My personal worry about so called McMansions is that people are buying the largest houses they can possibly afford, and the quality of the building is sacrificed for size. The costs of maintaining these enormous houses can sometimes be absolutely staggering. I worry that in years to come, entire neighbourhoods of these houses will simply fall into disrepair, as nobody will be able to afford the costs of fixing them as they age.
Approximately the same is true of sprawling suburbs. Sprawling suburbs are uneconomical; tax revenue is unable to cover the costs of maintenance. The result is that state and even federal money is needed to subsidize the costs[0]. Not sustainable.
Urban planning is not in good shape and hasn't been since about the 1950s. Worse, the postwar American model has been exported around the world which means these bad practices have been copied elsewhere. Still worse, urban planning decisions are effectively permanent. This is very apparent when you look at old European cities where buildings might have changed, but the layout of roads is either the same or agrees with the contours of previous structures, boundaries of what used to be parcels of farm land, etc.
I generally like strongtowns attitude and articles, but a lot of their detailed calculations about the cost of suburbs being unsustainable focus on sidewalk maintenance costs. One example:
Strong Towns makes a compelling case but until (unless?) suburbs truly start bankrupting in the way they describe, and in a way that hurts residents, I kind of think they are preaching to the choir.
Like if they are right but central state / city governments just increase subsidization, maybe that’s just what people want. Despite the fact that I don’t like it myself.
That is not what your linked article says. The article says is that US cities have not charged, and are not charging, enough property taxes: because of $reasons. If cities were to charge costs correctly, which must happen eventually, then suburbs are economical.
It is really difficult to compare like with like when it comes to property taxes in different countries. Costs, percentages, house valuations, plus other confounding factors mean we need to take all numbers as indicators only. But let’s compare Kansas City with Christchurch, New Zealand.
KANSAS CITY
[2021] The median property tax in Kansas is $1,625.00 per year for a home worth the median value of $125,500.00. Counties in Kansas collect an average of 1.29% of a property's assesed fair market value as property tax per year. Kansas is ranked number twenty six out of the fifty states, in order of the average amount of property taxes collected.
1625 / 76000 = 2.1% of median household gross income on property taxes[1].
Kansas City, MO's Taxpayer debt is -$8,700[2]. That doesn’t seem outrageous compared with household values and household mortgages.
CHRISTCHURCH
Suburbs pay for themselves in Christchurch, when they are built, and for their ongoing maintenance upkeep.
In 2021 average residential rates (property tax) nationwide [NZD]2,572. That’s about USD1750.
Christchurch is a city with significant and increasing urban sprawl. “Christchurch City Council continues to have the highest liabilities (debt) per household compared to any other council ([NZD]30,096)” with median property price in 2021 of [NZD]650,000 (I am guessing - rose significantly during the year). All new suburban developments in Christchurch have front loaded costs to pay for the extra infrastructure - the city does not subsidise infrastructure. Property taxes in Christchurch are about 5% of household gross income.
Well anecdotally, here in SoCal, McMansion capitol of the planet, I’m not seeing it.
Myself and my circle of friends have had assorted houses of assorted sizes and ages, and save for my 1960 ranch built on truly horrible soil, nobody has encountered any gross problems.
One is over 20 years old with nothing of note. Another is push 35 with nothing of note. My then new and lived in townhouse for 6 years had no issues. My friends in the Inland Empire (where housing was “cheap”) have had no complaints.
Partly I credit the building codes in CA and the communities. A friend recently explored building a house and was required to do an updated soil study, for example.
The expanding clay soil that they dropped my house on 40 years before we bought it converted the slab to gravel. All sorts of movement in that house. At one point you could tell the season based on the size of the crack in the bathroom wall, it moved visibly over time.
The entire neighborhood was like this. And, yea, they were expensive to fix. But the contractor gutting my rooms commented on how well the house itself was built. Today, I think what happened there could (should) not happen.
I had to re-pour foundations, re-line sewers, replace HVAC on that house.
Mind I certainly wouldn’t want to redo the flooring of a 4000 sq ft house. But the bones, core features and fundamentals seem to last.
And, for sure, there are different grades of builders. Homes at different price points. But much of that is fit and finish cosmetics vs fundamentals of the house.
I can’t speak to other neighborhoods. But I imagine it’s more than basic maintenance that’s driving folks away.
Make no mistake, larger houses cost more. More flooring to buy. More walls to paint. Larger HVAC to service. More cu ft to heat and cool.
But I’ll bet the sewer line for the cheap house and expensive house are fundamentally identical.
But I think the baseline, for the big parts, those dictated by codes and inspections, at least, anecdotally, in SoCal, seems pretty solid.
I think there can be some self-selection bias involved in this assessment. Maintenance is something that some people are disinclined to attempt at all: they "consume" their housing, vehicles, furniture etc. instead. In essence what they demand is an IKEA house. The market will meet that demand to the extent that regulation allows it.
As well, each generation of housing stock has a share of survivors that often were invested in more heavily early on, preventing small maintenance issues from developing into bigger ones. Foundation settlement is a common issue, as you point out. But for one example of what can go wrong with a whole generation, the move towards greater insulation ran into a widespread problem of toxic mold in the 2000's, caused by trapped water vapor in the structural materials. Those houses, McMansions among them, were lost, and made their owners sick. Building standards account for this now, but that kind of thing crops up with each change in practices, so I always see the first 5-10 years as a kind of proving ground: if it gets through that without turning into a nightmare it can usually go for many more decades.
I always wondered what a house "designed for maintenance" would look like. I imagine '70's style paneled interiors, but each panel comes off with a couple bolts, and you can rip out the insulation and replace it with state-of-the-art, run new Ethernet or coax trivially, or neatly replace a leaky pipe without huge rework afterwards.
> ... entire neighbourhoods of these houses will simply fall into disrepair, as nobody will be able to afford the costs of fixing them as they age.
Cleveland has this. Atlanta has this. I'm sure most other cities do too.
But there's always a buyer. They may not be able to afford to repaint custom Victorian woodwork every other year, and just let it rot, but someone will live there.
Back in 1999, an acquaintance of mine became a paper millionaire of a dot-com and bought a 2.3M home in Boca Raton, Fl, and put in a further half million renovating it. As he was driving me and a few friends through the neighborhood, he indicated that if you don't like the style of house, it could be demolished and a new home built, and pointed out a few homes that were new, the old having been demolished.
He also said that it cost him something like $10,000/month to live here, what with the mortgage and huge electric bill (he had three multi-ton A/C units to cool the almost 10,000 square foot (900 square meters) home.
In the 30's lots of large houses were divided into apartments. I'm thinking we're headed there again in some places. This time with McMansions being being divided into smaller units.
The problem is modern homes are for the most part hard to divide. Homes in the 30s often had very defined rooms connected with hallways. Modern homes include mostly open spaces with a few discrete rooms.
A big reason why is because of the depression. We constructed very few houses in the 1930s and 1940s. What we started building in the 1950s is a completely different thing and why homes pre-war that are well maintained are so prized.
Most of the pre-war houses are gone, because they were crappy. The houses that are still around and prized, or have been divided into multiple units, were the houses that rich people lived in. The houses everyone else lived in were torn down long ago.
Of course there's selection bias. And what was considered a "home" of that era was very wide ranging. A lot of people lived in what was little better than a shack. and yes, many of the pre-war homes that are still standing were for rich people back then and are today. But there are a lot of pre-war homes in areas that are considered undesirable or even slums in many midwestern and east coast cities. Many of them modified for multi-tenancy, yes but also many still standing in a state of dilapidation as old homes cost money to maintain and modernize.
Anyways, most people didn't live in single family homes before the 1950's. Tenements, apartments, and packing multiple families into a single space was very common across classes of people that weren't rich. Single family homes and land ownership that is attainable is a vert post-war idea. The Communists built huge towers with shared spaces (which we also did for our urban lower classes) and we built sprawling subdivisions of vernacular single family homes with private spaces.
Also, from 1930 to about 1947 we built almost nothing due to the depression and then the war. Most of the tenements and apartments and shard living spaces were becoming old and broken down and this combined with the better living conditions a suburban home and a car could provide fueled the great migration out of the cities. Of course, the lower classes were left with the last-gen homes and unable to repair the through thrift or wealth.
That argument scales to any market segment. And it's not always the absolute cost of maintenance, but the decreasing value of performing it. Welcome to American West.
>houses will simply fall into disrepair, as nobody will be able to afford the costs of fixing them as they age
That has been true of mansions for hundreds if not thousands of years ;)
My opinion is that the author is totally off the mark due to conflating two separate aspects of modern home building.
I’ll use these definitions in order to decouple the two aspects.
McMansions are custom homes built by the nouveau rich. They can be in greenfield developments or as teardowns in established neighborhoods.
Spec ("speculative") homes are houses built as a collection by a developer and then sold to their owners. There is usually an HOA.
A McMansion can be built poorly for sure. But more frequently it is built with a "most home for the least cost" mentality. The materials and quality are high but there's something missing. I think what's missing is craftsmanship and architectural finesse.
Spec houses can be built well and may are. But like McMansions - the dominant philosophy is "most home for the least cost". Those that are not built well - and that's is likely the majority - will result in large, unexpected repair costs for future owners.
McMansions and spec houses usually occupy mutually exclusive developments - which make sense since someone building a custom home doesn't want to be next door to a spec house.
A McMansion is only slightly more likely to avoid the "something is missing" aspect of large modern spec houses. And it's from the same root cause - a lack of craftsmanship and architectural finesse. Where I lived until recently and for over twenty years, there were several houses torn down and replace with McMansions. The one beside me was originally a small (~1200 sq ft) brick ranch like mine. It was replaced by a McMansion. The owner/builder told me directly that she builds "the most home for the least cost". She lives in them for three years and then moves and repeats. The one across the street replaced a very charming stone house in the Tutor style. I was sad to see it go. Its replacement was a house that occupies most of the lot - a 3/4 acre lot - but I do include all the ugly "hard" landscaping as occupying the lot. The lot had looked so large and beautiful with the small stone house. Both McMansion were built by the same builder. Neither had an architect (structure or landscape) involved - and it shows.
Another example on my street was truly a head-scratcher. The owners tore down a really nice 3000 sq ft brick house, and replace it with a really ugly 4000 sq ft house of much lower quality design and materials.
I get that the standard use of "McMansion" does encompass both types of building, but I have long distinguished McMansions as those that are custom-built. If someone else builds and then sell you a house, It’s no kind of mansion – it just a large spec house.
I have little experience with spec developments. I've no reason to venture into such exurb wastelands and thankfully all of my friends share that opinion and don't buy them. I assume they exist here - but they are dozens of miles from the city.
I live in a charming and affordable neighborhood that is a 15 minute drive to downtown (with light rail connections too). The houses were built in several generations from the 1920s to the 1970s. The schools consistently rate among the best in the state. McMansions are exceedingly rare here. Houses are rarely cheap and are of high quality. Lots are small and zoning doesn't allow for much of an increase in footprint. Even if it did, it would make no economic or aesthetic sense to tear one down. It does make sense to fix one up.
I've always considered McMansions to be more of style than an actual building type, usually it has to do with a mismatching of architectural styles, almost within the vein of "what a poor person thinks a rich persons house would have". Some of the diagram like posts on McMansion hell are a good example here is one, https://mcmansionhell.com/post/699110995935805440/a-fine-sel...
Also I think many of what is considered a mcmansion to be mass produced, that is if wikipedia is to be believed.
