Bad Manors: The McMansion as Harbinger

Urban planning is not in good shape and hasn't been since about the 1950s. Worse, the postwar American model has been exported around the world which means these bad practices have been copied elsewhere. Still worse, urban planning decisions are effectively permanent. This is very apparent when you look at old European cities where buildings might have changed, but the layout of roads is either the same or agrees with the contours of previous structures, boundaries of what used to be parcels of farm land, etc.

[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-pon...

Myself and my circle of friends have had assorted houses of assorted sizes and ages, and save for my 1960 ranch built on truly horrible soil, nobody has encountered any gross problems.

One is over 20 years old with nothing of note. Another is push 35 with nothing of note. My then new and lived in townhouse for 6 years had no issues. My friends in the Inland Empire (where housing was “cheap”) have had no complaints.

Partly I credit the building codes in CA and the communities. A friend recently explored building a house and was required to do an updated soil study, for example.

The expanding clay soil that they dropped my house on 40 years before we bought it converted the slab to gravel. All sorts of movement in that house. At one point you could tell the season based on the size of the crack in the bathroom wall, it moved visibly over time.

The entire neighborhood was like this. And, yea, they were expensive to fix. But the contractor gutting my rooms commented on how well the house itself was built. Today, I think what happened there could (should) not happen.

I had to re-pour foundations, re-line sewers, replace HVAC on that house.

Mind I certainly wouldn’t want to redo the flooring of a 4000 sq ft house. But the bones, core features and fundamentals seem to last.

And, for sure, there are different grades of builders. Homes at different price points. But much of that is fit and finish cosmetics vs fundamentals of the house.

I can’t speak to other neighborhoods. But I imagine it’s more than basic maintenance that’s driving folks away.

Make no mistake, larger houses cost more. More flooring to buy. More walls to paint. Larger HVAC to service. More cu ft to heat and cool.

But I’ll bet the sewer line for the cheap house and expensive house are fundamentally identical.

But I think the baseline, for the big parts, those dictated by codes and inspections, at least, anecdotally, in SoCal, seems pretty solid.

Cleveland has this. Atlanta has this. I'm sure most other cities do too.

But there's always a buyer. They may not be able to afford to repaint custom Victorian woodwork every other year, and just let it rot, but someone will live there.

He also said that it cost him something like $10,000/month to live here, what with the mortgage and huge electric bill (he had three multi-ton A/C units to cool the almost 10,000 square foot (900 square meters) home.

It was ... something.

That has been true of mansions for hundreds if not thousands of years ;)

My opinion is that the author is totally off the mark due to conflating two separate aspects of modern home building.

I’ll use these definitions in order to decouple the two aspects.

McMansions are custom homes built by the nouveau rich. They can be in greenfield developments or as teardowns in established neighborhoods.

Spec ("speculative") homes are houses built as a collection by a developer and then sold to their owners. There is usually an HOA.

A McMansion can be built poorly for sure. But more frequently it is built with a "most home for the least cost" mentality. The materials and quality are high but there's something missing. I think what's missing is craftsmanship and architectural finesse.

Spec houses can be built well and may are. But like McMansions - the dominant philosophy is "most home for the least cost". Those that are not built well - and that's is likely the majority - will result in large, unexpected repair costs for future owners.

McMansions and spec houses usually occupy mutually exclusive developments - which make sense since someone building a custom home doesn't want to be next door to a spec house.

A McMansion is only slightly more likely to avoid the "something is missing" aspect of large modern spec houses. And it's from the same root cause - a lack of craftsmanship and architectural finesse. Where I lived until recently and for over twenty years, there were several houses torn down and replace with McMansions. The one beside me was originally a small (~1200 sq ft) brick ranch like mine. It was replaced by a McMansion. The owner/builder told me directly that she builds "the most home for the least cost". She lives in them for three years and then moves and repeats. The one across the street replaced a very charming stone house in the Tutor style. I was sad to see it go. Its replacement was a house that occupies most of the lot - a 3/4 acre lot - but I do include all the ugly "hard" landscaping as occupying the lot. The lot had looked so large and beautiful with the small stone house. Both McMansion were built by the same builder. Neither had an architect (structure or landscape) involved - and it shows.

Another example on my street was truly a head-scratcher. The owners tore down a really nice 3000 sq ft brick house, and replace it with a really ugly 4000 sq ft house of much lower quality design and materials.

I get that the standard use of "McMansion" does encompass both types of building, but I have long distinguished McMansions as those that are custom-built. If someone else builds and then sell you a house, It’s no kind of mansion – it just a large spec house.

I have little experience with spec developments. I've no reason to venture into such exurb wastelands and thankfully all of my friends share that opinion and don't buy them. I assume they exist here - but they are dozens of miles from the city.

I live in a charming and affordable neighborhood that is a 15 minute drive to downtown (with light rail connections too). The houses were built in several generations from the 1920s to the 1970s. The schools consistently rate among the best in the state. McMansions are exceedingly rare here. Houses are rarely cheap and are of high quality. Lots are small and zoning doesn't allow for much of an increase in footprint. Even if it did, it would make no economic or aesthetic sense to tear one down. It does make sense to fix one up.

> I get it, millenials got screwed by the unfortunate confluence of 2008 and by the economy finally transforming from manufacturing economy into a service-based one. They can't afford large houses, so the psychological defense mechanism kicks in: "Hey, these McMansions are bad anyway. It's good to downsize into a shoebox".

So they're popular because they're affordable, but they're hated because they're expensive? Which is it?

> But at this point we perhaps should start answering the question: do we want cities to continue being densified into Manhattan-style concrete canyons, or should we make sure that our children can live in nice houses that our generation was not able to afford?

Manhattan is popular, aspirational even, for a reason. Every generation before the 1950s was built by gradual densification. The wrongheaded decision to try to pickle cities in aspic via zoning laws is what creates housing unaffordability. A "nice" lifestyle is far more about being able to live somewhere you can work and socialize than about having zillions of sterile square feet to yourself.

The _vast majority_ of land in the US, urban centers included, including NYC, is zoned for low density single family homes. Manhattan is only 1 of 5 boroughs in NYC, remember.

There is NO shortage of single family homes.

There IS a shortage of absolute number of units in urbanized areas.

This is because, contrary to what you claim, the only thing allowed to be built in many areas is exclusively single family homes.

> Should we make sure that our children can live in nice houses that our generation was not able to afford

I say this as a relatively fortunate homeowner in Los Angeles who is part of “this generation”: if we do not allow more homes to be built, the next generation will not be able to live in the city at all.

I myself would not have been able to afford my home in the city and neighborhood I love had the recent state zoning changes (sb9) which allowed me to convert my single family home into to a duplex not occurred.

The houses were generously proportioned for four people.

Then the wave of McMansions hit. The contrast was night and day. Same families, but the houses were twice as large, adorned with like... Fake columns and endless unnecessary fake architectural flourishes and ugly facade exteriors. The houses were jammed into tiny lots with no trees and no yards. The developers cut down all of the natural landscape and installed ridiculous fountain jets in drainage ponds. Side by side with the rest of the neighbourhood it was (and remains) ugly, excessive and soulless.

That's what a McMansion means to me. It's the white collar commuter's Ford F150 of a house.

And to be clear people have hated McMansions since long before the "millenials," what a weird "fuck you, got mine" take.

Plaster and lath? Can't be mass produced/installed. Out of style.

Crown moulding? Can't be mass produced/installed. Out of style.

Solid wood flooring? Can't be mass produced/installed. Out of style.

Brick? Can't be mass produced/installed. Out of style.

One begins to see a pattern and wonder if "style" is actually "what makes more profit for builders."

I think there's an issue with this premise. McMansions are not 'mansions' and the criticism stems from that fact. They are too small for the architectural features they try to cram into their facades (balustrades, numerous columns, far too many windows of awkward sizes). Also because they are small, they try to maximize the use of space leading to the exterior looking very weird due to overlapping roofs so individual rooms can be as large and tall as possible.

If it's got a 2000 sq ft footprint, with one story above ground and one below, that fits your description, but I don't think most McMansions tend to be one story—if they're 4000 sq ft, I would guess that many are likely to have about a 2-3000 sq foot footprint, with part or all of it having a second story (actually, rarely all, because a full-height foyer is a fairly common feature, from what I've seen).

I obviously can't comment on what you've seen derided as "McMansions", but I've seen a bunch of the stuff on McMansion Hell specifically (the blog the author of TFA maintains), and in general I wouldn't say they fit what you describe. Or, at least, some of them may not have a much larger livable square footage than a rural/suburban middle-class house, but they certainly cost appreciably more, because that middle-class house is built in a more or less standard manner, and the McMansion has a three-stall garage, four separate sets of pillared porches on the front, and three bay windows (in three completely different styles).

Someone finagled permission to build on Brotherhood Way and this is what they made. The houses themselves seem nice, but the neighborhood (if you can call it that) has a horror movie vibe to it.

Oh I assure you, they're cheap all the way through. Take the mass-produced bottom of the barrel construction practices of modern developers, the architectural sense of gluing pre-made block of house together, and then just keep gluing until you hit the target square footage.

It's all limestone concrete, softwood, asphalt shingles, hollow doors, plastic floors, drywall, spray painted hardware, a single layer of brick if you're feeling adventurous, a chimney that doesn't actually work, a fireplace that's electric.

It's unbelievably depressing that for how expensive they are you can't actually pay for quality only for more house.

And I don't really think it's anyone's fault per se but more the reality of mass-produced junk getting cheaper and human labor getting so much more expensive relative to it.

As a British outsider, it kind of does sound like trailer parks are American vernacular architecture. Why aren't they?

It does seem though like we're heading toward either trailer park or mansion.

Seventy year ago they built real starter homes for newlyweds that did not yet have 2.4 kids. I'm not sure where those people go now. I have three daughters that are in their 20s now though so I guess I can watch and see.

They complain they never see any birds or wildlife when the nearest batch of trees is at least a half mile away.

McMansions are a perfect expression of this: trying to look bigger and fancier than they are while being extremely cheap in every way that matters, and getting every "fanciness" signal all wrong. They're a common target because plainly-inept pretentiousness is very funny—it's a staple trope in comedy for a reason.

It's not the size of the house per se that draws comment on McMansions. It's the intense and desperate but hopelessly misguided social signaling in their styling.