“The subprime crisis is just the tip of the iceberg. Fundamental changes in American life may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow’s tenements.”
good piece by by Christopher B. Leinberger in the Atlantic

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.

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.

“McMansionization” is happening all over the country. I’ve been tracking it the past year or so and you see the same debates happening in town after town. Here’s a sample from Maryland.

‘‘[McMansions] can overwhelm those neighborhoods,” … Homeowners in Mount Rainier have torn down small houses and erected homes several times the original size. ‘‘Those homes can just dwarf everything else.”

Del. Joseline Pena-Melnyk (D-Dist. 21) of College Park said several neighborhoods in College Park — including Berwyn and College Park Woods — have seen their communities altered by McMansions.

‘‘You can imagine having a small house and suddenly having a huge house right next to you,” Pena-Melnyk said. ‘‘It can block the sun, and a lot of times it can be uncomfortable for residents.”

Giving local governments control over the building of large homes would also set rules and prevent conflict among neighbors unhappy with the development.

‘‘This will allow for some sense of order and … possibly prevent arguments among neighbors,” she said.

Last March, Bethesda’s Greenwich Forest Citizens Association publicly protested mansionization in their community.

College Park Councilman Robert Catlin (Dist. 2) said many McMansions being built in College Park are not owner-occupied, built primarily for student housing.

‘‘Sometimes, in addition to being a giant mass, [the design] is totally out of the character of the neighborhood,” he said.

Yes, and as I’ve said before, design affects community, and is central to it’s identity and health.

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.