Tag Archives: Australia

A video tutorial on how to build a McMansion in The Sims

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Two players put together a McMansion in The Sims and you can see the process here.

A few thoughts:

1. If I heard correctly on the video, this originally took 3 hours to build.

2. The builders note that this is a modern home yet the headline says it is a McMansion. While it is a large home and clearly has some wealth (located on a canal), the design does not necessarily make it s stereotypically American McMansion.

3. This has over 21,000 views in 2+ days.

4. The designers intended to have a fountain outside the house but alas, it was never constructed. That fountain would have contributed to a McMansion style.

5. Interesting that this features two Aussies. If there is one country in the world that can rival the United States in McMansions, Australia is it.

6. I get the impulse to design things in games like this. While I have never done much with The Sims, I’ve spent a lot of time doing similar things with urban planning in SimCity. Yet, I’m curious to know how much homes like these enhance the gameplay. How much better is it to have a family of Sims living in a custom-designed home like this compared to the average home?

Wherever you go, you just can’t escape those pesky McMansions…

Decreasing interest in McMansions in Melbourne, Australia

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The demand for McMansions has decreased in recent years in Melbourne:

MELBURNIANS are moving away from McMansions with the number of medium density home approvals in Victoria growing a whopping 109.5 per cent over five years.

The Bankwest Housing Density report shows that 23,390 medium density approvals were granted in Victoria in the past 12 months. Five years ago that number was just 11,164…

KPMG Australia demographer Bernard Salt said Melbourne, in particular, was densing up.

“A new generation of Generation Y and X have different values to preceding generation that wanted a three-bedroom brick veneer on the edge of town,” Mr Salt said.

This and other stories I’ve seen in recent months from Australia seem to suggest that the McMansion craze may have run its course. Older adults wanted to have the big house outside the city but for a variety of reasons, including a change in preferences among younger Australians, interest in smaller housing, and interest in more affordable units, fewer McMansions have been built.

What will be interesting to observe is whether the McMansion paths in the United States and Australia diverge in the future. Does the average Australian want to join the United States and leave a legacy of McMansions?

Once residents become more “architecturally aware,” they won’t choose McMansions

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An Australian architect says more residents in Perth would avoid McMansions once they become “architecturally aware”:

Designer homes are popping up across Perth as the city becomes more ‘architecturally’ conscious.

Aspects such as strong horizontal lines, cut outs and bold rectangular features are increasingly popular in new residential homes.

As Perth’s architectural style grows up, McMansions will be out and clean, simple modernist designs will be in, according to David Karotkin, the WA President of the Australian Institute of Architects…

“In more recent years there has been an increased awareness of architecture in Perth,” Mr Karotkin said…

“There’s awareness about the importance of the designs and the buildings we live in, work in and play in – it’s all architecture.”

There are several ways such statements might be interpreted:

1. Perth residents are finally becoming knowledgeable about architecture and are rejecting architecturally-deficient McMansions. There is an element of snobbery here: McMansions are for the less knowledgeable while the more educated pick homes designed by architects.

2. Perth is developing its own architectural style. Building styles might be drawn from other cities or countries but a new Perth School might be emerging. Having common design, particularly if it is recognized by outsiders, can become a mark of pride.

3. Architects are looking to increase the number of homes they design. In the United States, most homes are designed by builders and architects have just a small slice of the market. Educating people about the benefits of designed homes means more money.

I wonder what this architect would think if there are still some people who choose McMansions even with higher levels of education.

A plea to “stop demonising McMansions”

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An Australian architecture lecturer argues we should “stop demonising McMansions”:

For quite a few years now, anybody who writes about these oversized single family homes has consistently demonised them as not just individually ugly, ill-designed and unsustainable, but as the building blocks of isolated suburbs devoid of a sense of community…

What all this McMansion bashing has in common is a set of assumptions that are ill-founded.

The first is the convenient lie that McMansions are the opposite of architect-crafted paragons of good design. This is easiest dealt with by visiting somewhere like Homeworld Kellyville, the display village west of Sydney…

The second anomaly is that a surprising proportion of available project home models are of notably good design. They make the most of small sites, with great connections between informal living areas and well sheltered outdoor al fresco rooms…

The third inconvenient truth?…He pointed out in 2006 that, of the major dwelling types, free standing suburban houses are the lowest energy consumers per occupant and appear to consume less water per occupant than contemporary apartments. That is data.

In the end, King argues that not all McMansions are bad. Yet, it is common practice to paint all McMansions with a broad brush. At the least, the term McMansion is effectively used to bludgeon certain kinds of homes, particularly big showy homes associated with suburban sprawl.

American, Australian leaders face vermin, possums in their residences

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Even some of the most powerful leaders have to deal with infestations in their houses: the White House has vermin and the official house of the Australian prime minister has a problem with possums. First, the White House:

It is, of course, not the first time bugs or vermin have done battle with the humans who work in the 213-year-old building. Humans have not always prevailed easily – much to the deep frustration sometimes of the president of the United States. None was more frustrated than Jimmy Carter, who battled mice from the start of his administration. To his dismay, he found the bureaucracy unresponsive. GSA, responsible for inside the White House, insisted it had eliminated all “inside” mice and contended any new mice must have come from the outside, meaning, the New York Times reported at the time, they were “the responsibility of the Interior Department.” But Interior, wrote the Times, “demurred” because the mice were now inside the White House…

His fury was captured in his diary entry for Sept. 9, 1977. Carter that day summoned top officials from the White House, the Department of Interior and the GSA to the Oval Office to unload on them about the mice overrunning the executive offices – including the dead ones rotting away inside the walls of the Oval Office and giving his office a very unpleasant odor. “For two or three months now I’ve been telling them to get rid of the mice,” Carter wrote. “They still seem to be growing in numbers, and I am determined either to fire somebody or get the mice cleared out – or both.”

Now more scared for their jobs than at any possible reaction from humane groups, the bureaucracy responded. According to the Associated Press, daily battle updates were sent to the highest levels of the White House, complete with body counts and descriptions of the weapons being deployed. On Sept. 12 – three days after the meeting with Carter – GSA reported 48 spring traps in the White House, including five in the Oval Office and four in Carter’s study. Six more “Ketch All” traps were placed in the crawl space under the Oval Office. Peanut butter, bacon and cheese were the favored baits. By Sept. 13, the number of traps deployed in the West Wing was up to 114. On Sept. 15, the body count was up to 24. By Sept. 19, it was 30; then 38 by the end of the month…

Other presidents have had their own battles with White House vermin. First Lady Barbara Bush once was taking her daily swim in the pool on the South Lawn when she was joined by a rat that “did not look like a Walt Disney friend, I’ll tell you that.” She told reporters “it was enormous.” She credited her springer spaniel, Millie, and her husband, the president, with rescuing her and drowning the rat.

And in Australia:

Australia’s official prime ministerial residence, The Lodge, a 1920s colonial-style 40-room mansion in Canberra, was intended to be a temporary lodging until a permanent “monumental” residence was constructed. It is in a state of serious disrepair and has given successive leaders problems.

Former prime minister Julia Gillard once recalled an embarrassing dinner with a visiting foreign leader in 2012 which was interrupted by possum urine dribbling from the roof towards a valuable painting.

It sounds like these both of these houses have their own unique and tortured histories, leaving plenty of opportunities for nature to intrude on human politics. Frankly, I’m not sure most people would want to know how many critters are in and around their property. What exactly goes on around that foundation or within the walls? Perhaps this might be another selling point for passive houses: they are so sealed up that nature is effectively kept at bay.

New report says Australians to move away from McMansions, seek out smaller homes

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A new report suggests Australian builders will shift away from McMansions in the next decade:

Australia’s leading builders and developers predict that an appetite for small homes will be the dominant theme throughout the coming decade, according to a new report.

Three other major trends to impact the residential housing sector in the next 10 years will be affordability, diversity and walkability.

“What leading industry players told us in our interviews is that we are seeing a maxing out of the average house size,” says Deon White, managing director of urban design and town planning firm RobertsDay, publisher of the new report.

“The trend of the McMansion is on the decline; Australians are turning away from the super-large Australian home. Instead, they’re starting to engage with the concept of the smaller home. People want to live a little more; they want less of their income drained into their weekly mortgage payments.”

This mirrors ideas in the United States where critics of McMansions and other large homes suggest the focus should move away from space and most bang for your buck to customization and community life. New Urbanists, for example, would likely approve of all of these forecasted trends. At the same time, planning for a diverse range of affordable smaller homes within walkable neighborhoods is not necessarily cheap and it requires a large change of focus than simply building different kinds of homes. To make this all happen on a scale beyond just a few new developments requires the combined efforts of builders, people in charge of zoning and regulation, mortgage providers and financiers, and buyers.

Australian expert says McMansions should be divided into apartments

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An Australian expert tackles the problem of McMansions and affordable housing:

Western suburbs “McMansions” should be converted into apartments to help deal with Perth’s population growth, an expert says.

Leading WA environmental scientist David Kaesehagen said walls or divisions could be built within big properties in the most affluent suburbs to add to housing stock in a rapidly growing market…

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has forecast Perth’s population will grow from 1.8 million to 4.2 million in the next four decades…

Mr Kaesehagen said with the right laws and incentives, owners of large mansions could be persuaded to divide their properties. “This is a way of using existing built form to increase density without introducing high-rise or changing the aesthetic of these established suburbs,” he said.

This is not the first time this has been suggested but I have yet to see a community or significant number of people push for this. I suspect it would be really difficult to do this kind of retrofitting in suburbs often so concerned about property values and density: who would want to be the first resident to have your house subdivided as your neighbors look on and wonder about their housing values? How much would it cost to convert larger homes into multiple units when they were originally intended for single families? This might work best in McMansion neighborhoods that are abandoned or not yet opened (each of these would pose their own set of problems) so there would be no community members in opposition. But, then why not build higher density developments in the first place?

“The average Australian is a suburban Frankenstein”?

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One columnist is not pleased with the idea of the average Australian in the suburbs:

Earlier this month the Bureau of Statistics, apparently hoping to deter Wayne Swan from cutting its allocation in the May budget, made a grab for publicity with a report on the characteristics of “the average Australian”. In the process it broke its own rules.

The ABS applied mathematical magic to data from the 2011 census and sent the media off in search of a blonde brown-eyed 37 year old woman with two photogenic children aged nine and six, two cars and a mortgage of $1800 a month on her three bedroom home. Edna Everage’s granddaughter was born here (like her parents), describes herself as Christian, weighs 71.1 kg, and works as a sales assistant…

Start packing your bags. The ABS decision to build a suburban Frankenstein for the sake of a publicity boost risks returning us to the point in recent history when certain people were labelled “unAustralian” if their language or behavior did not match the world view of Alan Jones, John Laws, Neil Mitchell or Andrew Bolt.

The ABS has played into the hands of those titans of talkback who like to keep the message simple. They’re not interested in this qualifier the ABS included at the end of the report to salve its conscience: “While many people will share a number of characteristics in common with this ‘average’ Australian, out of nearly 22 million people counted in Australia on Census night, no single person met all these criteria. While the description of the average Australian may sound quite typical, the fact that no-one meets all these criteria shows that the notion of the ‘average’ masks considerable (and growing) diversity in Australia.”

The columnist may indeed be correct that the best way to do this would have been to use medians, rather than averages. But, the bigger issue here seems to be the idea that there is a “suburban mold” that Australians need to fit into. Not everyone likes this image as the suburbs are often associated with homogeneous populations, consumption and behaviors to keep up with the Joneses, and middle-class conservatism. Regardless of what the statistics say or whether a majority of Australians (or Americans) live in the suburbs, these suburban critiques will likely continue.

McMansions, housing markets, and the influence of banks

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An Australian architect argues homes should be valued on newer tastes rather than older interests in McMansions:

Recent sales and development figures have highlighted a trend towards smaller living spaces but the system for valuations in the capital seems biased towards larger average quality homes, Canberran architect Allan Spira said…

Mr Spira said building smaller, more affordable and sustainable homes will only be an option for “cashed up clients” unless the current system of valuations is changed.

“It’s time for the banks and their valuers to stop basing their assessments on the ‘McMansions’ of the past and start acknowledging the way of the future – smaller, smarter, better fitted out homes,” he said…

Mr Spira said most recently his clients struggled to get a $300,000 loan to build their three bedroom home in Wright.

Built across 127 square metres, he said it was “probably the most affordable and sustainable home in the suburb” but valuers CBRE based their calculations on inappropriate figures as no previous sales figures existed in Molonglo.

It might be hard to make a larger argument based on two cases. But, this argument does raise some larger issues:

1. Just when exactly do bankers and others know when the housing market has turned? In this case, the architect suggests people now want smaller homes compared to the McMansions they wanted a few years ago. It is easier to see change over the course of several years or a decade but it is harder to see this in the short run.

2. How much do banks and their choices about mortgages influence house purchasing and building patterns? Banks were partly blamed for the housing meltdown in the late 2000s but what percentage of blame do they deserve? I haven’t seen someone parse out the particular effect banking and mortgage choices have on what homebuyers are willing to do. This architect suggests homes aren’t being built because banks won’t provide financing for them but it is not clear how often this really happens.

New Halal subdivision planned for Sydney suburb

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A new 145-lot development in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia is drawing reactions from residents:

Qartaba Homes is promoting its 145-lot subdivision at Riverstone, near Rouse Hill, as Australia’s “very first project of its kind for the Muslim community”, The Daily Telegraph revealed yesterday…

Many residents expressed their concerns that non-Muslims would be excluded from the site, while others said the developers were welcome to the land, which they said was flood prone.

Qartaba director Wajahat Rana said the company was happy to sell blocks of land to anyone…

University of Technology Sydney sociology professor Andrew Jakubowicz said the creation of religious enclaves was not a new concept: “The phenomenon of creating an environment where people of a particular religious faith feel comfortable is a very old Christian tradition, associated particularly with the Anglican church.

More on this from the Daily Telegraph:

While the company has insisted people from all religious backgrounds are free to take up the offer, it advises that the loans are “100 per cent Halal” and a “chance to escape Riba (interest)” because interest is a sin under Islamic law.

Qartaba Homes director Khurram Jawaid said it was the real estate deal of a lifetime, open to Australians of all faiths and backgrounds, but the state MP for Hawkesbury Ray Williams said the project was divisive.

“I can only imagine the repercussions if a developer were to advertise a new Judeo-Christian housing estate; they would be hung, drawn and quartered,” Mr Williams said…

Land parcels range from 400sq m to 800sq m and are being offered at $85,000 plus charges, including a booking deposit of 30-35 per cent and a 24-30 month interest-free payment plan.

Sounds like an interesting project. I wonder how a similar proposal might fare in the American suburbs. America has a history of ethnic neighborhoods, particularly in immigrant gateway cities, though the percent of the ethnic group living in that neighborhood may not have been anywhere near 80-100%. In the last few years, I have tracked some of the opposition to mosque proposals in DuPage County (see here and here for examples) but the controversy seems to have died out for the time being. I imagine a proposal for a Halal neighborhood would really raise NIMBY concerns from certain local and national groups.

Just curious: could a process of obtaining homeownership without having to pay interest be appealing to a lot of potential homeowners, particularly in tougher economic times?