Tag Archives: wealthy

Gated crime-free “private city” under construction in Guatemala

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A new gated community under construction in Guatemala is upfront about being exclusive and crime-free:

Guatemalan developers are building a nearly independent city for the wealthy on the outskirts of a capital marred by crime and snarled by traffic. At its heart is the 34-acre (14-hectare) Paseo Cayala, with apartments, parks, high-end boutiques, church, nightclubs, and restaurants, all within a ring of white stucco walls.

The builders of Paseo Cayala say it is a livable, walkable development that offers housing for Guatemalans of a variety of incomes, though so far the cheapest apartments cost about 70 times the average Guatemalan’s yearly wage. It’s bordered by even costlier subdivisions begun earlier. Eventually, the Cayala Management Group hopes to expand the project into “Cayala City,” spreading across 870 acres (352 hectares), an area a little larger than New York’s Central Park .

Cayala’s backers promote it as a safe haven in a troubled country, one with an unusual degree of autonomy from the chaotic capital. It also embraces a philosophy that advocates a return to a traditional concept of a city, with compact, agreeable spaces where homes and shops are intermixed.

Detractors, however, say it is a blow to hopes of saving the real traditional heart of Guatemala City by drawing the well-off back into the urban center to participate in the economic and social life of a city struggling with poverty and high levels of crime and violence…

Pedro Pablo Godoy, one of the 25 architects who worked on Paseo Cayala, said it is the first project in Guatemala that adheres to New Urbanism, a movement that promotes the creation of walkable neighborhoods with a range of housing types and commerce.

Sounds like a fairly typical gated community that may simply be unusually frank about the reasons it is built and why wealthy residents would want to live there: to avoid the problems of society. I imagine some New Urbanists would not anything to do with such a project that is hardly about mixed-income development or being integrated into the fabric of normal society.

While we could focus on the exclusiveness of this new development, it would also be interesting to study whether and how a community forms in such a setting. It sounds like the developers expect some sort of streetlife, partly due to the architecture and design as well as a younger generation they are hoping to attract that want a lively urban setting. Will this actually occur? Will the perceived safety lead to more vulnerable social interactions? If so, what will this community end up looking look?

This also is reminiscent of plans to build several cities in Honduras that would have their own government and oversight.

George Lucas to his weathly neighbors: if you don’t want my new studio, I’ll sell my land for affordable housing

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An interesting NIMBY battle is continuing in Marin County, California between George Lucas and his neighbors. Here is the latest:

Skywalker Properties abandoned the plans in an acerbic two-page letter [PDF] to its neighbors: “Marin is a bedroom community and is committed to building subdivisions, not business,” it read. (“It was, by his own admission, a bit edgy,” Peters says.) The letter concluded by suggesting that if people felt the land was best suited for more housing, Lucas would aim to sell it to a developer who would at least create the kind of housing Marin really needs: not more million-dollar homes, but low-income residences…

The plan, now in its early stages, is for Lucas to transfer the property to the Marin Community Foundation, which will work with a nonprofit developer to build the housing, as it has with similar low-income projects throughout the area. (Peters prefers the term “workforce housing” given the stigma attached to its more common moniker. To illustrate the perception he is up against, one wealthy neighbor cried to the New York Times that Lucas was “inciting class warfare” by inviting poor people to move in.)…

Peters would like to put about 300 apartment units on the property, which would again take up only a small portion of the remaining 200 acres. Given all the protected space around Lucas’s properties here, it’s unlikely any of the neighbors would even be able to see such a development. Most of the Marin Community Foundation’s other housing projects have been developed along transit corridors. But because this location is more remote, Peters envisions that, at first, this site may be best suited for low-income elderly. Marin also has the highest proportion of aging residents of any county in California.

Peters is quick to add, too, that in Marin County a family of four earning nearly $90,000 a year is eligible for housing assistance (for further perspective on the local housing market: “I forget that you have to translate here that a million-dollar house is not a mansion, by a long shot. They’re very comfortable homes.”) And so the popular imagination – “you’re going to bring drug dealers” was another complaint in the Times – is at odds with the reality of what affordable housing really means in this economy, and who needs help obtaining it.

It’s a strange world where wealthy people can poke each other in the eye by threatening to build affordable housing. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how the neighbors respond but I wouldn’t be surprised if they fight this with the same vehemence they fought Lucas’ plans. Clearly, more affordable housing is needed here but wealthy residents fighting a NIMBY campaign can be quite powerful.

“The Queen of Versailles” is not about a McMansion

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More reviews are coming out of the new documentary The Queen of Versailles (and critics are liking it according to RottenTomatoes.com) but I would still argue with some of the depictions of the 90,000 square foot house at the center of the film. Here is an example: the Jewish Daily Forward has a headline titled “The Biggest McMansion of Them All.” I’ve argued this before: a 90,000 square foot home is far, far beyond McMansion territory. This is the land of the ultra-rich. Take this information from the same Jewish Daily Forward story:

David Siegel, 76, is the billionaire founder of Westgate Resorts, which he claims is “the largest privately owned time-share company in the world.” Jackie, 31 years his junior, is David’s surgically enhanced wife, and mother to seven of his 13 children. They live in a 26,000-square-foot home in Orlando, Fla., with a household staff of 19. They believe the house is too small…

All went well until the credit crunch of 2008. The Siegels’ problems weren’t caused by the house — though it did become a burden. Rather, David’s company ran into trouble as lending dried up. Typically, Westgate customers borrowed money from the company to pay for their vacation time-shares. The company, in turn, borrowed from the banks at lower interest rates. When the banks stopped lending, the bottom fell out.

Added to that difficulty was the burden of the PH Towers Westgate, a new 52-story high-rise luxury resort in Las Vegas, which drained Siegel’s corporate resources as well as $400 million of his own money. Finally, in November of 2011, Siegel was forced to sell…

Originally, the project was going to be a look at how the wealthy live and, of course, at the Siegel’s house-in-progress. It was very much in line with Greenfield’s previous work as a documentarian and photographer.

I’m looking forward to seeing this film at some point but it is difficult to draw conclusions about McMansions and American excess from one ultra-wealthy couple. Thus far, it sounds like reviewers and others see this film as a metaphor for the American economic crisis of the last five years or so and I’m not sure you can stretch it that far. As a view into the life of the elite, it may be fascinating but it would be difficult to describe this as a “typical” experience that explains the logic behind all McMansions and excessive consumption.

Say it upfront: a $10.95 million home with 109 acres is not a McMansion

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This real estate story starts in an unusual way: readers are first told what the large home is not.

Don’t call it a McMansion. This classic, $10.95 million Connecticut estate is tucked away on 109 acres of countryside in Sharon. Known as “The Colgate Estate”, the house was designed by award winning architect J. William Cromwell Jr. for Romulus Riggs Colgate (not that Colgate) and his wife, Susan, in 1903. To add to the homes illustrious history, the late singer, songwriter and producer Paul Leka and his family purchased the property in 1978.

On the 109 acres, you can find the 12,000 square-foot-main house, a large front courtyard with privet and fountain, and an English barn with six stalls. There’s also a carriage house, a swimming pool, a 2000-square-foot reflecting pool, and staff quarters.

The 19-room main house was made with granite mined from the property, and features an entrance graced with four immense Corinthian columns.

The interior of the main house is described as being both spacious and intimate. Besides the living room and Great Reception Hall (which also doubles as a ballroom), no other room exceeds 23 feet in length. The majority of the original furniture and fixtures are still intact. There are marble fireplaces, oak and walnut wall paneling and woodwork, Fontaine hardware and Mott and Fish ironwork. The five full and three half-bathrooms also add to the overall grandeur of the home: They feature toilets with pull chains, tubs with feet, and porcelain handles on marble sinks.

This is a strange way to start this overview of “The Colgate Estate” as I’m not sure what the author is getting at. Is the point that this is a real mansion? Is the point that this is an older home? Does this home have more style and grace that more modern big houses? Does the price tag indicate that this is really a luxury home?

At the same time, I applaud this: too many extra large houses are called McMansions when they are clearly in the mansion category. If there is a 12,000 square foot house on 109 acres built in 1903 by an award winning architect, this is not your suburban subdivision McMansion. This home isn’t for the nouveau riche or white collar managers: this is for the truly wealthy.

Upcoming film about a unconstructed 90,000 square foot mansion

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I’ve seen several references to the film The Queen of Versailles which comes out later this summer. Here is what the movie is about:

A Florida real-estate tycoon and his appealing, immensely flawed wife try to build the country’s biggest McMansion in photographer-turned-filmmaker Lauren Greenfield’s documentary, which is stranger than any work of fiction. Surrounded by controversy since well before its Sundance premiere (when subject David Siegel tried to sue the festival), “Queen of Versailles” veers from profound human compassion to domestic horror as Siegel’s wife Jackie wanders through her enormous but trashed home scraping dog crap off the carpets. It’s like a Theodore Dreiser novel for our time, infused with the vivid, vulgar spirit of reality TV. (Opens in theaters July 20; VOD release is likely but has not been announced.)

There is one problem with this: the home at the center of this film is not just a regular American McMansion.

At 90,000 square feet, it will be America’s largest single residence, boasting ten kitchens, a private ice-skating rink, and enough tacky antiques to make Michael Jackson blush. It’s telling that while the couple’s dream house was inspired by the famed palace, it was most directly modeled on a Las Vegas theme-park imitation of French grandeur.

A home that is 90,000 square feet is far beyond a McMansion. There are not many homes in the United States that are 90,000 square feet so it is difficult to argue that this home is mass produced. The home is named “Versailles,” referring not to some builder’s model but rather the well-known French palace. The home may be tacky and not have a lot of architectural merit but this is home is way beyond the size of anything that can be reasonably called a McMansion.

In reading several early reviews of this film, it seems like critics think this film is about more than just the vanity of a few wealthy people: the uncompleted mansion serves as a metaphor for the excesses of the early 2000s.

TV programmer: Real Housewives series is “sociology of the rich”

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The programmer behind the Real Housewives shows suggests they might have some sociological value:

Andy Cohen should know as the programmer behind “Top Chef,” the various “Real Housewives” series and his own “Watch What Happens Live.” Cohen, a former producer at CBS News, weighed in on the Bravo success story in an interview with Howard Kurtz on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” Sunday morning.

In picking programs, Cohen said he looks for “something that hasn’t been done before” and a personality different from what viewers have seen…

“In the case of ‘The Housewives,’ I call the ‘Housewives’ sociology of the rich,” Cohen told Kurtz. “I think it’s just fun to watch. It’s guilt-free gossiping that you can have. It’s like the modern-day soap opera, in my mind.”

I would be interested to have a sociologist chime in about whether shows like these reflect an increased interest in the lives of the wealthy and famous say compared to thirty, fifty, or one hundred years ago. When sociological studies like The Gold Coast and the Slum were written in the late 1920s, lower- or working-class residents may have known about the rich or run into them occasionally (and part of the intrigue of this study is that the wealthiest and poorest residents of Chicago lived within blocks of each other) but did they have the kind of vicarious interest in the rich that TV shows today try to promote?

Also: I imagine there are plenty of wealthy people who would argue that these shows only display a small segment of the wealthy lifestyle. What about shows about the millionaires next door or about people who scrimp and save to get their money? These shows seem to encourage people to live a more “wealthy lifestyle,” combining spending (conspicuous consumption, anyone?) and celebrity status.

A second note: it is hard to argue that an edited show about the wealth, a modern-day soap opera, can impart a whole lot about reality or a sociological understanding of the world. It can tell you something…but perhaps more about what Americans like in entertainment than about how people really live.

Urban differences: Portland, Oregon has only one doorman

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Here is an example of differences between cities: New York City is well known for its doormen but Portland, Oregon has only one.

[Richard] Littledyke, a tall, fair-skinned blonde of 28 years, has held doors open for Burlington residents for eight months. The previous doorman, Auggie Contreras, reluctantly vacated the position for a higher-paying bellhop gig at the Nines Hotel…

The Burlington Tower is Portland’s only residential building with a doorman. Other apartments have concierges and several hotels have bellhops at the front doors, but Littledyke is unique. Visitors to the area often use him as a landmark to find their parked car…

Both men said Portland’s lack of doormen probably comes down to the city’s size, age and housing stock.

In Portland, where far fewer people are cramped into limited space, people with extra money achieve status with a nice house and a well-groomed yard, Bearman says. New York’s cramped real estate requires doormen to serve the same purpose.

“They are tied into how to create elegance and luxury in apartment buildings, where space is limited,” Bearman says. “They also provide a bridge between the outside and the inside of a building that a yard serves to provide in a house.”

The explanation: when you have higher residential densities, more high-rise apartments or condos, and wealthier residents, doormen become more common as residents want to clearly signal their status and keep the outside world beyond the doors of their building. The suggestion here is that certain kinds of buildings lead to having doormen – I wonder if this is necessarily the case. Could there also be regional differences, places where it might be considered gauche to have a doorman? The article suggests several apartment buildings in Portland have concierges – how does this differ in the eyes of residents and others?

Recent uptick in sales of McMansions?

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Here is an argument that new home sales of recent months might be driven in part by larger homes, sometimes known as McMansions:

Data released on Wednesday shows that sales of newly built homes rose 3.3% in April from a month prior and 9.9% from a year ago. While the figures do not disclose the size of these new homes, home builders credited the McMansion side of the spectrum. That’s a reversal from recent trends: During the recession the size of homes got smaller, shrinking 3.4% to 2,382 square feet, according to the US Census. But last year that size jumped 5.2% to 2,505 – the largest in at least four years. In many regions of the country, homes are even larger.

Home builders say the trend toward larger new homes picked up more this year. Michael Villane, president of Lead Dog Builders, a custom home builder in Rumson, N.J., says he’s currently building homes with sticker prices of $1.5 to $4 million, up from the $1.3  to $1.5 million his clients were commissioning a year ago. While the average size of homes in the region is 3,500 to 5,500 square feet, he says the orders he’s received this year are for 7,000 plus-square feet homes. Though there’s no official definition of the word, many define McMansions as new homes larger than 3,000 square feet.

In some cases, home builders are enlarging homes even if clients don’t ask for it. Michael Dubb, CEO and president of The Beechwood Organization, a New York-based home building company, says his firm is building houses with larger kitchens, higher ceilings, and overall more spacious rooms in an attempt to appeal to buyers who might be on the fence about buying a new home. By building bigger without raising the price, he says, the company is hoping to increase its sales. (He says they’re not downgrading quality, but rather cutting into their profits in order to make more sales.)…

Requests for large new homes come at a challenging time for the overall new home market. New home sales hit a 51-year low of 307,000 last year, according to the NAHB. That figure is expected to jump 18% this year, but it would still be way off its peak of 1.3 million homes in 2005.

If I had to guess at what is behind this, here is what I would say: there is a bifurcation in the current housing market. On one hand, you have a large group of potential homebuyers who are looking for smaller homes. One recent book I reviewed calls this the “demographic inversion” as young adults and retiring Baby Boomers look to downsize and purchase in denser areas. Proponents of these trends argue that the Americans of the future are looking for a different kind of homeowning experience in the future. On the other hand, you still have a decent number of wealthy homebuyers who are now moving out of a hibernation stage brought on the economic/housing crisis several years ago. They are looking to buy homes similar to what they would have bought ten years ago but now feel financially stable enough to pursue this.

The article doesn’t mention this but I wonder if this is also at play: new home sales are at the lowest stage in 51 years so this new push for larger homes among the wealthy is really raising the average in a way that we haven’t seen in the past. When those at the lower economic spectrum get back into buying homes (though some would argue that they won’t – perhaps we’re moving to a rental society), the average figures for the whole country might come down or stabilize a bit.

Social profiling of McMansion owners?

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The mayor of an Australian town suggests that some residents are profiled because they live in McMansions:

HILLS Mayor Greg Burnett challenged Prime Minister Julia Gillard last week to meet struggling families and businesses from the Hills.

The mayor set the challenge on the Ben Fordham show on 2GB last Wednesday in response to the Prime Minister’s suggestion that Sydney’s north shore was out of touch.

“It’s social profiling and it’s similar to comments made regarding our area when they talk about McMansions and our levels of income,” he said.

“We have the highest proportion of families with mortgages than anywhere in the country and parents working 70 to 80 hours per week.

As I’ve suggested before, there isn’t really an acceptable quick comeback if someone accuses you of living in a McMansion. Such claims tend to put the owner in a defensive position. It is common to hear people make comments about McMansion owners, not only because of their perceived wealth but because of their bad architectural taste, their disinterest in community life (particularly in teardown situations), and how their purchases help feed into large social problems like sprawl and consuming too much.

The most support McMansion owners get tends to come in more wealthy communities with a critical mass of larger and more expensive houses. It is in these places where teardowns are not always seen negatively and property rights are more important in public discourse and regulations. These communities often have zoning that at least allows, if not encourages, the construction of McMansions. But from the outside, these communities can be viewed as exclusive as it requires a decent amount of money to live there and some communities actively work to keep certain housing and people (anything that might harm property values) out.

However, it might be going too far to suggest that McMansion owners are deserving of pity. After all, these tough economic times mean that there are plenty of people experiencing financial difficulties. These days, McMansions (and there owners) are a favorite whipping boy. See this example from a comment about a Atlanta Journal Constitution story about debt:

It’s because everyone wanted the McMansion ($300K). Then you had to have the Cadallic Escalade (40K)…to impress the neighbors.

And there were numerous housewifes who LOVE to shop and don’t work…

There is not much support for McMansion owners today…

Have enough money, pay others to wait in line for you

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The Jakarta Post reports on a phenomenon found in a number of places: people being paid an hourly wage to wait in line.

Student Ansari Haja has endured bad weather, hunger and the call of nature to stand in line for hours and secure an apartment at Bedok Residences.

The catch – the apartment was not for himself. The 19-year-old was paid $300 last November by a real-estate agent to spend 28 hours in a queue. He did it again a month later, for another showflat launch in Serangoon North – this time queuing for 14 hours…

It appears that apartments, clothing and gadgets top the list of things people will pay others to queue for.

Associate Professor Xiao Hong, from the Nanyang Technological University’s Division of Sociology, said that this practice reflects the affluence of a society that allows one person to buy another’s time.

‘Everyone’s time has a value on it. But because of social-economic factors, others have more value placed on their time. To compensate for a lack of it, they use economic resources to ‘extend’ the hours that they currently have in a day,’ she added.

And Singapore is not alone when it comes to the phenomenon of ‘queue-sitting’.

In Japan, businessmen have paid people to stand in line for the launch of the PlayStation 3, while in Britain, students at Edinburgh University were paid to help secure the best flats on the market.

I’m surprised I haven’t heard of this in the United States. This past Thanksgiving, I stood in line for 45 minutes before midnight at Best Buy and you could see that people were jumpy about things like people joining their friends in line right before the doors opened or not getting in the store even a few minutes after midnight. Would Americans accept the idea of someone in front of them being paid to wait in line and then changing places with the payee at the end?

The concept of paying for extra time is interesting. How is this any different than paying a personal assistant or a personal shopper to take care of certain tasks during the day? If you have the money, you can afford this. Does this suggest that inequalities of wealth can be translated into inequalities of time? People with more money or resources can literally do more each day.