Tag Archives: McMansions

The role of emotions in buying a McMansion

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“Financial journalist and author” Jean Chatzky discusses her rules about money and hints that buying a McMansion and working with money in general is complicated by emotions:

Have money rules changed with the recession?

I don’t know that the money rules have changed, but I think the recession has made people realize the importance of some of the money rules. For example, Money Rule #26 is “Just because someone will lend it to you, doesn’t mean you should borrow it.” I think it’s the lesson of the housing crisis. We over-borrowed. We took out bigger mortgages than we could truly afford because the banks were willing to give it to us. Every unfurnished McMansion proves that point. For everybody who’s ever felt house-poor or student-loan poor or credit-card poor, the recession has hammered that home.

Why do people tend to overcomplicate money?

It’s really emotional. If I had a bottle of champagne and I opened it with a group of friends, there would be this feeling that we should divvy it up fairly. But if I said, “I have some extra money,” people start making value judgments. There’s morality involved with how we divvy up the money.

Combined with that is the fact that we’re not taught about money as kids or in the schools. There’s not room for it in the curriculum. Getting financial literacy into every school in the country is a very important thing to do, but it’s an uphill battle. The combination of those two things makes many of us feel insecure when it comes to making the right decisions about our money, whether we’re spending it, saving it, or investing it.

Her rules seem meant to limit the emotional side of money. If you have rules to follow, you can sidestep the emotional aspects. While the rules may be helpful, this is a good reminder that economic activity is often emotional. We often talk as if humans make decisions purely for economic reasons when the real story is much more complicated. Stock trading and investing in stocks, purchasing consumer goods, and saving money are laden with emotions.

So what emotions lead to purchasing a McMansion? I haven’t seen an academic study that addresses this. However, critics of McMansions have made a number of arguments about why people buy McMansions: they want to impress other people, they have little sense of style or design, they have money to burn, they don’t realize they can get by with less space, they are unaware of how others might negatively view their home, and they are obsessed with getting a deal without thinking about quality. Critics generally argue that McMansions are attempts at displaying a particular status to others and this causes the buyer to overlook some concerns to which they should pay attention.

I’m guessing that McMansion purchasers wouldn’t give the reasons that critics suggest. At the same time, purchasing a home, usually the biggest purchase of someone’s life, is full of emotions. Buying a dwelling is one thing but when you add up a mortgage plus the idealization of a home in the American Dream and it becomes much more than that.

City wants to avoid McMansion development because the new residents would then demand upgrades to the sewege treatment plant

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I’ve seen a number of objections to McMansions over the years but I’ve never seen this particular argument made by the city of Santa Rosa, California:

Santa Rosa has renewed its interest in buying a former dairy to create a buffer zone at the regional sewage treatment plant on Llano Road…

The dairy is no longer in operation, but part of the property continues to be leased as pasture, Maresca told the board. There also are four rental homes on the property and a cellular tower.

The property has previously been marketed as suitable for as many as seven “McMansions” with “little hobby vineyards,” Maresca told the board.

That’s what the city wants to avoid. If such homes were built near the plant, future neighbors might complain about noise, odors and glare from plant operations and try to force the city to spend millions in upgrades.

So the city wants to avoid McMansions because it will then lead to spending more money on the sewage treatment plant? This is an unusual rationale: cities often avoid McMansions because of concerns about teardowns or homes that “don’t fit” with the character of the community or objections to sprawl. This is out of concern about possible NIMBY concerns that the city wouldn’t want to deal with. This is one way to try to avoid NIMBY situations…

There could be other ways around this issue rather than framing it as an issue of trying to avoid future problems. Why not purchase the land and then zone it for a commercial or industrial or agricultural use (apparently on the table before) that wouldn’t be so harmed by being near the sewage treatment plant? Why not make it some sort of park or open space (also on the table before)? It seems odd to me to argue about contentious future residents rather than framing this as an opportuntiy for the city to make better use of this land.

One does have to wonder: how bad is it near this sewage treatment plant if Santa Rosa is really concerned about how much the McMansions residents might complain?

Michael Jackson didn’t die in a McMansion; he died in a mansion

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Perhaps this is a very minor point about the life of Michael Jackson but as a researcher of McMansions, I think there are better ways to describe the house in which Michael Jackson died which is now for sale:

“McMansion” doesn’t even begin to describe the grandly ostentatious home, which sits on a massive 17,000-square-foot chateau-style property.

It boasts seven bedrooms and 13 bathrooms, with an elevator to zip you where you want to go.

Oh my, did you happen to get a little lost there? Must be because you took a wrong turn while passing the theater, the spa, the gym and the wine cellar, which has its own tasting room.

Feeling chilly? Pick a fireplace—there are 14 of them.

Feeling hot? Then won’t you take a dip in the pool? You can practice your Olympic laps there.

Oh, we almost forgot: the asking price. The digs will set you back a cool $23.9 million.

As I’ve argued before, this is not a McMansion because of its size. Yes, the home may be ostentatious but this is not your typical large, mass produced suburban home. Rather, this house is 17,000 square feet, far behind the reach of most homebuyers. Perhaps this home is lacking in architectural quality but it is far too big to be a McMansion.

I think this use of the term McMansion is meant to convey the idea of tacky or kitschy. I’m not quite sure how that applies here: isn’t it pretty normal for the uber-wealthy or uber-famous to live in a huge house? Is the idea that Jackson had poor decorating taste? Or is the term applicable because the person who buys this home would be doing a strange thing since Jackson died here?

Housing design judge on homes getting smaller, greener

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Housing design judge Heather McCune recently talked about two trends in the housing industry: smaller and greener homes.

The exteriors of the homes are getting far simpler, with far fewer gables and dormers.

There are a couple of reasons for this, we think: One is that this is a change that’s driven by cost. Every time you add a bump-out or change a roofline, it adds to the cost of the house. Builders and architects seem to be consistently asking themselves, does a change like this add value, does it add to the cost? So, the appearances are becoming more streamlined.

The other thing is a generational shift. The entry-level buyer is demanding a home designed for their aesthetic, not for their parents’ aesthetic. They seem to prefer a far cleaner presentation than what had been popular among their parents. I don’t think it would be out of line to characterize it as an anti-McMansion attitude…

Honestly, [“green” is] an evolutionary term in our industry. The definition of green is as different as each and every builder in each and every category. But we didn’t see a single entry that didn’t discuss its “greenness” in its entry statement. The industry is figuring out that green, in some form, isn’t an option anymore — now it’s simply mandatory.

But they each approach it their own way, and a lot of the builders and designers are participating in the many green-building rating systems, such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), which may emphasize different systems and concepts. Generally, though, what we’re seeing is that reducing energy usage is becoming an aspect of home maintenance, from the homeowners’ point of view. We saw less emphasis on sustainably produced building products than on energy management.

Housing going relatively smaller and greener. These trends seem to be picking up momentum and shouldn’t be a surprise (see a recent headline that suggests that here) to readers of this blog. For example, this housing judge was part of the most recent International Builders Show where a Gen Y home combined a smaller size with outdoor living.

It seems like cost is a big factor here: a larger home or a home with more “unnecessary” features means a higher purchase price while some want to lower home energy costs (some going so far as to have net-zero-energy homes). So perhaps we can infer that if the economy remains in the doldrums, these two features will continue to gain steam as homebuyers think more economically.

Argument: the US should move forward by saying “Death to the McMansion”

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Patrick Doherty argues that housing is one area in which the United States can chart a needed course forward through “profound problems in its political and economic system.” The solution? “Resilient communities with smaller homes.”

Boomers and millennials, the two largest demographic groups in the country, are converging in a time-of-life moment where what they want is smaller homes on smaller lots in walkable, service-rich, transit-oriented communities. Boomers, who have just started turning 65, are empty-nesting and downsizing. But they are going to have to work much later into what they thought would be their retirement, and they fear the fate of their parents, who had their car keys taken away and ended up in the nursing home. Millennials are in the process of getting married and having kids, and according to market surveys, 77 percent simply don’t ever want to go back to the ‘burbs. At the end of the day, traditional subdivisions are isolating and expensive, while millennials are increasingly connected, are more into tech than cars, and are seeing their economic future more like their grandparents’—full of hard work and living on a budget.

Add it all up, and the National Association of Realtors estimates that—today—56 percent of Americans want the attributes of this new American dream in their next housing purchase. Yet only 2 percent of new units being built today fit these attributes. That’s a massive pool of pent-up demand, locked away by federal policy still supporting suburban growth at the expense of all other types of communities. Change the policy—without having to spend a dime—and we’re off to the races with new jobs in construction and infrastructure, plus homes and communities that reflect the way we want to live today. And they happen to be good for the planet, reducing energy, water, and waste by at least one-third.

But there is more. Three billion people around the world coming into the middle class in the next 20 years. When they do (and 200,000 people are literally leaving their villages every day), their incomes go up 300 percent—and so does their resource use. Since we’re already consuming 1.5 planets’ worth of resources, the McKinsey Global Institute is now saying we need a massive resource productivity revolution. That’s especially true in the United States, where we use 50 percent more material per unit of GDP than the top-performing EU countries. That waste could be profit.

America should be the leader of that resource revolution.

The larger argument seems to be this: the United States is locked into political and economic policies that no longer match our world. We need to adjust to two major changes in housing: (1) fewer people want to live in the type of suburbs that were built in force starting in the 1920s and then again after World War II and (2) building sprawling suburbs consumes a lot of resources that could better be used elsewhere.

Several things strike me:

1. Political and economic policies may be made as much or even more so for cultural reasons than for what is most effective or pragmatic.

2. That being said, changing these policies would be difficult to do overnight. There is still an ideology of the American Dream that includes owning a home. However, this may indeed be shifting toward denser homeownership but I think it would take some time (if just for younger generations to get older).

3. I would be interested in seeing a comprehensive national strategy by which this could be pursued. Perhaps this could start with removing the mortgage interest tax deduction. I’ve been thinking in recent days that this is also closely tied to gas prices and how the cost of driving affects where people want to live. Builders might need some incentives to provide different kinds of housing. Communities across metropolitan regions might need to band together to address common issues and stop fighting over residents and corporations. All of this is not easy but I imagine there are better ways to do this than simply talking about a bunch of things at once.

McMansions as debtor’s prisons

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While arguing for tiny houses, Jay Shafer argues that McMansions are comparable to debtor’s prisons:

“I see myself as freeing people,” Shafer says. “McMansions are like debtors’ prisons for the 21st century. Why pay for all that space that you’re not using, for the heating and maintenance, if it doesn’t make your life better?”

Indeed, researchers have discovered that many people bought big houses without any idea of what they’ll actually do with the room, and ended up living in just a small portion of their costly domiciles. In the quest to fill up the spaces with big-screen TVs and sectional sofas and bric-a-brac, many ended up succumbing to what one market researcher has termed a “claustrophobia of abundance.”

Shafer has a better idea. Sell the Xanadu, get rid of a lot of your stuff, and invest $50,000 or so from the proceeds in an elfin dwelling mounted on wheels, so that it technically qualifies as a vehicle and thus gets around the minimum-size constraints of zoning laws. Put it on a tiny parcel, ideally in some picturesque location on the outskirts of suburban sprawl, perhaps in a location where you can appreciate a little bit of nature.

Two things are interesting here:

1. I’m not sure I understand the comparison to debtor’s prisons. I understand that buying a McMansion can require taking on a lot of debt but debtor’s prisons were quite unpleasant places (some mention here). Are McMansions really that bad?

2. So it is okay if tiny houses contribute to suburban sprawl? I’m intrigued by the last line: you can park your tiny house on the edge of the metropolitan region, and live in nature while still being close to a lot of amenities. The problem, then, is not suburbia per se but rather the oversized houses. Would critics of sprawl be satisfied with this trade-off?

And I also have two questions:

1. Do tiny houses work for families?

2. Has anyone come up with a way to connect tiny houses so you can have a bigger house but that is still movable?

Discussion over “Prairie Modern” McMansions in the Atlanta suburbs

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A historian discusses “Prairie Modern” McMansions that have been built in the Atlanta suburb of Decatur:

For the past several years Decatur architect Eric Rawlings has been designing homes in a style he describes as “Prairie Modern.” Rawlings considers the eight Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired homes to be among the best examples in his portfolio. Others in Decatur’s Oakhurst neighborhood call them out-of-place McMansions. All but one of the Prairie Modern homes have been built at teardown sites, single-family residential lots where smaller homes were demolished to make way for the Prairie Moderns…

Rawlings defends his Prairie Modern design and he strongly disagrees that his Prairie Modern homes are McMansions. He left this comment in a 2011 blog post:

I have over 60 built projects in Oakhurst alone and only 8 are Prairie Style, only 22 are New Construction. I have about 40 renovations, many of which preserve the original building with a minor addition not even visible from the street. KC Boyce’s house is only 2100sf with 4 beds and hardly a McMansion by the actual definition. Susan Susanka, author of the Not So Big House, invented the term McMansion and would completely disagree with your interpretation of the definition. His 2 story house with low slope roof is barely taller than the houses near it with steeper roofs. The house on the left is sitting more than 6ft lower because of grade elevations. Scale does not mean height or floor area. It refers to the proportion and size of the pieces and parts that make up the structure. A simplistic two story cube is out of scale compared to a one story house made of smaller forms. A larger house made of the same sized pieces and parts is in Scale with a smaller house made of the same size pieces and parts. The Fayetteville house is 25ft tall, 10ft shorter than the Decatur Zoning limit of 35ft. [Copy pasted as received.]

Despite Rawlings’s assertions that his Prairie Moderns are not McMansions, they are more than twice the size of the homes they replaced. They are also larger than neighboring homes that are contemporaneous to the ones torn down. And, they draw from an architectural vocabulary that is out of character with the community. All attributes that conform to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s definition of a McMansion.

Lots of interesting pictures of homes to illustrate the argument. Several things are worth commenting on:

1. Susan Susanka did not invent the term McMansion. The term dates roughly to the late 1980s.

2. There seems to be some discussion of what exactly constitutes a McMansion:

2a. The historian draws from a definition from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and it seems that the teardown dimension is big here: these houses are bigger than the surrounding homes.

2b. But there is an architectural congruity issue as well: Prairie style homes don’t fit in this particular community. This amuses me: the Prairie style is well-known in the Chicago area because of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work in Oak Park and Chicago and you could find a number of “Prairie Moderns” in the region. I suppose this style is tied to Prairie regions (Midwest) but wouldn’t the Prairie style make more sense than stucco houses in the Atlanta area? Of course, one could argue that neither style or perhaps any “foreign” styles are appropriate.

3. Adding to the intrigue is that one of the “Prairie Moderns” won an award from Decatur for “Sustainable Design and Energy Efficiency.” So perhaps not everyone has an issue these homes. If so, this would be common in teardown situations: you can often find people arguing for newer homes and owners being able to do what they want for their property and others arguing that new houses should have some architectural congruency with the existing neighborhood and that there should be some design guidelines or standards (perhaps through the creation of a historic preservation district).

h/t Curbed National

Customizing your luxury home too much might make it harder to sell

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Arguing against McMansions and mass-produced homes, architects (like Sarah Susanka), environmental psychologists, and other argue that homes should be more customized for individual homeowners and residents. But could this customization make the home harder to sell? The New York Times investigates:

That, at least, has been Mr. Rooney’s experience, as potential buyers seem to find amenities he lovingly included in his dream home “more of a disadvantage,” he said. In fact, they try to use the custom extras as “a negotiation weapon,” claiming no use, for instance, for his personal salon or sports court…

Peggy Moriarty, an associate broker with Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty, says that when it comes to high-end properties with lots of amenities, golf courses and the like “get beaten up by the weather” after the first year, and homeowners “get bored.”…

Similarly, home theaters are attractive, fun and “an added plus,” but often tucked down in a basement corner. “People like to hang out near the kitchen and watch TV in the family room,” she said. Except for teenagers or “basement dwellers,” even the most magnificent theater “after the initial creation doesn’t get used that much.” The lesson here, according to Ms. Moriarty: “The toys aren’t selling the house.”

Not all brokers agree. Mr. Elliott, a broker who owns his own firm, says there is demand for amenity-laden properties among foreign buyers. “When you get to houses over a certain level,” he said, “the more amenities, the better.”

Here is the trade-off: if you customize the home while living in it, some would argue that the home becomes more personal and relaxing while the best is utilized more effectively. On the other hand, certain customizations can limit your market or can lead the seller to have to make concessions.

Three other things strike me:

1. I assume that the people who buy these larger luxury homes also theoretically have the money available to convert the space they aren’t thrilled with into something they would rather have. Does this suggest that the wealthy don’t want to undergo many home renovations? In other words, are the wealthy more or less likely to want move in ready homes?

2. I would argue that the homes mentioned in this article, a $4.25 million home, a $14 dollar home, a $1.789 million home, and a $9.475 million home (and check out the luxury details of these homes such as a par-3 golf course or a 33-foot ballroom), are clearly mansions. Early on in the article, here is how these features and homes were summed up: “idiosyncratic extravagances that supersized homes in the McMansion era just had to have.” These homes may have been built in the McMansion era but not are not McMansions; these kinds of features are ones only the truly wealthy could afford.

3. How much does staging matter when selling one of these luxury homes and how much does it cost? There is a lot of space to cover…

A surplus of 5 million McMansion in the United States?

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In the middle of a review of the Foreclosed exhibit at MoMA, a housing analyst makes an interesting statement about the surplus of housing currently in the United States:

It’s still easier to borrow for a McMansion, even though the U.S. has about five million too many of them, according to Arthur C. Nelson, a housing analyst who directs the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah.

Nelson was also cited in stories about turning McMansions into affordable housing that I wrote about back in October 2011. In that story, it was said that there “America [is] saddled with about 30 million more homes on large lots than the market needs.” Whether the number if 30 million or 5 million or even 1 million, that is still a large glut of homes that must be hampering the housing market.

I wonder if Nelson is defining a McMansion just by square footage. This is the most basic trait of a McMansion when the term is generally used though it is unclear how big a home has to be in order to be called a McMansion. Is 3,000 square feet big enough? Is 10,000 square feet more of a mansion than a McMansion? We could also ask whether a home this size necessarily is a McMansion as it may be an older home or it may have more architectural quality than a McMansion is assumed to have.

 

Characters on GCB have taste because they don’t live in McMansions

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I was amused to run across this description of the homes for the new ABC series GCB. While the women may be gossipers, at least they have good taste and don’t live in McMansions:

The production team spent four days scouting historic and modern houses in Texas, soaking up local color in the tony Dallas enclaves of Highland Park, Preston Hollow and University Park. “We visited homes, churches, country clubs, offices, stores, etc., and immersed ourselves in everything Dallas,” says Dugally, an Emmy nominee in 2004 for Arrested Development. The pilot was shot on location, though Los Angeles doubles for Dallas in the series. “It was not an easy task as Dallas is known for its large expanses of property, many without high fences or security and lots of brick architecture,” she adds. “Los Angeles is full of palm trees that don’t do well in Dallas. We were able to find several wonderful houses and a great church in the L.A. basin that serve as the exteriors for our show.”

Although Dallas certainly earns its bigger-is-better notoriety — Aspen’s housewife character has a French Country-style kitchen with a countertop deep fryer and three double ovens — Dugally notes that the houses they saw there weren’t McMansions. “Dallas is the most cosmopolitan city in Texas. Most of the money is old money,” says the designer. “I said, ‘Let’s give our characters taste.’ We made a very conscious decision that the look be over-the-top but still elegant.”

For the home of Amanda’s colorful mother Gigi (Potts), production designer Dugally wanted the interiors “to remain very upscale but traditional.” Front and center is the ornate, winding staircase with a landing topped by a gold leafed dome. Asian accents, custom-designed wallpapers by Astek in Los Angeles and white wainscoting are just a few of the design elements used for the warm gold- and cream-toned decor.

Gun-toting Gigi gets her own rifle-display room. “It’s completely taken from memory from a house I saw in Dallas,” says Dugally. Among the animal trophies is a mounted javelina. In high school, Bibb’s Amanda character had branded ugly-duckling Carlene as one of the creatures, a relative of the pig that’s native to the Southwest. Says Dugally, “Our executive producer Robert Harling wanted a javelina wherever we could get one, and he was so thrilled we found it. It’s so ugly.”

Read on for descriptions of some of the other houses.

Perhaps the characters on the show have some reason to have more taste – perhaps they are educated and/or have money. The inspiration for the fictional Hillside Park is supposedly Highland Park, a well-known Dallas suburb that is quite monied (a median household income of about $150k). If you have enough money, you don’t need a “traditional McMansion” to impress people because you don’t want to look like the nouveau riche and would prefer to show your wealth through refined and expensive accoutrements.

But the decision to have them avoid McMansions is still intriguing, particularly if they wanted the houses to be over-the-top. Even diva or “sassy” characters on TV can’t have McMansions because this would reflect badly on them.