Tag Archives: McMansion

A bear asks for an apology for McMansions

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A New Jersey bear explains his point of view which includes asking for an apology about the McMansions that have been built:

You see, there are an awful lot of us these days – thousands when their used to be a handful. Twenty years ago I was something special, a character out of a storybook. I was mean or cuddly, depending on your personality. Today I am a nuisance, and I completely understand this. There’s not a whole lot of room anymore, thanks to our large and growing population combined with your government’s collusion with developers over the past few decades. As I write this they are taking down more land near me for what you folks call “affordable housing,” but of course it’s just a front for a massive shopping complex. You folks are pretty gullible, if you don’t mind me saying.

Occasionally, we get the urban sophisticate coming our way and he/she treats me like the old days. They look at me with wonder and awe, and I’m guessing it’s because they don’t have much wildlife around the outskirts of Trenton, Newark, or Hoboken. Usually the people are on their way to the Mount Airy Lodge or some other oasis and I give them what they want – an authentic outdoor experience (even if that experience is realized along a highway). Anyway, those same city dwellers are trying to protect me now and I appreciate it. I do. I don’t want to be hunted just as the woodchuck doesn’t want to fall under my claws. But it’s not reality. We are a safety hazard to you (and you to us), and while it’s not our fault, there are too many of us and too many of you. Someone has to be minimized. Both of us can’t pull up fake wicker chairs on a back deck and debate the healthcare bill. It is the natural order of things. A cat is territorial and will fight off any other cat that invades that space (and kill any mouse), so too are humans. I am only thankful that you are sensitive enough to minimize and not eradicate.

So there it is. I am sorry for the destruction around town and the occasional fright.   I am sorry for the debate we spawn between rural residents that have to deal with us on a constant basis and city residents that don’t. And I hope one day you apologize to us for taking so much of the woodland for your McMansions and strip malls. It made things difficult, to say the least.

I assume there is a (good?) reason for this piece. Regardless, it illustrates the sprawl argument that is often made about McMansions. Even more so than the particular features of McMansion homes, McMansion neighborhoods, or people who buy McMansions, a number of people consider McMansions to be the primary exemplar of suburban sprawl that brings highways, strip malls, and single-family homes. This doesn’t just ruin the landscape for humans but has other ecological consequences including flooding issues, a loss of open space, and a negative effect on animal habitats.

And perhaps sometimes you just need to hear it from a bear.

Nice guy political leaders don’t live in McMansions?

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As a New Zealand journalist paints a nice guy image of the leader of the opposition party, there is an interesting bit about the leader’s home:

The Goffs’ home is spacious and comfortable – it’s not a McMansion, those sorts of architect-designed, three-level monuments to money that have sprung up in the more fashionable rural suburbs of Auckland, although there is a small kidney-shaped swimming pool. You can tell a family has been raised here and that the family will always be welcome home.

This description contains some of the common complaints about McMansions: they are excessive homes built by social strivers in the suburbs. At the same time, there is a contrast to typical complaints: these are designed by architects? Also, are McMansions not capable of being welcoming places or having the traits that show kids were raised there?

But one does have to wonder whether this particular home might just be labeled a McMansion if the leader wasn’t such a nice guy or the journalist didn’t have a positive experience. By saying his home is not a McMansion, the journalist is painting a down-to-earth, positive image.

A play shows the issues of residential segregation in 1959 and 2009

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A recent play compares issues of race and housing in 1959 and 2009:

This year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Clybourne Park” takes place on Chicago’s Northwest Side on two distinct afternoons: one in 1959, the other in 2009. Inspired by the Groundbreaking drama, “A Raisin in the Sun,” “Clybourne Park” highlights the politics of race and gentrification.

In the 1959 setting, a white neighborhood responds when a black family tries to move into the neighborhood. In 2009, the situation is reversed:

CORLEY: And that plays out in the second act of “Clybourne Park,” set 50 years later in the same living room of that bungalow. It’s tattered now. There’s graffiti on a couple of walls, the stained glass windows gone. A white couple has bought the house in the now all-black and gentrifying neighborhood. They want to tear the home down and build anew. Their black neighbors want to preserve the neighborhood’s history and want the white couple to alter their McMansion plans.

Their chat, with attorneys present, turns into an uncomfortable and eventually hostile conversation. Karen Aldridge portrays Lena, a black woman whose aunt used to live in the bungalow. She echoes the arguments of the white Karl Linder, as she and her husband try to persuade her white neighbors to save the house.

This might be a great play for students to see in order to think about the continuing issue of residential segregation. While it is pretty easy for students to get outraged over the housing issues of the 1950s when fictional situations like these played out in many American neighborhoods (see about the infamous 1951 riots in Cicero here and here) as whites tried to protect their neighborhoods before fleeing to the suburbs, there are plenty of issues to think about in recent years.

It is also interesting to see the term McMansion injected into matters of gentrification. Typically, McMansion refers to large suburban homes. However, in some of the research I’ve done, it is not terribly unusual for urban residents opposed to new large homes to dub them McMansions. Particularly in cases of gentrification, perhaps the term McMansion really gets the point across for opponents: these are suburbanites who want to bring in their suburban lifestyle which will destroy the urban fabric of the neighborhood.

Even Gawker says “The McMansion is dead”

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Since Gawker is reporting it, does this really mean that the McMansion is dead?

This heartless recession has stolen from America our most treasured national totems. Huge SUVs? Too gas-guzzling. Sprawling suburbs far removed from the “diverse” cities? Reduced to slums. And now, the recession is coming for our very homes.

By “our,” I mean “people with too much money and too little taste.” The WSJ says that the humble McMansion—the rightful reward of all hardworking Americans willing to take on a $450,000 mortgage and a 75-minute commute in order to have a huge, useless foyer lined with the thinnest sheet of marble veneer—is no longer the popular thing to build, for builders who want to build homes that will actually sell. Shrines to conspicuous consumption are out! By necessity.

Goodbye, grand foyers! Adios, spiral staircases! Hello, newly poor American rationalizing their now meager living spaces like a bunch of formerly wealthy people wiped out by financial calamity—which they are!

Totem could be taken as referring to a religious object of devotion, a la Durkheim. If so, do Americans worship SUVs, McMansions, and suburbs? That would be interesting to discuss.

Granted, Gawker is quoting an interesting Wall Street Journal story that suggests the wealthy/big homes of the future that will include “drop zones,” space for an elevator, a “lifestyle center” (not to be confused with gussied-up outdoor malls masquerading as community centers known by the same name), steam showers (goodbye soaker tubs!), and outdoor living space.

A reminder: this is the same website that has this description leading off its stories about Jersey Shore (this is from earlier this year).

When watching Jersey Shore, the most important sociological experiment of our time, we’re looking for new and exciting behavior.

Me thinks there may be some hyperbole and/or mocking there. At least that is what I hope.

You can have an “Eco Freak McMansion”!

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I’ve asked before whether one could have an acceptable green McMansion or if no McMansion could ever be considered truly green. I recently ran across this story of a man who has a 3,000 square foot “Eco Freak McMansion”:

Bill Newman’s kayak buddies love to tease him about his new house in Brooklyn Center. It’s too big for just one person, they say. It’s a McMansion. And it’s way too nice for him.

Newman just laughs. He erased his guilt about the home’s size (more than 3,000 square feet spread over three levels) by packing it with sustainable features, including solar panels, geothermal heating, super-insulated walls and rainwater collection systems…

His house, which he nicknamed the Eco Freak McMansion, is bigger, better and, yes, way nicer than what he’s used to. Even though he’s lived in his new house for several months, “I feel like I’m house-sitting for some rich guy,” he said…

The new house has three times the finished square footage as the cabin, but it’s three to four times more energy-efficient, Newman said.

It’s also a lot more stylish, thanks in part to designer and kayak buddy Jackie Kanthak, who helped him pick out finishes, fixtures and colors, aiming for locally sourced and green materials whenever possible.

Interesting. No mention of how much this all cost but it sounds like Newman no longer feels guilty about his larger than average house. It would be interesting to hear whether his friends are convinced that it really isn’t a McMansion. The house may be efficient and green but doesn’t it still have a large land footprint? Does Newman really need multiple great rooms?

If this house meets with the approval of his friends and others, could this be the wave of the future where Americans get their cake and eat it too, getting a big yet efficient house?

New American homes might be smaller but are still bigger and nicer than the past

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Some commentators have taken the US Census data that says new American homes are smaller than they were at the 2007 peak as evidence that the McMansion era is over and Americans will live in smaller homes in the future. While it may be difficult to make predictions about the future (and Americans still have large homes compared to world standards), there is another way to look at the data: the new houses of 2010 are much bigger and nicer than new homes several decades ago.

According to the data, the average new, single-family home built in 2010 was 2,392 square feet. That’s down somewhat from a McMansion-inflated high of 2,521 square feet in 2007, but still up significantly from three decades ago.

In 1980, the average new home was just 1,740 square feet, according to the Census.

Our homes also have gotten a lot more comfortable. For example, in 1980, 63 percent of new homes had central air conditioning. Last year, 88 percent of them did.

In 1980, more than one-quarter of all homes built had 1.5 bathrooms or less. Last year, just 8 percent of houses had such a small number of bathrooms.

This is quite a change from 1980, suggesting that homes have changed quite a bit in the span or just one or two generations.

Questions that come to mind when considering this historical change:

1. Would those who suggest American homes will get smaller in the future suspect that homes will go back to 1980 sizes by 2040?

2. Does anyone expect that Americans will give up amenities, such as multiple bathrooms, on the way to having smaller homes?

3. If the answer to the first two questions is no, what might the new home of 2040 look like? A little bit smaller, say 2,000 square feet, but packed with features?

The large homes of politicians

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While this gallery of photos doesn’t offer “proof” that most or even many politicians have big homes (and it may just be a play to pull in Internet visitors and clicks), it is an interesting subject to think about:

1. What exactly is the causal relationship here? Did they have bigger than normal homes before they were politicians (meaning they were wealthy when running for office) or are the big homes in part because of their political office?

2. Are there large homes any different than other people within their income brackets?

3. How should the public think about this? Should there be outrage that public servants don’t live like public servants? Do we not usually care because it is their private home and many Americans would buy bigger homes if they had the opportunity? Occasionally, this becomes part of a campaign – John Edwards took some grief for this and his haircuts – and others like Al Gore can be mocked.

4. How much time can a politician even spend in these homes with duties and homes elsewhere?

5. Would a politician who lives in a McMansion (and the implications regarding bad taste, etc.) be considered worse off than one who lives in a mansion?

Balancing libertarian and humanitarian instincts when using the word “NIMBY”

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Megan McArdle discusses how the word NIMBY is a prejorative term that tends to be used in instances when the user doesn’t approve of particular uses (opposed to uses that they would approve):

I think this is a little bit too cute.  I read DePillis pretty regularly, and I don’t usually see her calling out, say, people opposing a local Wal-Mart as “NIMBYs”; they’re “opposition groups”.  The term NIMBY seems to be reserved for people who oppose locating things in their back yards that DePillis herself thinks are laudable.  Small wonder that when she uses the word, people take it as a perjorative.

Nonetheless, she has a point: many people oppose having necessary but potentially disruptive things located near them, even if you think those things are a good idea; if you do, you should own it, not make up ridiculously implausible stories about how those inner-city kids wouldn’t really enjoy a halfway house in a nice, suburban neighborhood; they’d be much happier in a crack-infested ghetto like the one where they came from.  Don’t you know you shouldn’t remove creatures from their natural habitat?
 
In the case of people in some DC neighborhoods, they may even be justified.  Anacostia–and my own neighborhood–house an unusually large number of social service organizations, because land has been cheap, and the communities have lacked the socioeconomic power to block new projects the way that, say, Dupont and Friendship Heights have.  I don’t know the statistics on Anacostia, but Eckington/Truxton Circle house thirteen social service groups, from women’s shelters to So Others Might Eat, a wonderful organization that serves thousands of meals to homeless people every day.  Frankly, I haven’t found them disruptive–and indeed, didn’t really know they were there until controversy erupted over a plan to build a fourteenth service facilities.  But the fact remains that a lot of the homeless people hang out in what passes for the area’s park space between meals, and more than a few spend the day drinking single-serving beers from the area’s many liquor stores…
 
In this case, my libertarian instinct squares with my humanitarian instinct: at least in the case of private charities, I cannot, in good conscience, oppose letting them do whatever they want with the property they buy (within reasonable limits on things like toxic fumes and all-night jackhammer parties.)  But I don’t think it’s helpful to brand my neighbors who do as NIMBYs.  Oversaturation of neighborhoods with social services is a genuine problem for those neighborhoods.  We should treat it with at least as much respect as we give to those who don’t want to live near a big-box store.

McArdle seems to be suggesting that the use of the term NIMBY escalates a discussion about land use to an unhelpful level. As soon as the word is brought out, the terms of the discussion changes as the user implies that people are being selfish and those being called NIMBY then have to go on the defensive. Additionally, NIMBY is in the eyes of the beholder: what one person would see as desirable is an abomination to another.

The term McMansion, something I have spent a lot of time studying, is used in a similar manner. Just like NIMBY, the term evokes larger issues such as excessive consumption, sprawl, the disruption of a neighborhood, etc. McMansion and NIMBY are not simple descriptive terms that just refer to a big house or opposition to a particular land use. Both are politicized terms. NIMBY often refers to wealthier, white, more educated homeowners who want to protect their private utopias that many see as exclusionary and government subsidized.

Are there helpful alternatives to the term NIMBY?

Winner selected for new, greener Barbie house

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One columnist takes issue with the winning design selected for the new Barbie house that was intended to be a greener home:

What Li and Paklar imagined was a series of glass cubes stacked on top of each other with enough space underneath the beach mansion for a car or motorbike to park. Very chic, very elevated, very Le Corbusier. The interiors (pink, of course) look airy, clutter-free and, with 4,881 square feet of living space, lonely for a single person. There are bamboo floors and a roof garden with natural irrigation. But even those tiny eco-design gestures cannot offset the fact that Barbie gets to hog a massive house on three acres of pristine West Coast beach. Sorry, girlfriend!

America has been damned by the tyranny of the excessively large house. Check the explosion of square footage over the last half century of the private home, from the modest two-storey of Leave it to Beaver to the sprawling residential heaps featured on The O.C. Barbie once cavorted through her own shopping-mall playset. It was just something she had to have, like a purse.

The problem with the McMansion scenario? It’s unaffordable and unsustainable. But, like Barbie’s impossibly small waist, it’s a dream that everybody is conditioned to want…

Li and Paklar might have been tempted to design a compact, art-filled studio in the heart of Manhattan for Barbie. They might have edited her massive wardrobe down to a few edgy, well-designed outfits and given her a pair of workboots to wear on construction sites. If they had, my bet is they wouldn’t have won the design competition. In America, what suits Harvard-educated architects doesn’t really count. You have to think big, hungry thoughts to get ahead. Just like Barbie.

It sounds like this columnist thinks that McMansions can’t really be green.The fact that the home is large and has a large lot is simply too much to overcome.

Did anyone really think that Mattel would select something small, non-luxurious, or small? Perhaps the selection of this design suggests Americans want green and luxury to come together and don’t want to sacrifice much in order to be green. Therefore, acquiring smaller homes is driven more by economic trouble (people can’t access the actually homes they would want) or individualistic choices (wanting to declutter, simplify, improve, etc.) rather than the idea of sacrifice or helping the world.

The actual home design is more modern than I would have expected. How about a discussion about Barbie’s aesthetic tastes in homes?

Explaining our social world to alien visitors

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Sociology has a meme involving aliens: what would someone from Mars observe or conclude if they came to Earth and looked at modern society? Although it doesn’t come from a sociologist, here is an update on this idea that includes McMansions:

Since they haven’t answered, we could assume that the humans in space aren’t sophisticated enough to interpret our radio signals.

But just imagine how we can help them when we do find them. We can teach them everything we know and speed up their evolution into modern man in a flash. We could have them skip over the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, the industrial revolution, and be flipping microchips and tweeting by sunset. How exhilarating it will be for us to teach them about fire and wheels. We could bypass the telegraph, and give them 3DTV! Imagine their excitement, moving from a cave to a McMansion with granite countertops? Once they learn how to use all the gadgets — iPod, iPad, iPhone — they would only need to learn the basics of reading and math.

The sequence of what we teach would be important. It would be terrible to show them how to accumulate stuff before we taught them how to defend themselves from those who would take their stuff away. Would spears be good enough or would we need to give them guns, guided missiles, or maybe an atomic bomb? And if they come from a tribal background, would every tribe need an atomic bomb?…

Of course, there is a chance that humans, way out there in space, have been receiving our signals. Maybe, they’re a lot smarter than we imagine. Maybe, they know all about us. Maybe, they have decided it’s better not to answer our call.

This may seem like a silly exercise but it has some value: it can be hard to take an outsider’s perspective of our own world. By trying to adopt the viewpoint of someone who might come from a completely different social system (and planet), it helps us take a broader and overhead look at our own actions and social relations.

I sense some satire here about showing our visitors 3DTV, McMansions, and iPads. This sounds like a suggestion that we pay too much attention to technological and physical comforts without remembering the foundation beneath them such as social structures, basic tools, government, and moral values. This seems related to the question of what civilization relies on.