Here's a novel idea: if you don't want to live in a "McMansion", don't buy one.
Shopping for houses isn't like shopping on Amazon. You can't just pick what you want and have it ready on a lot of your choice in two days. If the only housing stock available/being built is houses you don't want to live in, whether they're too big, too poorly built, too ugly, not oriented on the lot right, not exactly where you want it, you're going to have to buy one anyway.
> You can't just pick what you want and have it ready on a lot of your choice in two days
No kidding. And?
> If the only housing stock available/being built is houses you don't want to live in
These houses are exactly what their owners want to live in. Exactly. If the market demand weren't there, the contractors would be building something else.
I'll regularly go to estate sales in McMansions. It's really amazing to see.
Master Bedrooms the size of my apartment that are mostly empty.
Huge tall ceilings with poorly assembled trim to break up the monotony. Two extra large AC units needed to cool all that air.
Basement bars that have gone unused for years, expansive basements with old kids toys laying about, so roomy that it feels almost commercial.
So many extra sitting rooms just there as a place to put things. Its amazing how wasteful they are, how they basically just exist to say "look, big house". Nothing in them is practical, they're difficult to navigate because you need to make room for the massive foyer staircase and inexplicable loft/bridge to overlook your leather couches with USB ports in them, sitting across from a tv mounted 3 feet too high to ever have a comfortable viewing angle.
I've seen the ugliest ceiling mural, attempting to emulate an Italian fresco with all the skill of a high school drug PSA mural.
These homes just reek of desperation, like they've accrued all this wealth and have found themselves sitting at the back of the bus in "The Graduate", without any purpose and unsure why they fought so hard.
Its really interesting seeing a bathroom with enough open space to store an old beetle, with 30 drawers under the acreage of counter top. Mostly empty but dispersed with normal human items, like they're trying so hard to make it seem like any of this was necessary.
All of these places are devoid of any kind of design, it all feels like a simulacra of old wealth, like its what they "should" be buying and decorating with, but then you see personal items and realize they're no better than the average person, they have the same interests and hobbies, only now they're buried deep inside this dryrock dungeon, hidden away so they can appear high class and fancy.
The worst thing about them? How cheap it all feels, and how much it feels like a normal house scaled up beyond any purpose. Sure the first floor may have some kind of granite tile, but every other floor seems to bow and give under your feet like you're on a rubber running track. Noises reverberate if there's no carpet, but if there is, it most likely came with the home and has not been taken care of.
McMansions are an amazing symbol of the hollowness of seeking wealth. You could have a much nicer, bespoke and practical home if you wanted. For the money you could hire a real designer, real craftsmen to build your hardwood features or master plaster craftsman to make real ceiling moldings.
Instead of ordering a steak from a fine restaurant, the McMansion is spending the equivalent money at a McDonalds.
I would argue that the problem with McMansions has less to do with their sheer size (though on the larger end, their size truly is ridiculous) and more to do with how badly utilized it all is.
One of these days I hope to be fortunate enough to design and build my own house, and so it's a subject I think about frequently. I'd like it to be a bit larger than average, but the allocation of space is determined almost entirely on practicality. So for example, rather than having a cavernous reception/living room and a dining room that's rarely used, the ground floor would have a small living room with the extra space instead going towards a kitchen with ample counterspace to do serious cooking in (something that's oddly skimped on not only in McMansions, but also more traditional houses) and a mudroom at the entrance so guests have a place to put their bags, coats, etc and have room to take their shoes off without stumbling over each other.
I suspect that there's demand for sizable, yet practically-designed houses like that but nobody's building them so people instead buy what is being built.
> has less to do with their sheer size(...) and more to do with how badly utilized it all is.
That's basically what I'm getting at. I've been in close to a dozen mcmansions, only one actually felt like it was a home rather than a catalogue ad.
I don't think the average McMansion owner has any intention of utilizing the space, and I'd argue they're designed in a way antithetical to utilizing the space.
Large open areas aren't suitable for living space unless you want a full living room in every room. If you were to say, convert one into an office, it'd be an interesting arrangement.
They're basically designed with the kind of banquet you see in movies, in mind. Once the party is over, you just have empty space.
> Large open areas aren't suitable for living space unless you want a full living room in every room. If you were to say, convert one into an office, it'd be an interesting arrangement.
Oh my god, the move away from having actual rooms is so awful.
But as long as people keep falling for the "wow" factor (in real estate photos and on first-viewings) of big, useless open spaces and cavernous open living/dining/kitchen combo rooms and signing on the dotted line, it's what we're gonna keep getting :-/
To me it sounds mostly like you're describing a well-planned Victorian. There's of course some unpleasant cross-pollination with McMansion designs, but the more sensible floor plans still follow the practice of a bunch of smallish, specialized but not hyper-specialized, efficiently laid-out rooms that are easy to move between.
Of course, another question there is, how much of that is the result of local zoning and permitting processes banning all the stuff that people actually like? I know I've seen a lot of complaints about basic stuff with stairs, windows, and bedroom sizes in older plans that have been rendered illegal by newer zoning.
I haven't seen such complaints about basic stuff. Maybe it's just my own bias, but whenever I see people complaining about "regulations" choking out The Way Things Used To Be, it's usually actually about cost to the producer, whether houses or soda or anything else. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35894852
Everything that made century homes desirable isn't mass-producible, and therefore untenable.
> the massive foyer staircase and inexplicable loft/bridge to overlook your leather couches with USB ports in them, sitting across from a tv mounted 3 feet too high to ever have a comfortable viewing angle
I'm rolling, LOL. Nailed it.
My main problem with living in houses built post-McMansion-influence (so, a great deal of what's been built for the last 25 years or so) is how terrible the layouts are. You'll have 3,500 sqft but it feels about as usable and spacious when you're actually living in it as a well-laid-out 2,200.
I once rented a basement bedroom from a couple when I had to do an internship. The house was a ginormous McMansion just like you described. I would occasionally go up to the main part of the house and it dawned on me that the couple had no furniture. Just this giant 5000 square foot house with seemingly dozens of empty rooms. They had two patio lounge chairs in the family room and a cheap (for the time) TV, and that was pretty much all I saw. Imagine leveraging yourself to the hilt, getting a mortgage that two people had to work to pay (and still having to rent rooms to others)... simply to get a huge box made of cheap lumber and drywall, and not even being able to live in it like civilized people.
I once checked out a similar basement apartment for a friend. There were three or four bedrooms within this basement, taking up maybe 30% of the total basement square footage. The rest was absolutely unusable open space with tons of support beams breaking it up, and an extremely slippery granite floor. The kitchen was nice and you could theoretically see the TV in the "living room" zone, but it was like 30-40 feet away so it was too far to be useful.
Selection bias though, right?
Anyone who leverages up to buy a home and then has to rent out a part of it to a stranger is, probably, by definition, having cashflow issues?
And to contrast that, I've been friends with someone who made significantly more money than I do (or likely ever will), and while their house was in a nice, upscale neighbourhood and was somewhat bigger than mine, overall it was a pretty normal suburban design.
What they had was taste, and good priorities.
Rather than put money into lots of space, or showy exterior features, they put it into the kitchen, and the bathroom. I was lucky enough to be able to stay at their house a few times (visiting the area for reenacting purposes—that's how I met them), and use their absolutely palatial shower. They are also foodies, and love to cook good food and cook it well, so they made their kitchen both beautiful and functional. (They also make stained glass as a hobby; I have no idea how expensive that is, nor how it would compare to buying a similar piece, but they had installed some of their work in their own windows, which added to the class of the place.)
I believe the difference between someone with a McMansion and people who own houses like that one is a sense of security in their own position in the world. McMansions are entirely about conspicuous consumption—about showing off your wealth, so that you can brag about it and rub the noses of lesser beings in it.
Upper-middle-class sensibilities and attitudes, rather than middle.
> They also make stained glass as a hobby; I have no idea how expensive that is, nor how it would compare to buying a similar piece, but they had installed some of their work in their own windows, which added to the class of the place.
Pretty accessible, actually. My wife does it off-and-on and is always shocked at how much people charge for not-especially-well-made pieces at e.g. art fairs. The equipment and materials are cheap, as hobbies go. Buying decent finished stained glass pieces is expensive—but getting decent at making it's not all that hard and doesn't take too long, and the materials are cheap. It's one of those "very cheap if you DIY and count the hours as fun hobby-time, pretty expensive if you don't" things. It's especially easy if you just use pre-made templates rather than designing your own, and there are tons of those cheap or free online (and nobody who doesn't do stained glass will think anything of it).
I think she only made a half-dozen pieces or so before she was roughly matching the quality of stuff we'd see at art fairs and such. Maybe 30ish hours to reach that level. Very-good tools might run you as much as $1,000 total, but you can get started for more like $150-200 (shop used for the grinder, especially). Glass is glass, it's not really that expensive when you're just buying sheets of it.
The biggest pain with it is materials storage and little glass bits getting on the ground in the work area (and sometimes tracked outside of it...) making it kinda hazardous. :-/
> Upper-middle-class sensibilities and attitudes, rather than middle.
Not really.
It's not a "middle-class sensibility or attitude" to like mashed-together architectural styles, or rooms three times larger than the furniture you've got to fill it, or a cluster of rooflets overlapping in apparently random ways.
Aesthetics certainly have cultural elements to them, but those aesthetic choices really only appeal to the subset of people who...own or aspire to McMansions.
I've never been anything but middle-class myself, nor has nearly anyone I knew, and I've never personally known anyone to perceive McMansions as something good.
Estate sales are commonly held by the estates of the recently deceased. So, there may be some bias in your sampling, since you're walking around the house of someone who was at the end of their life, not right in the heart of it.
And, I'm not sure large houses are as wasteful as you let on. After all, the floor area of a room grows quicker than the perimeter does. A 100 sq ft room could have 40' of walls, but a room with 4x the area could only have 2x the length of walls.
And it might just be my area, but there is no way you can get a bespoke home of equivalent square footage as you could a pre-built mcmansion.
In this area, people will do estate sales when they move as well. These are very much alive families, maybe their kids have mostly moved out. Totally not dead people homes. Those are a lot smaller and quaint.
I doubt it’s the equivalent money, the stuff you’re talking about (hiring master craftsmen) probably costs 5x-10x what a large house built the way you’re describing does.
I'm talking "turn of the 20th century business man" size. You could cut down the average mcmansion size in half and have an overall nicer house with fine materials and it'd still be bigger than most homes built before 1990.
Arguably worse than the house itself: owners who stay in precarious financial situations to pay off too much house. Yeah, it's their decision and they're probably learning a lesson, but...for what? Signaling to a select few people that they've made it? How is it worth the stress? Do they realize how time and effort they put into what is empty posturing?
Little wonder why some people's midlife crisis is explosive.
For a while, every place I moved to was slightly larger than the last. This is culturally what we're directed to: have a guest room. Build a man cave. Two ovens in your kitchen, why not? An office with a library. A room for the piano. There's always a way to put that money into stuff.
My first house was modest. About 700sqft semi-detached, built in 1905 as housing for mill workers, in the Philly exurbs. Good bones but a total gut job. The appeal was mostly that I could walk to the train station in three minutes. Cute backyard, but barely one parking spot per house.
Next place we got was 1300sqft (not including the full basement) - three bedrooms! My wife and I each had a space. Two car driveway a mile from city hall in what's barely north Philadelphia. Mid-1990s construction, weirdly suburban - I think it had more of a lawn than we had in the exurbs. So much room for stuff! Especially in the basement with its ceilings!
By a quirk, we came across a building in the historic district. It needed a ton of work, but the price was too good to pass up. We had been renting our first house out, but the tenant had broke her lease, so we moved back to the exurbs, sold our Philly house, and bought this weird property... 16'x100' venue space on the first floor, with a 16'x30' apartment on the second floor. We added a third floor (approx 1200sqft, single bedroom), rent out the second floor as an airbnb, and will be making the first floor a venue again.
Moving from 1300sqft back down to 700sqft, then up to 1200sqft (but with no basement) was a master course in space optimization and mindfulness about consumerism. When I see these McMansions, I think: that's a lot of air to heat & cool. Those are a lot of rooms to fill with junk. That's a lot to dust and vacuum. And let's not even talk about design and architectural choices, or how everything interesting is a fifteen minute drive - at least.
I didn't think I'd have a custom home built in my 30s, let alone adaptive reuse of what turned out to be an 18th century building, but I feel like I accidentally stumbled out of a consumerism trap and into a kind of Goldilocks zone. When someone from NYC visits, they think our place is huge. When someone from central PA visits, they think it's kind of cramped. McMansions baffle me. There are so many more interesting things you can do with money, and so many more interesting places you can live - but I get how it's hard to break the spell of "get a bigger house, buy more stuff." And I'm not saying I made a better choice... I also think about how much money I spent to live in the spacial equivalent of a trailer home.
As much as I couldn't go back to the suburbs, suburban people often have trouble adapting to this kind of space. We had Airbnb guests a couple of years ago, who were gifted a weekend stay by their daughter. On the first night, they used Ubereats to order McDonalds, stayed inside and watched TV. In the morning, they told us they were checking out early, and that it was no fault of ours. I don't know if I can properly express to you how absurd it is to order McDonalds in a town with world class food options, or to stay inside watching TV in one of the most walkable, historic, and street-level active cities in the country. But hey, "Country Mouse & Town Mouse" is a fable that's at least 2000 years old. To each their own, I suppose.
Come to think of it, no actually. The items in these homes are so incredibly mundane its shocking.
I like checking out the "Studies" or home offices out of curiosity. Typically they're adorned with various right leaning politco books of the last couple decades. Maybe a model boat.
More often than not, the home offices are weirdly cramped, the computer desk shoved in a closet or weirdly placed in the middle of the room.
if only you could decide on what other people could spend their money on, then the world would be such a better place, right? and, you seem to have no problem enjoying the downstream effects of their "estate".
btw, that thing you're undoubtedly alluding to, the 1-story craftsman bungalow with custom woodwork and detached garage/shed, gravel driveway and on half an acre with a perfectly manicured herb garden and tomato beds is more expensive and probably located in a jurisdiction with much higher taxes.
i live in a concrete loft which is basically the polar opposite of a mcmansion but can you enlighten me how i'm doing my entire life wrong also?
different types of housing exist because people have different tastes.
I almost never find anything good at these estate sales, its purely for entertainment when I see a sign as I drive by.
Most of the items there are really cheaply made and have way too high an asking price, or are well made but some of the tackiest design trends of the 80s/90s/2000s.
I've already refinished one solid wood piece of furniture with the black splatter marks added to invoke a fake "old". Not doing that nonsense again.
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. McMansions are defined by their attempts to outwardly demonstrate wealth, which makes deriding them easy but justifiable. Many of the kinds of homes the author discusses here are multimillion dollar properties. Yes, there's a little snobbery involved, but I don't find it classist to point out the irony in wealthy folks appearing cheap by yelling "LOOK HOW WEALTHY I AM!"
The people who devalue mcmansions largely do so because these houses are the material legacy this country is leaving, and it's objectively shit. They are an irresponsible way to build and organize neighborhoods.
Yep. Not everyone wants to pay $5,000/month to live in a jumped-up coat closet in a "trendy" part of Manhattan.
Me, I live in a late '50s tract house and it suits me fine. I don't actually care what kinds of housing other people want to live in -- because it's none of my business. Manhattan coat closet or suburban "McMansion" -- whatever floats your boat.
Sprawl is a problem, but I don’t buy that this is the main reason people complain about McMansions (I live in a condo in a dense building fwiw due to personal preference so this isn’t sour grapes).
The people I know living in these large houses that were cheaply built with weird architectural accents were primarily middle class people in suburban areas with low cost of living and larger families. Often they grew up with less money and were the first of their family to do well. Typically they bought a house in some new development with a good school.
The people I’ve heard complain the most about it are the upper-middle class people on the coasts that went to Stanford, I mostly only heard this style of complaint after moving to the bay and meeting people that grew up in these higher classes.
It really comes across as a way to look down on the lower classes that “don’t have good taste” dressed up as something more intellectual. Actual rich people (not upper-middle) don’t give a shit, probably because they’re not afraid someone will mistake their status for middle class - they just live in their estate in atherton and don’t read articles like this.
I don’t like suburban sprawl either, but I have an allergic reaction to this kind of elitism.
It’s true - middle class people often don’t know how to properly signal status because they didn’t grow up in it, but how to properly signal it is also a moving target (intentionally) by those a little above them. I just find it tedious to watch.
there’s obviously space between “cheap mansion on an acre miles away from grocery” and “imaginary dystopia” - you could at least pretend to be commenting in good faith
A huge part of the point here is that McMansions create unattractive, difficult to use, and costly to maintain infrastructure. And the residents who live in the McMansions aren't really the people who are bearing the full brunt of these costs.
As always, we must consider the actual alternatives and not just our imaginary ideal scenario.
What is the alternative for the relatively large population looking to start families in a neighborhood with a good school district and child care on 1-2 working to middle class salaries while building some equity?
Can you point us to someplace where there is quality, affordable, and aesthetically pleasing new home construction happening at scale?
One consideration is that "new homes" have historically been something of a "luxury good" but somehow become so normalized in the last couple decades, that people argue "middle class salary" should be able to buy one.
Growing up, no one in my family lived in a new construction home, nor did any of my friends.
New construction needs to happen to increase aggregate supply to deal with incremental increases of demand. That supply though, may be more high end than median. Even this works fine because it means someone will buy a pricey new construction home rather than a cheap home and gut renovate it. The lack of new construction causes high income buyers to move further and further down market to buy-to-reno.
In many places (where building is still happening) the cost of new vs old construction is surprisingly close; so why not get a brand new 2023 house instead of that older 2003 one?
Because new construction is not necessarily built with the same materials and expertise as old construction. Good bones and all. Although I think you'd have to go back further than 2003 to get a meaningful difference in construction practices.
Early 90s is about how far back you have to go, around here, to get an appreciably better-built house. Solid wood trim and doors! Cabinets that don't fall apart when you so much as look at them! All in working-class houses of that age. I swear even the light switches feel like they're built better.
As long as it doesn't have a wood-single roof. Those haven't been good since some time in the '70s. Demand shot up in the '80s and they built a shitload of houses with fancy "50-year" wood roofs, but there wasn't enough lumber of the quality required to make them actually last 50 years (both increase in demand and an ever-declining quality of lumber in general caused this, I think) like older wooden roofs did, so they all started leaking after like 10-15 years. But at this point most of those have been replaced with regular ol' asphalt.
That may be the case, but you have to take survivorship bias into account, and the vast differences in available equipment and materials.
A modern double-paned house with R20 insulation and a well designed heat pump system is going to blow(er test) the doors off an immaculate mansion built in the 1900s with single pane glass and a gravity furnace.
Survivors are the only ones on the market so its already accounted for I guess. I think I misread your original comment, are you saying price for a well-built new home is similar to pre-owned good bones?
I was just noting that the prices are much closer now than they had been in the past (on a sq ft to sq ft even 10 years ago a 1970s house would be a good $50-100k less than a new house, though it was hard to compare because location, lot size, etc).
In my experience, "good bones" houses are harder to find than people realize, and there are lots of things that can wear out over time that you don't realize until you have one wear out.
For example, behold the glory of Orangeburg sewer lines, relatively common in some areas between the 40s and 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangeburg_pipe - a cool $10k+ when that finally eats it.
"The old ones are better" is sometimes true and in some cases; for example, an old plywood sided house will handle sustained water intrusion much better than a modern OSB sided house, but modern siding may prevent the water intrusion much better. There are also things that look really great but are actually disasters waiting to happen - river rock foundations, for example. A contractor friend once mentioned that the old victorians in our area were amazing except for the roof and foundation, both which can be annoyingly expensive to fix.
Based on my personal observations, assuming you avoid asbestos and aluminum wiring, the houses before the 80s are better than 80-2010s or so, especially 80-90s, as I've seen many, many cases of those houses built with newer materials that clearly the builders didn't understand or care how to correctly install.
That stuff can still happen on a modern house (hire a home inspector to inspect during build if you can) but they seem to have a better handle on how to do things right for the long-term.
but the baseline built in assumption that all home buyers should be able to afford new homes when people complain that new homes are too expensive is what misses the point.
New homes are built on the expensive side because that's what allows developers to turn a profit in areas where development plots are scarce to come by. That is - where land is the constraint, why would a developer choose to have a lower ROI?
Areas that new & old homes don't price too differently & there is still building happening are likely not in land/development/zoning constrained with undersupply.
Also laughing/crying internally as you describe 2003 as old (from my 1970s home)..
Never lived in a building that wasn't older than me..
Heh my last few houses have pre-nuclear steel in them, since they were built before the bombs dropped.
And yes, the "standard" (hard to call something a standard that only really existed for 50 or so years of the modern USA) of houses going out of style and passing down as starter homes, etc has been sadly disrupted.
And many of those starter homes are now held out as rentals, which further distorts it.
(We're actually in a "starter home" now and considering what the next step should be, and the vast improvements in energy, etc over the last 20 years alone is making me heavily lean toward building, especially as I can sit on the design and get something more reasonable for the cost.)
> One consideration is that "new homes" have historically been something of a "luxury good" but somehow become so normalized in the last couple decades, that people argue "middle class salary" should be able to buy one.
Yes, how dare the proles expect to live like the "best people".
McMansions are aesthetically pleasing to the average taste, which is out of alignment with coastal elite modernism. If your taste is out of the mainstream, then it is harder to find houses, and they will be more expensive. There are the occasional attempts at the non-standard suburban subdivision style. I liked these:
> which is out of alignment with coastal elite modernism
Most coastal areas I've been to typically value their historical architecture and maintain those aesthetics.
Really not sure where you're getting that from. If you go to areas in Michigan such as Troy, most of the houses are of a mid-century modern design similar to what you're sharing.
The design language of a McMansion inherently lacks cohesion. Its not an elitist take to say "taking various design elements from 6 different eras of building and inflating them all up to 150% scale" is a bad design.
If a design lacks any kind of symmetry, has windows that dont line up that are all different sizes, misplaced features, etc; its an ugly design. Not sure what else to say.
Midwesterners are not immune to good design practice, and its bizarre to suggest that people outside of the coasts are incapable of making a cohesive design.
> Most coastal areas I've been to typically value their historical architecture and maintain those aesthetics
Given that virtually all new construction in coastal cities is five over one crapboxes along with the occasional uninspired at best highrise, I don't see it. Certainly nobody is putting up what one might consider well built aesthetically pleasing mansions in downtown San Wherever.
5-over-1s are basically universal in the United States. You might see them more in coastal areas but that's because its where the population gravitates to.
I don't like 5-over-1s either but they're a product of zoning laws that tried to legislate out more compact housing.
I much rather have a couple duplex/quadplexes on each suburban block but a lot of folks really don't like that idea.
Bring up the idea of putting a cafe or convenience store inside a suburban culdesac hell and people will lose their mind.
> 5-over-1s are basically universal in the United States. You might see them more in coastal areas but that's because its where the population gravitates to.
Yes I'm aware. The point is that the coastal cities are not in fact trying to maintain their historic aesthetic. They're building the same crapboxes everywhere else is.
This isn't a dumb flyover hicks vs sophisticated coast tech bros issue. It's an observable fact that architecture and construction virtually everywhere in the USA and the West in general has been garbage for over half a century. McMansions are just a symptom of a deeper rot.
And when those ranch-style houses were new, architecture snobs were decrying them as as soulless cookie-cutter crap.
Here's a novel idea: if you don't want to live in a "McMansion", don't buy one.