Businessweek: “Death of the McMansion has been greatly exaggerated”

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Even in a down housing market, the size of the average new house in the United States has not dropped much. In other words, the McMansion may not be dead yet.

Who says Americans have fallen out of love with McMansions? It’s true that the housing bust shaved a few square feet off the average size of new homes in the U.S. But new single-family homes built last year were still 49 percent bigger than those built in 1973, according to Census Bureau data.  And it’s worth remembering that family sizes have shrunk over that period.

The peak size for new homes was an average of 2,521 square feet in 2007. By 2010 it was down to 2,392. That statistic fed into a slew of stories about the “new frugality.” A survey of builders conducted in December 2010 by the National Association of Home Builders predicted that the shrinkage would continue, with the average getting down to 2,152 by 2015.

But then a funny thing happened. In 2011, according to the Census Bureau, the average ticked up a bit, to 2,480 square feet.

That’s partly because mortgages were so hard to get that only the well-to-do, who buy bigger houses, were able to buy new homes in 2011, according to Stephen Melman, the director of economic services for the National Association of Home Builders. But it could also be that the “new frugality” story was somewhat oversold.

A couple of thoughts:

1. This is why it helps to wait and have two kinds of data before making definitive pronouncements: longer-term data as well as a variety of housing measures. Year to year figures tell us something but we should be interested in larger trends. Additionally, if houses are about the same size but there are a lot fewer being built, this tells us something as well. Sometimes, trends are hard to see while we are in them.

2. Even if the size of new houses hasn’t dropped much, it could be that these new large homes look less like McMansions. The common definition of McMansion includes several factors: a large house (perhaps in a teardown setting) that is architecturally deficient and also tied to other concepts like sprawl and overconsumption. What if more of these new large houses are green? What if they are designed by architects and built to last?

Is it good for suburban neighborhoods for foreclosed homes to be purchased by private-equity funds who want to rent them out?

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Some neighborhoods are facing a new dilemma: how to respond to private-equity firms purchasing and fixing up foreclosed homes and then renting them out.

Similar scenarios and concerns are unfolding across Chicago and in other markets hard-hit by the housing crisis. Well-capitalized, out-of-town private equity funds are scouring neighborhoods, paying cash for distressed single-family homes and renting them out. The opportunities are plentiful, enabling investment groups to profit from low home prices, rising rents and an increase in the number of potential renters.

The transactions are returning vacant properties to active use. But they also are stoking fears among neighbors and municipalities about the long-term effect of large, private investors — including many that are operating under the radar — in their communities.

“This scares the hell out of me,” said Ed Jacob, executive director of Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago Inc. “In this rush to say this is a new asset class, are we creating the next community development problem?…

The general strategy of the companies is the same: buy low, make the necessary upgrades, fill them with tenants and then sell the homes in three to seven years. With companies and analysts anticipating projected returns of at least 8 percent, there also is talk of creating publicly traded real estate investment trusts.

This presents quite an issue for suburbanites worried about property values (which is a top-level concern). Foreclosures are not good for a neighborhood. They tend to drag down sales prices for homes with residents because investors or buyers can try to get the foreclosures for cheaper. Foreclosures may not be maintained well so the yard and exterior appearance can suffer. Suburbanites fear such homes might also fall prey to more criminal activity.

On the other hand, renters are not typically viewed positively in single-family home suburban subdivisions. Renters are perceived to be more transient, not as concerned about the property itself or the neighborhood. Renters can be viewed as a different class of people, meaning people who don’t have the resources to settle down and buy a home. Renting might mean absentee or less-involved landlords who might still let the property become run-down.

What is the long-term verdict? I think rentals make sense in a lot of suburban neighborhoods. Without buyers willing to pay good money for homes, it is better for a community to have people consistently in the homes than to have series of foreclosures. The situation could be made a lot better if the landlords and/or rental investors are good landlords who make efforts to help the neighborhood. As the article notes, different communities can also look into the matter and see how they want to respond. I would guess most communities and neighbors hope the rental properties again become owned homes but this will take some time for housing prices to climb again.

Sprawling suburbanites are out of touch with nature

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The author of a new book about sprawl and wildlife describes the connection suburbanites have to nature:

Sprawl in my book consists of suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas where people reside but don’t farm for a living. They live in all kinds of houses, in or out of developments, in small dwellings or McMansions on five acre lots, in second homes, weekend places and recreational farms. I call the latter group “toy farmers.” They dabble at growing things, raising chickens or a few sheep. They keep a horse. They shop at Agway and Tractor Supply. They hire Hispanics to mow and trim and weed. Most sprawl dwellers are on the landscape but not of it.

Q: What do you mean by “on the landscape but not of it”?

A: From baby boomers forward, we’ve become increasingly disconnected from the natural landscape, even the adulterated one where we live. Unlike our grandparents, most of us no longer have the stewardship skills needed to manage the ecosystems around us. Many of us don’t want them managed at all. These people want nature to take its course — even though they are managing the landscape around them like crazy by living in it. And we don’t have the time to deal with it. We spend 90 percent of our time indoors — in houses, offices or cars. We get our nature from movies and TV, now piped into digital screens. We see films that have been edited to make wild creatures behave like pets or people.

Q: What’s the connection between sprawl and wildlife?

A: The 19th century conservationists didn’t conceive of sprawl. How could they? No one had lived like this before. Some people say that in sprawling out, we encroached on wildlife habitat and, therefore, the problems are the fault of us not wild creatures. It’s true, we encroached, mainly into old farm land. But that’s only half the story. In fact, wildlife encroached right back. Lots of species adapted with surprising ease to life in the sprawl, to living around people.

Sounds about right: nature via televisions, iPads, and looking out the window.

There is a complicated history behind the suburbs and nature. In the 1800s, the suburbs were seen as a place where residents could return to nature. Cities were seen as anti-nature with their dense collections of people, factories, and infrastructure. In contrast, the suburbs offered lawns around single-family homes set back from the streets, nearby parks, and winding streets that minimized the visual impact of development. A classic example of this is Llewellyn Park, New Jersey. Yet, the nature in the suburbs was carefully controlled. Lawns were manicured and landscaped as were many parks.

In the mass suburb era after World War II, nature took a backseat to development. You can find many pictures of subdivisions being prepared for construction where the ground has been flattened and trees flattened. Starting around the early 1970s, new planning techniques tried to reclaim more land in subdivisions by clustering development. New planning paradigms like New Urbanism have incorporated talk about sustainability and responsible development. However, having more suburban open space also means this space still tended to be highly controlled. For a good read on connections between suburbanization and the environment, check out Adam Rome’s The Bulldozer in the Countryside.

The intersection of Chinese bridal couples asking for cash, Facebook, and protests

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This could be a poster story for globalization: on Facebook, a Hong Kong bride asked for money from wedding attendees and this has attracted protestors to the wedding.

That’s the prospect facing one Hong Kong couple, who infuriated hundreds after the bride’s Nov. 2 Facebook post went viral.

“I’m not opening a charity….If you really only want to give me a HK$500 [US$65] cash gift, then don’t bother coming to my wedding,” she wrote earlier this month, according to an article Thursday in the Wall Street Journal China.

The bride’s identity and wedding venue were identified by social media users, and a protest was organized via Facebook. Nearly 1,000 have claimed they will attend.

A spokesperson for the hotel where the wedding will be held said they plan on honoring their contract with the couple.

Though giving newlyweds cash is a traditional Chinese custom, sociologist Ting Kwok-fai told The Wall Street Journal that Hong Kong weddings have grown increasingly extravagant in recent years. Engaged couples feel pressured to minimize the cost of the affair, he said, and in this case, the bride may be seeking to recoup some of the costs of the wedding.

Multiple social forces are coming together here in a new kind of way: traditional social norms, new technology and interaction on Facebook, and more public concerns about inequality and conspicuous consumption. This reminds me of the classic 1929 work of the Chicago School of sociology titled The Gold Coast and the Slum. While studying neighborhoods just north of the Loop in Chicago, Zorbaugh discussed the social interaction between some of the wealthiest Chicagoans and some of the poorest Chicagoans. While the two groups certainly knew about each other through walking in or passing through neighborhoods or reading news in the newspaper, there was little direct social interaction. For example, some of the wealthy socialite women tried to start aid groups to help these nearby poor neighborhoods but could not get much participation from the poor neighborhoods.

Today, some of these barriers are reduced because of Facebook and other technology. Again, there is likely not a whole of physical social interaction between those with a lot of money and those without. In Hong Kong, you can walk down Nathan Road in Kowloon and find the some of the world’s most exclusive brands. If you turn off the road several blocks to the west, you are among nondescript apartment complexes with little glitter or glamour. Yet, these new technologies allow for more awareness and more reactions which could then coalesce around social action. The socialite wedding announcement in the prestigious newspaper 50 years ago that would have drawn less attention has now turned into Facebook-announced weddings that can quickly become very public.

Leader in Texas adverse possession movement hasn’t been successful yet

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The adverse possession advice being peddled through a Texas man’s website and e-book hasn’t exactly worked out yet:

If you direct your browser to 16dollarhouse.com and plunk down $9.97 for an e-book, you can still learn from Ken Robinson ( “poised, measured, insightful and wise” and an AMERICAN, all caps, as the site informs you) how to use adverse possession, a once obscure Texas law, to get a house on the cheap.

Be forewarned that Robinson’s legal theories haven’t worked out so well in practice. Earlier this year, he was evicted from his $350,000 Flower Mound McMansion after a judge decided that his claim to the house was bullshit. His disciples have fared little better.

Following news of Robinson’s scheme, officials in Tarrant County made the rounds evicting squatters who moved into homes after filing adverse possession claims. Eight of them were charged with theft or burglary.

David Cooper was the first to go to trial, which wrapped up today…

But Texas law also says you can’t steal people’s stuff and, in Cooper’s case, the house actually wasn’t abandoned. It belonged to a couple who were spending a lot of time in Houston, where the wife was undergoing cancer treatment. When it became clear that the home wasn’t abandoned, Cooper was arrested and charged with burglary and theft.

See more about the ruling on Robinson’s Flower Mound case here.

This would be an interesting protest movement that someone like Occupy Wall Street might want to take up: identify and then occupy Texas houses.

$53 million was embezzled from Dixon, Illinois in part because the community had a commission form of government

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Rita Crundwell is accused of embezzling $53 million from the small community of Dixon, Illinois. In this account of how this happened, an argument is made: Crundwell’s embezzlement was made easier because Dixon operates under the commission form of municipal government.

Something else—ominous in retrospect—summons a small-town feel: the unusual system of governance. Since 1911, Dixon has been run by the commission form of government, an old model used by only about 50 of the 1,300 municipalities in Illinois. Power is divided among five people: a mayor and four part-time commissioners who oversee their own fiefdoms (public property, public health and safety, streets and public improvements, and finance).

The positions pay a pittance—the mayor makes $9,600 a year; the commissioners, $2,700 each, according to the annual budget—which means that most officeholders juggle their duties with full-time jobs and spend limited time at City Hall. The owner of a carpet and flooring store served as finance commissioner for a number of years. He was succeeded by a business teacher and athletic coach down at the high school, Roy Bridgeman, who served for more than two decades. As for Mayor Burke: he runs his own real-estate firm.

The problem is that “the commissioners are just citizens,” says Jim Dixon, a retired attorney who served as mayor from 1983 to 1991 and is a descendant of the town’s founder. “Some of them may not always have been qualified for the areas they were elected to oversee.” Dixon says he pushed, unsuccessfully, to change to the far more common city manager model of government.

Still, the commissioner system made for a neighborly and easygoing approach and seemed to accomplish the goals that gave rise to its adoption in the first place: placing a check on the power of the mayor’s office and curbing the possibility of corruption. It didn’t hurt that it also saved the city money on the salaries that a professional city manager and staff would command.

Some background to this story: the commission form of government was particularly popular over 100 years ago. However, many communities have long shifted to newer forms of government that feature a city manager. One reason for this was to avoid the outsized influence commissioners could have if they had more control over one area. In suburbs, this shift to hiring a city manager often happened in the decades after World War II when both established and new suburbs faced new issues and complexity associated with growth. For example, a suburb like Naperville was swamped with requests for development and moved through the 1950s and 1960s toward more professional city government and urban planning. The post-World War II also featured a movement toward professionalization of tasks in communities that were once simply enough to hand over to trusted local officials. Today, city managers are well-trained officials who often move up the ranks to larger and larger communities as they demonstrate their abilities. Of course, as this article mentions, hiring a city manager and more professionally-trained city employees does cost money. (See this Wikipedia article on the council-manager form of government for more information.)

So will Dixon now move to having more professionals in local government? Part of the appeal of living in a small town is the trust residents and officials have in each other but it will be interesting to see if there are major responses to this breach of trust.

Goodbye, McMansions with granite countertops; hello, pre-fab green homes with LEED ratings

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Author Sheri Koones thinks the new housing trend is green homes:

The way Sheri Koones looks at it, the next real estate status symbol will be a minuscule heating bill.

“It’s the new bragging rights,” said Koones. “People used to brag, I have granite countertops. Today I think it’s going to be a lot more substantial to say, ‘I pay hardly anything for energy. I’m LEED Platinum” (a certification of residential energy conservation).

Granted, with the housing market still wounded, green construction is hardly likely to dominate cocktail-party chatter anytime soon. But Koones is mindful of our newfound economic sobriety. Declaring “the whole McMansion thing is over,” she’s become a champion of an unlikely-sounding candidate for the Next Big Thing: factory-built housing…

But she doesn’t mean like trailers. She means homes that aren’t constructed start-to-finish on someone’s lot, but largely in manufacturing facilities, sometimes on assembly lines. She’s become such an advocate of these processes that she’s out with her third coffee-table book on the subject.

There does seem to be a growing interest in green homes, partly for their earth-consciousness and partly because of an interest in reducing utility costs. However, I wonder about two things:

1. A granite countertop is a more obvious status symbol than “a minuscule heating bill.” So is a McMansion compared to a pre-fab green home. Of course, one can have less obvious status symbols but then the owner has to do more work talking it up and pointing it out to people. I suppose LEED homes could start displaying plaques or signs that highlight their green status. Plus, is the LEED rating of the pre-fab home enough to overcome people’s conceptions about pre-fab homes?

2. As I’ve wondered before, how do green homes compare in cost? Cutting down heating costs is good but there must be some cost to this up-front. What about resale value, particularly for a pre-fab home?

Children and mass transit

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As a new father who uses public transportation almost exclusively, two recent items re: public transportation and children caught my eye. First, a Rockville, MD “Principal Calls CPS After Mom Lets Daughter, 10, Ride City Bus to School” [h/t Adam Holland]

It had been brought to her attention, the principal said, by some “concerned parents,” that my daughter had been riding the city bus to and from school. I said, yes, we had just moved outside of the neighborhood, and felt that this was the most convenient way for our 5th grader to get there and back. The principal asked was I not concerned for her safety? “Safety from what?” I inquired. “Kidnapping,” she said reluctantly. I said that I would not bore her by talking statistics that, being in the business of taking care of young children, she surely knew better than I did….

It was raining hard the next day so I offered to drive L. [my daughter] to the bus stop. I thought she’d want to wait in the car with me, but she said, “It’s okay mom, you go work. I want to say hi to my friends.” “Your friends?” “Well, they are not my kid friends. They are just, you know, my people friends.” There was the Chinese lady, the lady with the baby who cried a lot (but it’s not his fault, he can’t help it), and the grandma who always got on at the next stop. In a few short weeks, my daughter had surrounded herself with a community of people who recognized her, who were happy to see her, and who surely would step in if someone tried to hurt her.

My son is only five months old–years away from travelling solo. But I can attest that a community springs up around him whenever I take him on a bus or train. Our fellow riders are generally friendly when he is happy and understanding when he is not.  Either way, they definitely notice him, and I have little doubt that they would step in if something were wrong.

Moreover, even at his young age, my son seems to enjoy making friends through these public interactions, often going out of his way to stare at someone seated nearby until he catches their eye and can start smiling and babbling at them. As Carla Saulter explains in a second post, “Why Public Transportation Is Good for Kids“:

It’s become part of the collective American belief system that cars are the preferred (if not the only acceptable) mode of transportation for our children. Cars are now viewed as an essential tool of good middle-class parenting — both as a means of keeping our children safe from the evils of the outside world and of providing convenient access to the myriad destinations to which we are required to deliver them….

As they grow up riding buses and trains, kids master the skills required to get around. They start small, like my daughter, who recently began carrying her own bag (a pink backpack with a train, per her request) and move on to stop recognition, schedule reading, and trip planning. Long before their peers are old enough to drive, junior transit riders have the skills to ride solo. The confidence that comes from these abilities will help them when they face problems mom and dad can’t help with.

And speaking of facing things … Kids who spend most of their time in controlled spaces — from home to car to school/mall/lesson/play date — have very limited contact with the people they share the world with. Kids who ride transit, on the other hand, have plenty of opportunity to interact with their fellow humans. They learn to accept differences, interact politely with strangers, and set and respect boundaries.

Riding mass transit can be inconvenient, and it certainly isn’t a parenting panacea. However, it can also be a safe, wonderful option for exposing children to other people and the wider world.

I think my son and I will be riding the bus for years to come.

Republicans propose copyright reform

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Techdirt links to a remarkable Republican policy brief on copyright reform:

The purpose of copyright is to compensate the creator of the content: It’s a common misperception that the Constitution enables our current legal regime of copyright protection – in fact, it does not…[L]egislative discussions on copyright/patent reform should be based upon what promotes the maximum “progress of sciences and useful arts” instead of “deserving” financial compensation….

Today’s legal regime of copyright law is seen by many as a form of corporate welfare that hurts innovation and hurts the consumer. It is a system that picks winners and losers, and the losers are new industries that could generate new wealth and added value.

This has the potential to mark the beginning of a huge political shift on intellectual property issues. Heretofore, most copyright reform advocates have pursued a judicial strategy, trying to persuade courts to narrowly read (or overturn) sweeping statutory language. By and large, courts have declined to limit copyright laws in this fashion. If those laws were actually changed, however, that would compel different outcomes.

A policy brief is not even a bill, let alone a law. But the conversation has started.

Analyzing cities in 1588

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A newly translated into English work from an Italian observer in 1588 provides a perspective on cities:

His book called On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities, written in 1588, has just been translated into English for the first time in four centuries and published by the University of Toronto Press.

Funny how modern it is, once you get past the obligatory nod toward the ancients and Botero starts talking about the world he actually knows. This stretched from cities built by the Incas (he admired their engineering) to the Indian island of Goa, a vigorous trading partner of the Portuguese.

Botero doesn’t care much about fortresses and armies; he looks for trade, transportation routes, a middle class, contact with foreign states, universities, and growth, as well an an effective ruler. Not so different from our day…

Botero writes: “Someone will ask me which is of greater value for improving a place and increasing its population: the fertility of its soil, or the industry of its people?” That’s easy, he says. Industry wins over farming or other production of raw materials every time.

This article suggests Botero seems to have a more modern perspective on cities and has been called the first urban sociologist. Having never encountered his work before, I wonder if we could flip this around: perhaps Botero was living at the leading edge of the modern era in northern Italy in the late 16th century. The Italian Renaissance had already occurred. This would be around the same era in which Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism suggested modern capitalism developed. Cities were connected more than ever before and Europeans now had information about cities in the Americas and Asia. It still takes someone to notice and point out these changes but the world and big cities were changing by this point in time.