That’s what Katherine Salant says in her latest column.

…most new houses today feature a capacious master suite that is often large enough to be characterized as a house within a house, or, as some wags have suggested, a McMansion within a McMansion. The master suite usually includes a sitting area for television viewing or computer work as well as the occasional fireplace and kitchenette. The kids are off in their own bedrooms, often with their own attached bathroom and their own television and computer. After dinner, the family scatters. In many households, a family dinner is a rare event.

In the piece she also quotes Stephanie Brown from U of Michigan, Peter Whybrow from UCLA, and Dan Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence.

There’s certainly something to this. I know in my own case there are many times - like, er, right now - that each person in the household is enganged in their own screen. Occassionally we send each other email or chat messages. Every rare once in a while we’ll yell across the empty living area from whatever room we happen to be in to the other person in another room on the other side of the empty living area.

A pair of graduate students at the University of Florida’s Documentary Institute have made a film about suburban lawns called Gimme Green.

This is from their Facts page:

• If present consumption patterns continue, two out of every three people on Earth will live in water-stressed conditions by the year 2025.
• On average, Americans use 40 to 60 percent of their water on their landscapes.

And its always been amazing to me how freely and without question we dose our lawns (and food and everything else) with synthetic chemicals we do not understand. The Gimme Green site mentions these stats:

• Of 30 commonly used lawn pesticides, 19 are linked with cancer
  or carcinogencity, 13 are linked with birth defects, 21 with
  reproductive effects, 26 with liver or kidney damage, 15 with
  neurotoxicity, and 11 with disruption of the endocrine (hormonal) system.
• Of those same 30 lawn pesticides, 17 are detected in groundwater,
  23 have the ability to leach into drinking water sources,
  24 are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms vital to our
  ecosystem, 11 are toxic to bees, and 16 are toxic to birds.

Makes you just want to lay out on the lawn and soak up the carcinogens, doesn’t it?

Tony Klein, an enterprising state representative from Vermont has proposed a McMansion Tax on homes over 4000 square feet. Home buyers would pay an additional $1000 for each additional 100 square feet over 4000 total square feet.

So a 5,000 square foot home will cost an extra $10,000.

Supporters say the goal is to promote energy efficiency and to send a signal discouraging big homes that need a lot of power.

Rep. Tony Klein: “When you build something that requires the potential use of a lot of electricity, even if you don’t use the electricity our utility has to have it in their portfolio which means they have to add to their contract amounts which means it costs all of us in our rates.”

Direct taxing (and this one is rather crude) may not be the way to do it, but there should be some public disincentive to living overly large. The private disincentives - like energy costs - do not really seem to deter anyone. Yet.