Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society
by Thomas Frank · 18 Jun 2018 · 182pp · 55,234 words
, of course. Not for our own sake. But for theirs. (2011) The Architecture of Inequality My first memorable encounter with what we now call the McMansion came somewhere around 1985. I was reclining comfortably under a concrete bridge on what were then the fringes of the Kansas City metro area, drinking
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priority anymore, and in-your-face tract mansions were sprouting everywhere. Today we call those changes inequality, and inequality is, obviously, the point of the McMansion. The suburban ideal of the 1950s, according to The Organization Man, was supposed to be “classlessness,” but the opposite ideal is the brick-to-the
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-head message of the dominant suburban form of today. The McMansion exists to separate and then celebrate the people who are wealthier than everybody else; this is the transcendent theme on which its crazy, discordant architectural
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of this. Have the security guard slam the gates, please, and the rest of the world be damned. Inequality is the point of the McMansion, and the McMansion is also, to a certain degree, the point of inequality; it’s the pot of pyrite at the end of the rainbow of mud
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columns. The helter-skelter proportions. The toaster-shaped windows that would make Palladio want to stick his head in the oven. The obvious problem for McMansion designers, both then and now, was what to do with the structure’s vast exterior walls. In the early days, the facades were often flat
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. These are assets, not homes. They are built to flip: human settlements organized around the premise of the Greater Fool Theory. * * * They weren’t called McMansions at first, of course; that epithet came later. The man who bears the most responsibility for popularizing the term seems to have been Duany, the
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in the suburbs. Google the word and you will find that nearly everyone who uses it criticizes McMansions. It is a universally hated architectural form. Indeed, after unemployment and the activities of investment bankers, the McMansion may be the most despised aspect of capitalism there is. Those who defend suburbia, on the
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a common democratic project. To sneer at disorderly new developments, as highbrow urban planners do, is an act of disdain. And, by extension, to deride McMansions can be interpreted as only one thing: an act of snobbery toward the rich. * * * There’s an even stranger way in which the
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McMansion tracks the larger debate about inequality. Every time the pundit class has convinced itself that the conservative era is ending—that we are about to
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architect Duany was touring the country lecturing about the blight of the gigantic suburban home. A Washington Post staff writer, Henry Allen, was describing the McMansion as a stale leftover from the fading days of the Reagan boom. But nothing really changed, either in politics or in suburban development patterns. The
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fortunes of the rich continued to soar on Bill Clinton’s watch, and the McMansions of the 1990s soon exceeded those of the 1980s in the two essential categories of square feet and contemptuous vulgarity. Eventually, and with the help
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toward ever gaudier houses was over. On the latter subject, at least, it was more than just talk this time around. Wrecked subdivisions and abandoned McMansions blighted the landscape from California to Connecticut after the housing bubble burst; countless pictures remain online to remind us of what this desolation looked like
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of the Great Recession. More shockingly, in 2009 the average size of new American houses began to decrease. News stories proclaiming the “Death of the ‘McMansion’” proliferated. Fortune magazine ran a story about the “New Affordability” in housing. Again, however, nothing really changed. After a brief experiment with deficit spending, President
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all on subprime loans, about half of the disaster was actually attributable to the less well-known fiasco in Alt-A instruments, which fed the McMansion market—the “liar’s loans” that were securitized and sold off stamped with a big triple-A. The worst recession of our lifetime, in other
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get themselves a piece of the grandiose. That astounding reversal of the usual chain of cause and effect changed the way I thought about the McMansion. I once thought of writing an essay tracking stylistic changes in the tract-mansion form—how, say, the fake French simplicity of Newt Gingrich’s
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1987 McMansion gave way to the complex multigabled fakery of Michele Bachmann’s 2007 McMansion, with maybe a stop in between to contemplate Ricky Bobby’s McMansion in Talladega Nights. But what I discovered is that the form doesn’t really
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change. Yes, the houses get bigger every year, gables and gazebos come and go, but what is really striking about the McMansion is its vapid consistency as the decades pass. What stays the same, and what always gets me when I walk through one of these houses
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too tall to decorate. The billowing industrial roof. The windowless walls. There’s something else, too. Stand in the street when the sun hits the McMansion from the right angle and its glare obliterates the fake muntins in the windows, and suddenly you grasp the truth about this form: it is
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cheap, coal must be hauled in from Wyoming on mile-long trains. Your taxes must be higher to make up for the deductions given to McMansion owners, lending standards must be diluted so more suckers can purchase them, banks must be propped up, bonuses must go out, stock prices must ascend
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of powering a movement like Trump’s, which is blowing through the inherited structure of the Republican Party like a tornado through a cluster of McMansions. Trump himself provides rather excellent evidence for this finding. The man is an insult clown who has systematically gone down the list of American ethnic
The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
by Leigh Gallagher · 26 Jun 2013 · 296pp · 76,284 words
as housing’s “baroque” period—and soon we were identifying them with a new label, the McMansion. Though almost every builder started making them during the housing boom, the invention of the modern-day McMansion dates decades earlier; the first use of the term dates to around 1990 and was soon thereafter
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.’ You can get by with a cheap subfloor, but you had to have the Jacuzzi for two.” Toll might have popularized the notion of the McMansion, but by the early 2000s nearly every builder was making their own versions of them; soon their two-story foyers, butterfly staircases, and separate media
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it was fifty years prior. The National Association of Home Builders’ concept home that year was more than 10,000 square feet. As big as McMansions had become, every effort was made to make them look even bigger, with builders employing visual tricks like adding fewer trees and less vegetation, and
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, according to a survey by Trulia, was 2,100 square feet, right around what it was in the 1990s. Demand appears to be waning for McMansions. Only 9 percent of respondents in a separate Trulia-Harris interactive survey in 2010 said they wanted homes over 3,000 square feet—which by
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McMansion standards isn’t even that big. A majority of respondents, 64 percent, said they preferred homes ranging from 800 to 2,000 square feet. In
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: Making Room for What Really Matters to similarly advocate for a reduction in the amount of clutter. The bigger-is-better mentality that gave us McMansions, Susanka argues, also gave us McLives, her term for an over-obsession with material goods. A few years ago, she says, no one wanted to
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’s Chicago Business in an article about the city’s many corporate campus reverse migrations (“Like the disco ball, the regional shopping mall and the McMansion, the suburban corporate headquarters campus is losing its charm,” the story began). It’s not just Chicago. In New York City, UBS is said to
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lot in Long Grove, Illinois, to School Street, John McLinden’s innovative new suburban village in nearby Libertyville. Gibson and her husband were “on the McMansion track,” she says, living in a house with six bedrooms, a three-car garage, a circular driveway, and a two-story great room. But over
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those extra houses we built over the years? The answer has developers, land-use planners, housing economists, and home builders racking their brains. Some foreclosed McMansions in exurbs are finding creative new second lives as things like film collectives, rehab centers, art galleries, or, in Merced, California, dorms for college students
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underwater owners of multimillion-dollar properties are renting out rooms for the night to help pay the now-inflated mortgage. In still other developments, foreclosed McMansions are being bought up by extended immigrant families in what experts say could become a viable use for many subdivisions if there’s enough demand
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, Illinois, John McLinden developed School Street, a neighborhood of twenty-six houses in dense arrangement just off the town’s Main Street. Many buyers are McMansion refugees who tired of the wasted space and relying on their car. ©2010 Belmar Colorado www.belmarcolorado.com Developers are turning dead suburban shopping malls
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”: Kaid Benfield, “What’s Going On with New Home Sizes—Is the Madness Finally Over?” Switchboard, February 9, 2012. Only 9 percent of respondents: “The McMansion Era Is Over: Trulia’s Latest Data About American Attitudes Toward Home Sizes,” Trulia.com, August 20, 2010. Two-thirds of new homes built in
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Common Ground, National Association of Realtors, Summer 2012. many are willing to pay for the ability to walk: S. Mitra Kalita and Robbie Whelan, “No McMansions for Millennials,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2011. the 2011 figures showed birth rates: “Births: Preliminary Data for 2011,” CDC National Vital Statistics Reports. Similar
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20, 2010. CHAPTER SIX: WHERE THE WEALTH IS MOVING Mad Men quote: Courtesy of AMC Network Entertainment LLC. “unerringly contextual:” Robbie Whelan, “A Departure from McMansions,” Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2011. “Fortress of Glassitude”: One sample: Pete Davis, “Fortress of Glassitude Ready to Rise at 400 Park Avenue South,” curbed
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2050, a think tank arm: See america2050.org under “Megaregions” (don’t skip the maps). Some foreclosed McMansions in exurbs are finding: Barbara Kiviat, “Reinventing the McMansion,” Time, September 28, 2009; Patricia Leigh Brown, “Animal McMansion: Students Trade Dorm for Suburban Luxury,” New York Times, November 12, 2011; Norimitu Onishi, “Foreclosed Houses Become
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, Jason, 36, 49, 62, 69–70, 135 on adolescent car independence, 110 on appeal of suburbia, 49 city, move to, 171 on Duany, 117 on McMansions, 69–70 Duckworth, Joe, 135 Dumbaugh, Eric, 83–84, 106–7 DUMBO, Brooklyn, 18, 163–64 Dump the Pump, 109 Dunham-Jones, Ellen, 103, 180
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of, 29 corporation relocations to, 44 England, 28 federal master-plan in, 35, 42–43, 61–63, 65–67, 192 housing boom (2000s), 66–72 McMansion era, 69–71 malls/big-box stores, 44–45 marketing of suburbs, 64–69 mass-produced communities, 37–38, 46, 70 post–World War II
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–66, 76–77 housing boom (2000s), 66–72 minorities, lower percentage, 43 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), 42 Home size decrease in, 22, 136–140 McMansions, 69–71, 136, 205 median ideal size, 136 small-home movement, 138–140, 159 Home values and community physical design, 131–32 decline in suburbs
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, 160–61, 199–200, 210 McGirr, Lisa, 179 McIlwain, John, 209 McLinden, John, 7, 140, 141–42, 200–201 McLives, 139–140 McMahon, Bob, 133 McMansions, 69–71, 136, 205 Malls. See Shopping malls Mangiamele, Paul M., 182 Mansueto, Joe, 173 Marohn, Charles, 53–61 background information, 53–56 on codes
Suburban Nation
by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck · 14 Sep 2010 · 321pp · 85,267 words
curving cul-de-sacs, a streetscape of garage doors—a beige vinyl parody of Leave It to Beaver. Or, worse yet, a pretentious slew of McMansions, complete with the obligatory gatehouse. You will not be welcome there, not that you would ever have reason to visit its monotonous moonscape. Meanwhile, more
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sprawl, the elementary particle is the single-family house. The current model is the fast-food version of the American dream—some call it the McMansion. Its roots can be traced back to the manse on the agricultural estate, or the cabin in the woods. Unlike its predecessors, however, the
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McMansion is located in the center of a small plot of land, surrounded at close quarters by more of the same. The aesthetic deficiencies of this
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a name for themselves by seeking inspiration in its kitsch. But the real problems here are not aesthetic but practical. Like its culinary counterpart, the McMansion provides excellent value for its price. American homebuilders are perhaps the best in the world when it comes to providing buyers with the private realm
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few public spaces worth visiting. One’s role in this environment is primarily as a motorist competing for asphalt. The McMansion: independent of its aesthetic qualities, an excellent value Outside the McMansion: a depleted public realm This disjunction between the private and public realm has resulted in a uniquely American form of
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based on location-efficient mortgage lofts Long Island Railroad Longmont (Colorado) Los Angeles; automobiles in Loudon County (Virginia) LUTRAQ McCool, Lorne McDonald‘s MacKaye, Benton McMansion Madison (Wisconsin) Maine main streets; of new towns and villages; office parks versus; shopping centers versus malls; underground, in inner cities; see also shopping centers
The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work
by Richard Florida · 22 Apr 2010 · 265pp · 74,941 words
, just as youths squatted in abandoned tenements in the South Bronx and bohemians homesteaded the empty lofts and factories of Brooklyn, many of the empty McMansions of the Sunbelt are providing shelter to homeless and jobless young people. It’s entirely possible, of course, that the bank just decided it was
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.” Could this be just the tip of the iceberg? Could the once-desirable suburban and exurban communities—with their endless cul-de-sacs and gated McMansions—be on their way to becoming the blighted and abandoned communities of tomorrow? “The future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing,” wrote
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-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments and requiring relatively little upkeep. “By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built,” he writes. “Hollow doors and wallboard are less durable than solid-oak doors and lath-and-plaster walls. The plywood floors that
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not completely true, of course. Some people did go hog wild, shelling out more and more for pricier cars and houses. Whether they were bigger (McMansions or Hummers) or better (Lexus Hybrids or renovated brownstones) is beside the point; the fact is that they cost more. The concentration of economic activity
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appeal, and much of the appeal has is of the lurid and voyeuristic type—which also accounts for the popularity of the Real Housewives franchise. McMansions are tacky; driving a Hummer, worse than gauche; greedy Gordon Gecko types, simply gross. The social zeitgeist is clearly shifting away from craven materialism—at
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holding onto their populations with a mix of people trapped in homes they can’t sell and those who prefer urban digs over more distant McMansions,” the story reported. “Growing cities are growing faster and shrinking cities are losing fewer people, reflecting a blend of choice and circumstance.” In 1980, the
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areas where decent lower-income housing is scarce.12 You may not think this concept has a much of a future in the land of McMansions, but I’m old enough to remember when Americans scoffed at Japan’s tiny “shoe-box” cars. I’m not saying that typical American families
The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us
by Joel Kotkin · 11 Apr 2016 · 565pp · 122,605 words
return to the traditional pre-1950 city—represent a kind of moral imperative. Typically, this is cast as a choice between 4,000-square-foot McMansions and unbridled consumption on one side and more sustainable high-density urban living on the other. Columbia University’s Earth Institute executive director Steven Cohen
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-mile urban footprint, the development stretches over 8,100 acres. The tracts range from small townhomes costing about $200,000 to what some might call McMansions that go for several times more. Nearly 60 percent of local residents who have moved there since 2014—over 1,100 households—are married couples
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to suburbs and especially exurbs will be poor, heavily minority families. Rather than stay in gentrifying cities, these people will be crowding into dilapidated former McMansions in the “suburban wastelands.”127 It is true that, even in the United States, suburbs have experienced a rapid growth in poverty as some historically
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,” Demographia, http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf. COY, Peter. (2012, November 16). “The Death of the McMansion Has Been Greatly Exaggerated,” Bloomberg Business, http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-11-16/death-of-the-mcmansion-has-been-greatly-exaggerated. CRITSER, Greg. (2010, September 2). “A Pill For Los Angeles? Medicating the
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: An Overview Suburban Turmoil in the United States,” Suburbia in Transition, New York: New Viewpoints. ROSS, Benjamin. (2014, May 4). “Disaster in the age of McMansions: America’s dangerous addiction to suburban sprawl,” Salon, http://www.salon.com/2014/05/04/disaster_in_the_age_of
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_mcmansions_americas_dangerous_addiction_to_suburban_sprawl/. ROTHMAN, Hal. (2003). Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the 21st Century, New York: Routledge. ROXO, Sergio and HERDY,
On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense
by David Brooks · 2 Jun 2004 · 262pp · 79,469 words
the literature of the past century, nobody is happy in suburbia. But driving through the suburbs, one sees the most amazing things: lesbian dentists, Iranian McMansions, Korean megachurches, nuclear-free-zone subdevelopments, Orthodox shtetls with Hasidic families walking past strip malls on their way to Saturday-morning shul. At some point
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barbershop with twenty Vietnamese and Filipino coworkers and then driving home each day in a Lexus SUV. If you tour the open houses in a McMansion neighborhood of, say, Great Falls, Virginia, or Orange County, California, you will be stunned by how many of the luxury homes belong to immigrants who
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into their double-wide driveway in front of the two-car garage and next to the adjustable-height Plexiglas backboard. Their home is a mini-McMansion gable-gable house. That is to say, it’s a 3,200-square-foot middle-class home built to look like a 7,000-square
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forward so it looks like a baby gable leaning against a mommy gable. These homes have all the same features of the authentic McMansions (as history flows on, McMansions have come to seem authentic), but everything is significantly smaller. There are the same vaulted atriums behind the front doors that never get
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are so small—especially upstairs—that the bedrooms and master-bath suites wouldn’t fit inside one of the walk-in closets of a real McMansion. As the happy couple emerges from the vehicles, it is clear that they are both visibly flushed and aroused. With the juices still flowing from
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world as Americanization lack of social decline in midst of as spiritual impulse Mather, Cotton Mather, Eleazer Maxim McDonald, Dick McDonald’s McElroy, John Harmon McMansions Mead, Margaret megastores. See superstores Melton, J. Gordon Melville, Herman men: and barbeques and Cigar Aficionado magazine at college and future-mindedness shopping in exurbia
Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor and David Horsey · 1 Jan 2001 · 378pp · 102,966 words
feet and more. “Starter castles,” some have named them. Others call them monster homes. On America’s Streets of Dreams, the competition is fierce. McMansions. . . Double McMansions. . . Deluxe McMansions. . . Deluxe McMansions with Cheese. . . Full Garage Deals. . . each one a little bigger and glitzier, popping up like mushrooms in a frenzy of home wars. In
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the old-fashioned way—on our hands and knees.”14 Doing research for her best-seller Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich went a-scrub-bing from McMansion to McMansion in Portland, Maine, working under rules that prohibited her from even taking a drink of water while cleaning a house. She discovered that some
The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream
by Christopher B. Leinberger · 15 Nov 2008 · 222pp · 50,318 words
—This housing will also be in the fa- vored quarter, though is less likely to be in a gated community. This type includes so-called “McMansions” and other oversized homes that provide “value.” Although large, these houses are not especially well built (hollow doors, sheetrock walls, and midlevel appliances). Yet on
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times faster than metropolitan population growth, because the USDA does not consider some of the lowest density development popular over the past generation, such as McMansions on two-acre lots,16 as urban land use. A 2006 Brookings Institution study focused on “exurbia,” the fringe of a metropolitan area that is
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Yet for now, drivable suburban development continues to be built due to legal codes, subsidies, financial standards, and developer know-how. Hundreds of thousands of McMansions have been built on large drivable sub-urban lots since 2000, and exurban population growth beyond the metropolitan fringe has been growing twice as fast
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all sides to the weather, unlike more efficient apartments and townhouses in more urban settings. Another problem is that today’s homes, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built in comparison to those grand houses and townhouses that were broken up into apartments half a century ago. Hollow doors and wall
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board are less durable than solid oak doors and lath and plaster walls. Many McMansions have been built with artificial components that do not have a proven track record of long life, such as plywood 146 | THE OPTION OF URBANISM
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that the U.S. Census does not consider land that has two-acre lots as being urbanized. Two-acre lots are often minimum densities for McMansions and real mansions, not to mention gentlemen’s farms and ranches that are on the exurban fringe of many metropolitan areas, owned by executives that
City on the Verge
by Mark Pendergrast · 5 May 2017 · 425pp · 117,334 words
City website called Atlanta “a portrait of dysfunction.” The vacant homes in the southern part of the city stood in stark contrast to the gigantic “McMansions” thrown up in wealthy northern Atlanta neighborhoods. These had become so numerous by 2006 that Shirley Franklin issued a temporary moratorium on such massive home
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opportunity to develop comprehensive planning” to address local concerns about housing, health, and jobs. By 2009, there was no need for a moratorium on building McMansions or anything else. Many ambitious projects faltered and failed because of the credit collapse, including several around the BeltLine. The Georgia office of the Trust
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-door twin, built by the same developer in the early 1950s, had been torn down a few years before to make way for a monstrous McMansion. Other gigantic homes have replaced various domiciles throughout Buckhead. In recent years when I accompanied my parents on their morning dog walk, we sometimes went
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. It’s an aging, rectangular brick colonial on nearly three acres, and some awful day new owners will probably tear it down to build a McMansion. But to those who cannot afford a roof over their heads, who live on the streets, in vacant lots, or in Atlanta’s shelters, the
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couples and singles who want to balance work and leisure activities. Old houses are being torn down and replaced by more expensive edifices, including one McMansion of 10,000 square feet. Bill Seay observed that Piedmont Heights is like a “small town in a big city,” offering enough amenities so that
Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay · 2 Jan 2009 · 603pp · 182,781 words
as half of our own emissions emanate from “the built environment,” the energy consumed to build and service sprawl. We emit more carbon living in McMansions. For another, air travel’s actual share of our carbon footprints is currently 3 percent and falling (at least in the United States), thanks to
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size, nearly four times the landmass of LAX, and more than all of greater LA’s airports combined. No one could build horse farms or McMansions close enough to complain about the noise, leaving the airport to operate in peace and (relative) quiet. It wouldn’t emerge from its torpor until
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in the depths of the recession, the aerotropolis was filling faster than expected, was sparser than it should be, and was top-heavy with starter McMansions. Reunion and the surrounding boomburbs have been zoned for forty-four thousand homes and roughly 150,000 people. The nascent aerotropolis is making the same
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, despotic, and unsustainable to American eyes, it’s because all we have in common is the questionable materialism of the American dream—the glass towers, McMansions, and SUVs (subsidized by dollar-a-gallon gasoline). But Dubai has nothing to do with America, even though our gas money and our fear of
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buyer admitted, “but it’s in a good neighborhood with breathtaking views, so it will definitely appreciate.” America’s next Chinatowns may be made of McMansions. Just as Japan’s tourists defined the 1980s (remember tripping over salarymen and their families, Nikons clicking away?), China’s will be the next to
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