pleasing. For example, did growing up in a 1880s Victorian home or a 1950s ranch necessarily lead to better behavior or were these larger social issues? In this line of reasoning, McMansions may just be a symptom of larger issues such as increased consumerism and individualism.

All that said, I could imagine even more data that could be added to the infographic:

-How much extra infrastructure needs to be built to support suburban McMansions (as contrasted with denser apartment living in big cities)?

-What about the loss of aesthetic beauty in seeing or living in mass-produced, poorly designed McMansions? Can’t this decrease one’s enjoyment of life?

-What is the cost of all the driving often done to accommodate McMansions?

-How about the decrease in civic life encouraged by such large and well-furnished private spaces?

This infogrphic could keep going on and on and on…

Four reasons American mass transit went awry

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John Rennie Short explains why America’s mass transit infrastructure is in such bad shape today:

The first is the early and continuing embrace of the private car as a form of urban transport. In Europe, expensive gas and restrictive land use measures kept people in dense cities, and urban growth followed along the lines of mass transit, reinforcing and consolidating their use…

Second, as cities were designed to meet the needs of the motorist, mass transit systems that had been owned by private companies were abandoned or effectively dismantled in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s because they were losing money…

The third reason is that all infrastructure ages and needs costly maintenance and continual improvement, yet funding is often constrained…

Fourth, there is a deeper tension in the U.S., first noted by economist Kenneth Galbraith, between private affluence and public squalor.

It is difficult to overestimate the effect the car had on American social life. Many cities had thriving mass transit systems – railroads, electric streetcars – before automobiles reached the mass public. People had to live closer to where they worked. Street life could be very hectic – just remember all those horses out on the streets of major cities – but there was more interaction. Today? People often prefer driving solo in their vehicle at their own convenience. Mass transit simply didn’t look as appealing with the new option of driving on the table and governments spent lots of money to push driving rather than mass transit.

Is the insistence on driving America’s ultimate enduring response to big government? Residents may be willing to put up with being constrained in other areas but don’t you dare tell me that I can’t go where I want when I want.

Miami’s luxury housing market fueled by ill-gotten gains

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The latest big Wikileaks event shows what has been fueling Miami’s luxury housing boom:

Mossack Fonseca’s leaked records offer a glimpse into the tightly guarded world of high-end South Florida real estate and the global economic forces reshaping Miami’s skyline.

And MF’s activities bolster an argument analysts and law-enforcement officials have long made: Money from people linked to wrongdoing abroad is helping to power the gleaming condo towers rising on South Florida’s waterfront and pushing home prices far beyond what most locals can afford…

A Miami Herald analysis of the never-before-seen records found 19 foreign nationals creating offshore companies and buying Miami real estate. Of them, eight have been linked to bribery, corruption, embezzlement, tax evasion or other misdeeds in their home countries.

That’s a drop in the ocean of Miami’s luxury market. But Mossack Fonseca is one of many firms that set up offshore companies. And experts say a lack of controls on cash real-estate deals has made Miami a magnet for questionable currency.

Later in the article, one analyst suggests no one really wants to know this information as luxury housing is a big deal. Who benefits? City leaders who get to trumpet the new growth. Local construction firms, people in real estate, and the finance industry who are involved with the new units. Municipalities like the new tax dollars. Possibly, nearby business owners who could see an uptick in activity with more people nearby who have money to burn. And the whole region benefits from the status of some of the world’s wealthiest people plus an attractive (and expensive) housing market.

If this is happening in Miami, it is also likely affecting other important cities. Take New York: as the leading global city, wouldn’t people who have ill-gotten gains want to be there? Or, how about other leading cities in different regions like London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo?

 

The results of primary voting in DuPage County

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The Daily Herald has an analysis of primary voting for president by Chicago area county. Here are the results for DuPage County:

The heart of this traditional Republican stronghold is bright red, with the central areas of the county and south through much of Naperville full of precincts that turned out big for the GOP primary. The same goes for the southeastern part of the county, including Downers Grove,

Overall, more than 17,000 more Republicans than Democrats turned out in DuPage, bucking the statewide trend.

But there’s Democratic blue in the DuPage County part of Aurora, as well as in Addison Township. That kind of Democratic turnout could hint at why Obama was able to pull off wins in DuPage County in the last two presidential elections.

Two quick thoughts:

  1. Displaying the data in a map like this is very helpful as you can quickly see the different bases of support for the two political parties. Additionally, showing the size of the margin of victory for the leading party is much better than just showing who won.
  2. The voting patterns show some correlations with demographic patters: more Republican areas are whiter and wealthier while more Democratic areas are less wealthy and more diverse. Again, seeing this on a map helps make those connections – as long as you know a few things about the spatial dimensions of the county.

Connecting big drops in homicide rates and race and ethnicity

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A new sociological study finds that homicide rates across different racial and ethnic groups have fallen:

The study revealed that three of the most significant social trends over the past 20 years — mass incarceration, rapid immigration and growing wealth inequality — all contributed to the reduction in the gaps between the white homicide victimization rate and those for blacks and Hispanics.

As a result, the black-white homicide victimization rate gap decreased by 40 percent, the Hispanic-white gap dropped by 55 percent and the black-Hispanic gap shrunk by 35 percent, according to the study to be published Thursday in the April issue of the American Sociological Review…

In fact, the study found that an influx of immigrants actually decreases homicides. “People who decide to come here are not people with strong tendencies toward violent crime,” Light said. “They are coming here for educational opportunities, employment opportunities and opportunities to help their families.”…

The study also showed that the increasing racial/ethnic disparities in incarceration rates were associated with significant reductions in black-white and black-Hispanic homicide victimization rate gaps. However, the authors were quick to caution against drawing the conclusion that even more incarceration would produce even more benefits because the findings have to be viewed in a larger context.

There are several matters of public perception that this study seems to address. Many are not aware of these declines and instead think crime has risen (see earlier posts here and here). Or, how about the data on immigration on crime where higher rates of immigration lead to lower homicide rates? Or, the roughly 35-40 percent decrease in the homicide rates for whites, blacks, and Latinos?

Thinking more broadly, what would it actually take for the American public to change their perceptions about crime? Could this sociology study help convince average Americans that violent crime rates have significantly dropped in recent decades? Would the media have to stop highlighting violent crime? Would the entertainment industry (movies, TV, video games, books, etc.) have to become less violent? Thinking about this particular study, perhaps positive changes to race relations would help…

Self-driving cars require better maintained roads

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Self-driving cars may have advantages but they might also require spending more on road upkeep:

Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars, vexing engineers and adding time and cost. Poor markings and uneven signage on the 3 million miles of paved roads in the United States are forcing automakers to develop more sophisticated sensors and maps to compensate, industry executives say.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently called the mundane issue of faded lane markings “crazy,” complaining they confused his semi-autonomous cars…

An estimated 65 percent of U.S. roads are in poor condition, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, with the transportation infrastructure system rated 12th in the World Economic Forum’s 2014-2015 global competitiveness report...

To make up for roadway aberrations, carmakers and their suppliers are incorporating multiple sensors, maps and data into their cars, all of which adds cost.

 

It would be interesting to see some estimates of the additional costs to keep roads at a level where self-driving cars can safely operate. Does the money saved in less congestion on the roads and fewer traffic accidents outweigh the new maintenance costs?

On the other hand, having to do more frequent construction may not affect drivers as much if all cars are self-driving. Since such vehicles are supposed to improve traffic flow, construction is something drivers wouldn’t have to handle – their cars would do it for them. And, if we have driverless cars, can we have driverless maintenance vehicles?