There’s a much better looking Quicktime version, but if you can’t see it, here’s the google version:

Clip from Subdivided: Isolation and Community in America

Clip from Subdivided: Isolation and Community in America

Are McMansions a real estate fashion trend, doomed to fail like pet rocks and bell bottoms and singers who look good but can’t write thier own songs? That’s the opinion of Arrol Gellner. Writing in SF Gate he notes

After the current taste for huge houses inevitably fades, our infrastructure will be burdened with untold thousands of residential white elephants for decades to come.

What’s so awful about these big, bad houses?

Here’s the usual litany of answers: They use more building materials, wasting natural resources. They take more energy to heat and cool than a comparable small home, consuming more nonrenewable heating oil or natural gas and more electricity (most of which is also generated by fossil fuels, creating more pollution).

In a city like Dallas with a special talent for vulgarity, the moral arguments never work. As Gellner says, “moral arguments won’t dissuade people from buying big houses, just as they haven’t dissuaded them from buying sport utility vehicles.”

Basically, he says, people will just get sick of taking care of them. And if Kunstler is right, they will not be able to afford the costs of energy to heat and cool them, not to mention the gas to drive several hours a day to and from the place they work all day in order to afford the things. Geller points out that there was a previous cycle around 1900 when larger homes were eschewed for smaller ones:

…with efficiency-minded magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal leading the charge, overworked homemakers rebelled against the large, ornate and hard-to-maintain homes of the Victorian era. … they quickly came to be seen as the apex of vulgarity, and many were eventually carved up into rooming houses — a common strategy to make use of all that burdensome space. The remaining numbers that escaped demolition continued to be held in contempt for 60 more years. Today’s McMansions, with their overbearing scale and frenetic ornamentation, are a pretty close match for Victorian excess. And after their inevitable fall from grace, time won’t treat them any better.

I hope he’s right, but as long as people can max out their lifestyles in order to fulfill the mantra of worth = $worth (or the appearance of it), of the replacement of citizens by consumers, those hulking garish boxes will continue to thrive.

Looks like the folks in Little Forest Hills (the neighborhood profiled in Subdivided) sent Robert Wilonsky a post about the upcoming KERA screening (Jan 3 @ 8pm on KERA 13). He kindly wrote a note about it on the Dallas Observer blog.

Michael Davis over at Dallas Progress also picked it up. I read through his blog and noticed an interesting post about how San Diego has banned giant retail stores. Hard to imagine that outside of the west coast and certain parts of New England. Davis writes:

I hope that the current and future Dallas City Councils take notice.

While some community and elected officials openly wish that they had a Wal-Mart in their area, I ask you to take a drive to 3155 W. Wheatland (map) and ask yourself if this is what you want in your community.

The mismanaged Wal-Mart near US-67 & Wheatland is a disaster. Their lack of selection, filthy floors and shelves, dirty parking lot, and overall lack or willingness to provide a decent shopping experience is evident. Once night falls, it simply feels unsafe. Only open for three years, the store looks like it’s been open for twenty.

Good stuff. And thanks Michael for the kind words on the film!