In many cases, it houses immigrants living with their extended family.
According to Pew, a record 60.6 million Americans — almost one in five – lived in multigenerational households in 2014, defined by Pew as a having two or more adult generations or grandparents and grandchildren. This is about a 30% increase in just seven years; in 2007 there were 46.5 million people living in multigen households.The Pew data shows this increase is largely based on adult children (defined by Pew as 25 years or older) living at home with mom and dad. In fact, for the first time in 130 years, living with parents surpassed other living arrangements for those 18 to 34.
And the trend is increasing across all racial groups. The Pew data shows that among this multigen population: 28% are Asians; both Hispanics and blacks account for 25% each and whites are at the tail end with 15%. However, across these various racial groups, each has seen an increase of two percentage points since Pew’s 2009 data.
Asians make up less than 6% of the US population, so they are disproportionately represented in the multigen household.
In other cases, it is investors maximizing the value of their new land by building McMansions.
"As the value of land in Metro Vancouver increases, the existing houses have to be demolished and bigger ones erected in order for the value of the land to be realized," says Gordon Price, a former Vancouver alderman who sat through many monster-house debates during his 12 years on council. "Even if you've bought a beautifully preserved 1920s bungalow, it has to come down because you've spent $2-million for the lot and you won't get your retail value for that unless there's a building appropriate to the value."
In other cases, these are secret boarding houses.
In some respects, if a 25-bedroom house is fully occupied, that means that four or five other normal-sized houses will not have to be built. It might be bad news for neighbors in terms of parking, property taxes and utility fees, but it helps drive down the cost of housing for society. (Also, it might be better for the environment.)
Both bigger houses for smaller families and fully occupied monster houses seem to accord with current trends in American geography.
Here is the Case-Shiller home price index, which measures the cost of homes in comparison with family income.
Note that between 1920 and 1940, home prices in relation to income collapsed. Shiller explained this as a result of calamity.
1921–1942: This was the only period where prices were considerably below their 1890 level throughout. The start of the decline roughly corresponds with the start of World War I, which was followed by the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918, the Great Depression and finally World War II all of which, Shiller argues, could have affected home prices negatively.
The 1920s was also a period when house-building techniques began to modernize. IIRC, this led to a lowering of the costs of housing.
(It has been said that the 1920s were the "real" beginning of the 20th century in the US in terms of modernization. Europe lost its faith in progress and civilization in the aftermath of WW1, a disillusionment that also struck the US. But the US went into emotional denial during the 1920s and rebooted its optimism in technological progress, which can be seen in 1920s Art Deco design, for example. The denial of the 1920s expressed itself in an odd mix of hedonism, financial speculation, a desire for "normalcy" and political conservatism. The same kind of cultural phenomena happened in the 1980s in the US after the disillusionments of the 1970s.)
These modern building techniques advanced in sophistication during WW2, and allowed for rapid mass production of houses in suburbs during the 1950s after two decades of suppressed demand.
Detroit might be a useful example of the evolution of American geography. The middle classes began to move out into the suburbs in the 1950s. Here is a graph of Detroit's population.
Simultaneously, manufacturing began to make up a smaller part of the economy.
Nationally, this trend goes back to the end of WW2.
Even when manufacturing output expanded, jobs in manufacturing contracted.
Here are several trends since the 1840s:
- Farming employment has been in long decline.
- Factory employment peaked in 1950, then declined.
- Service employment has been on a constant rise.
Manufacturing does not happen in the suburbs. The factory jobs are either in the cities (automobile production in Detroit), which began to decline after WW2, or the rural areas (textile production in the South) which are now in decline.
From the end of WW2, the cities languished and the suburbs prospered. In the public mind, the cities were associated with poor minorities.
There is a sense that in the 21st century, this has reversed.
Who gravitates to the cities today?
- Professionals.
- Artistic types.
- Educated youth.
- Older corporate executives who used to live in suburbs. (Corporate middle management is being moved out of major global cities into mid-sized cities like Phoenix and Denver.)
The top ranks of management are Republicans; everyone else in these groups tend to be Democrats. (The current tax reform shifts the burden of taxes from corporations to professionals, who tend to be Democrats.) Each of these groups tend to be affluent, to various degrees. This drives up the cost of urban real estate. Also, rich white liberals love the city, but they protest the construction of any new office or residential buildings; the lack of new supply drives up prices.
Some of the poor who used to live in the city are getting priced out. They are moving to houses in the less expensive suburbs, far from the social services that used to help them. Rich white liberals in the city are willing to pay higher taxes for urban amenities like opera houses, hospitals and public schools for their kids, but they don't want to pay for services in suburbs for the poor.
And so here we are.
What is to be done?
It's a matter of supply and demand.
One issue is housing supply. Where there is now already development, there should be mega-development. In the cities, that means building skyscrapers, and in the suburbs that means building bigger houses (which is what is happening anyway).
There should be no restriction on building size or on building heights. The restriction would be on resource consumption. Buildings would be required to severely limit the amount of electricity and water that they utilize and consume, and they would process much of their wastewater. They would be "semi-autonomous buildings".
This restriction on consumption would have a limiting effect on the size of buildings. So "monster houses" in the suburbs would be allowed, but they would have water catchment systems and yards that would require less water. They would also have solar panels and some battery storage with the requirement that they reduce their evening electricity load by 50% the household average. Also, houses and buildings would be built to be far more durable.
All of this would cost a little more, but it would have the effect of limiting the size of houses and buildings. (Currently, the size and costs of houses in the US keeps expanding anyway, and without any apparent necessity.)
Ideally, the greatest restriction should be that building on new land should be discouraged. Also, building in the kind of (risky, self-indulgent) places that people especially love to live in, like forests and ocean fronts, should especially be discouraged.
The other issue is demand.
In the US, there is a demand for ever-larger houses. There are various theories to explain this, such as:
- The house is a symbol of "success" in the US, especially for the older generation. (American culture is unique in that financial success is equated with virtue. This is related to an early, formative Protestant ethic, as well as a unique culture of enterprise.)
- The house serves as a surrogate community or family in the US, especially for older "empty nesters" who should be downsizing.
- Home sizes increase after a recession (although home sizes are generally always increasing in the US and recessions are merely interruptions).
- Increasing home sizes in the face of decreasing family size are proof that the US is a totally awesome country where dreams come true.
(The last website might be taken as evidence of how Americans deal with tragedy and disillusionment -- for example, with the 2008 financial sector and housing meltdown -- by doubling down on denial and resuscitating their faith in "progress", amplifying their risk-taking economic behavior, partying harder than ever, and intensifying their escape into domesticity and political conservatism.)
The last website is libertarian, and there is an extended discussion in the comment section on:
1) Is the ever-expanding American house due to tax subsidies?, and
2) Is a house really a good investment? (and, relatedly, What does one mean by an "investment"?).
It could be that the demand for ever-increasing home sizes in the US is largely a product of policy. The issue would be demand-side economics -- tax breaks for the rich and subsidies for the poor.
Liberals wring their hands over suburban sprawl and ever-increasing home sizes in the US. But is it to some degree liberal policies that have encouraged ever-larger homes in the name of the "American dream"?
There is another issue that the article mentions, which is decreasing family sizes in the US, which also affects demand for housing.
Fertility rates in the US are in fact remarkably stable at 2.0 children per family, slightly below the "replacement level" of 2.1 children. This is a very high fertility rate compared to other advanced economies.
Japan has a very low fertility rate, in contrast.
The historical trend is for developed countries to have lower fertility rates; but when those advanced economies enter prolonged periods of stagnation, fertility rates fall further. This leads, as in the case of Japan, to a vicious circle, where lower population levels decrease demand for goods and services, and the resulting deflationary economy inhibits higher birth rates.
Another related issue is immigration rates. Economically, higher immigration rates increase demand for housing.
The US has a very high immigration rate, with 14% of Americans being foreign born. In contrast, foreigners make up only 1.5% of Japan's population, and they generally don't become Japanese citizens. (Even ethnic Koreans and Chinese born in Japan typically forgo naturalization).
There could be a trend in immigration policy in the US that favors:
1) more educated immigrants; and
2) fewer immigrants.
The most recent major immigration reform in the US was the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. It opened up immigration to non-Europeans, with an emphasis on reuniting families and targeting immigrants with special skills (e.g., engineers).
The 1965 Act marked a change from past U.S. policy which had discriminated against non-northern Europeans. In removing racial and national barriers the Act would significantly, and unintentionally, alter the demographic mix in the U.S.The new law maintained the per-country limits, but also created preference visa categories that focused on immigrants' skills and family relationships with citizens or U.S. residents. The bill set numerical restrictions on visas at 170,000 per year, with a per-country-of-origin quota. However, immediate relatives of U.S. citizens and "special immigrants" had no restrictions.
This was at once a step toward greater ethnic and racial inclusiveness and toward greater selectivity in terms of job skills. In terms of identifying a trend, this would be a hint or intimation of where things are heading. This would be toward
1) colorblind policies that do not discriminate in terms of ethnicity, but that
2) do carefully discriminate in terms of education level.
In fact, the 1965 Act, which is at once both generous and shrewd, seems out of step with the attitudes of many Americans in the 21st century in terms of its generosity. While there seems to be no desire to return to an exclusively European-origin immigration policy, the idea of "no immigration" is beginning to seem a possibility. In particular, there is increasing sentiment that "reuniting families" is a corrupt loophole ("anchor babies").
This populist xenophobia reflects economic reality. Typically, immigrant groups seek to expand immigration quotas for their own group in order to increase their political and economic power. But in the 2016 presidential election, almost half of all Hispanic voters in Florida voted for Donald Trump. A conservative political orientation might reflect the affluence of Hispanics in Florida (Cubans), as well as the cultural conservatism of Hispanics more generally. But certainly some of those Hispanic voters were working class and/or (fiscally) liberal. Not only do they compete economically with illegal aliens, but also with legal immigrants. In the United States of the 21st century, working class jobs have become increasingly scarce, with the resulting spectacle of naturalized immigrants voting against other immigrants from their own country of origin.
Nevertheless, the same populist movement that seeks to limit immigration also wants to re-industrialize the United States. In that case, highly educated immigrants will be needed. This might run counter to populist xenophobia, but the US has always turned toward foreigners to fill its ranks of engineers and scientists.
So, in the future there may be greater restrictions on immigration -- even while the most educated and talented of foreigners may be wooed by the US. With fewer immigrants, especially working-class immigrants, there would be less demand for housing, although there might be more McMansions for wealthy immigrants.
Again, reduced immigration would reduce demand for homes. But there is one more potential trend that would reduce demand for larger homes.
It turns out that many young, cool, hip, educated, creative millennials who supposedly want to live permanently in the city actually want to live in the suburbs. They seem to differ from their predecessors in that they may want to DOWNSIZE. They want smaller houses and apartments in the inner suburbs that are closer to the city.
So what’s going on? Aren’t millennials all about urban life?
“Between 1978 and 1990, there was a 32 percent increase in births, so now there are 32 percent more young adults in the city,” Dowell Myers, professor of demography and urban planning at the University of Southern California told Time, who has argued that the phenomenon of city-loving millennials is mostly a myth. “That upswing has led people to think that there’s a real change in taste, when there’s just a lot more young people born 25 years ago.”
Most millennials turned 25 in 2015, Myers said, meaning the demographics of millennials are changing. This, however, doesn’t mean that growth in city centers is declining. But in most metros places, including Houston, millennial population growth is happening more quickly in the suburbs than in urban centers.
The Kinder Houston Area Survey found that 50 percent of Houstonians would prefer to live in “a smaller home in a more urbanized area, within walking distance of shops and workplaces rather than in a single-family home with a big yard where you would need to drive almost everywhere you want to go.”
What might be the influence of personal technology in this trend?
The older generation of Americans treasure the house as a symbol of their aspirations that also serves as a repository of artifacts that embody precious memories.
But what happens when one's accomplishments and memories are preserved instead on social media? That is, the core traditional attitudes and values have not changed so much down the generations. What changes are the expression of those values.
How radically can attitudes toward housing change?
Perhaps Japan can serve as an example.
In Japan, the lifespan of the average house is supposedly less than 30 years.
Unlike in other countries, Japanese homes gradually depreciate over time, becoming completely valueless within 20 or 30 years. When someone moves out of a home or dies, the house, unlike the land it sits on, has no resale value and is typically demolished. This scrap-and-build approach is a quirk of the Japanese housing market that can be explained variously by low-quality construction to quickly meet demand after the second world war, repeated building code revisions to improve earthquake resilience and a cycle of poor maintenance due to the lack of any incentive to make homes marketable for resale.Everywhere from major metropolitan areas such as Tokyo and Osaka to struggling mid-size cities to suburban housing estates, renovated buildings are an evolving niche in the property market, emblematic of the dramatic transformation under way in Japan. The country is shrinking, with a negative growth rate that’s expected to bring its current population of about 127 million down to 88 million by 2065. It’s also an ageing society, and within 20 years over a third of its inhabitants will be 65 or older. As the population shrinks and ages, it is also concentrating into metropolitan areas, leaving millions of suburban and rural homes vacant. The current vacancy rate nationwide is about 13%, according to the Nomura Research Institute, and that figure is expected to rise above 30% by 2033. Coupled with Japan’s stagnant economy, these statistics have many convinced that the market for new buildings will begin to dry.
In some cases, refurbishment is radical.
Younger people, particularly in urban areas, have more flexible options. To accommodate them, new companies are looking beyond conventional housing. In recent years, a number of small development companies have been buying up older buildings and giving them new uses. The Tokyo-based company ReBITA has been converting apartment buildings, offices and company dormitories into shared live-work spaces – affordable rental units with common kitchens and work areas. Such spaces were uncommon in Japan just five years ago, says Azby Brown, director of the Kanazawa Institute of Technology’s Future Design Institute in Tokyo. “It’s a new lifestyle and I don’t think a lot of the big housing companies have picked up on it yet.” He says it’s as much about reducing the cost of housing as embracing a more community-oriented form of living. Some even see these types of social space as a roundabout way to reverse the country’s low birth rate.Through its association with the Urban Renaissance Agency, Muji has begun renovating and redecorating unitsin public housing blocks to attract younger tenants – tearing out walls, replacing clunky kitchen cabinets with open storage spaces and racks, clearing space for bicycle storage.“The old design doesn’t fit with younger people’s tastes,” says Koji Kawachi, director of Muji’s dwelling space operation, noting that many of the buildings have a cramped, overly partitioned layout. “The renovation is based on the idea that small, separated rooms can be integrated into larger spaces,” he says. The company strips the rooms of excessive finishes and replaces them with clean white surfaces and spare wood furnishings.
This is the economic explanation for why the Japanese have historically resisted the purchase and refurbishment of older homes, and why financially strapped younger Japanese are more willing live in refurbished homes.
There are other theories as to why the average lifespan of a house in Japan is 38 years (as opposed to 100 years in the US).
- A culturally ingrained love of newness as spiritually clean and pure.
- Post-war housing that was shoddy.
- Constant earthquakes make the Japanese feel that houses are disposable and that older homes are potentially dangerous (an irrational belief that reflects a pervasive cautiousness).
- Regulations that ensue after major earthquakes classify older homes as inadequate.
These reasons may be true and valid, but they ignore a couple of other influences.
The private, domestic realm in Japan is a refuge of individuality, and consequently Japanese often have rigorous hobbies (flower arranging, calligraphy, music) through which they can express their creativity and uniqueness. The house is likewise seen as a private, transient mode of self-expression, the way Snapchat is for American teenagers.
Another reason might be that Japanese and other East Asian peoples do not like to purchase used items because they feel that something of their previous owner's essence adheres to the item.
This reflects a traditional "panpsychist" worldview in which all objects possess some qualities of consciousness.
In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that consciousness, mind or soul (psyche) is a universal and primordial feature of all things. Panpsychists see themselves as minds in a world of mind.
Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers like Thales, Parmenides, Plato, Averroes, Spinoza, Leibniz and William James. Panpsychism can also be seen in ancient philosophies such as Stoicism, Taoism, Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism. During the 19th century, panpsychism was the default theory in philosophy of mind, but it saw a decline during the middle years of the 20th century with the rise of logical positivism.[1][2] The recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness has revived interest in panpsychism.
According to Graham Parkes: "Most of traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean philosophy would qualify as panpsychist in nature. For the philosophical schools best known in the west — Neo-confucianism and Japanese Buddhism — the world is a dynamic force field of energies known as qi or bussho (Buddha nature) and classifiable in western terms as psychophysical."
Even more than other East Asians, in their popular culture, the Japanese are prone to see otherwise inanimate objects -- rivers, rocks, dolls, robots -- as possessing a soul or spirit.
If one looks at the refurbishing of homes in Japan, one striking pattern is that the refurbished home is radically altered. The old home is gutted to the shell, and an entirely different and often unfamiliar design is implanted. So this is not a "refurbishment" in the American sense, in which a newly purchased house will come with new carpets and kitchen cabinets and a fresh coat of paint. This is practically a new structure.
This resonates with the "ship of Theseus" paradox from philosophy.
Does an object that has all its components replaced remain fundamentally the same object?
In Japan, a home that has been stripped down to its shell and rebuilt with a new design is considered a new home -- at least in the minds of the more economically desperate younger generation. The older generation, in contrast, might still feel uncomfortable with a rebuilt structure.
What are a few commonalities in housing trends in the US and Japan?
1) The values and attitudes of the younger generation might at first seem to diverge from those of the older generation, but it is mostly a matter of expression, not of substance. But the new expression of old values might develop in unforeseen and significant ways.
2) There is economic pressure on the younger generation to downsize and live in more urban areas.
3) There is technological innovation that allows for change.
4) There is the slightest shift to a semi-collectivist lifestyle (e.g., dormitory life) for young adults.
There is the possibility that many of today's McMansions for small, wealthy families in the affluent suburbs will be tomorrow's shared houses for aspiring young professionals who would utilize self-driving taxi services and largely work from home. Economically and environmentally, this would be great news.
What has become of the McMansion?
By 2016, no one was buying McMansions anymore.
https://chicago.curbed.com/2016/9/13/12902744/chicago-mcmansions-sales-report
Back in the 2000s, the assumption was that "Home prices just keep going up!", so that buying the biggest possible and most expensive house was seen as the wisest investment. That is incorrect.However, there’s some concrete evidence that shows that home buyers are glossing over the marble-plated homes that really defined the ‘90s and early 2000s and are buying more modest residences in the city. According to a recent analysis from Trulia covered by the Chicago Tribune, the McMansion’s day "has come and gone."
McMansion owners are finding that their homes, generally in the 3,000 to 5,000 square foot range, are spending longer on the market and are taking more price cuts than more traditional homes. According to the data from Trulia, premiums for McMansions have dropped significantly just in the last few years. And the median price for these large homes has also dropped a bit—from $598,000 in 2007 to $485,000 for this year. But beyond cultural trends focusing on excess and consumption, the Tribune notes that many home buyers who purchased these large, newly constructed homes in the early 2000s believed that they were making a smart investment decision and assumed that these already large and pricey homes would continue appreciating in value over time.
McMansions are usually associated with the housing boom of the 2000s.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-mcmansions-price-drop-chicago-0906-biz-20160902-story.html
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-mcmansions-price-drop-chicago-0906-biz-20160902-story.html
The McMansion style, built between 2001 and 2007 and averaging 3,000 to 5,000 square feet, lacks the appeal with today's buyers compared to old vintage homes or large freshly built homes.
The realization is especially hard on homeowners trying to sell because when they bought the giant homes in the early 2000s, they thought of them as great investments, Feinstein said.
Then, the idea was that bigger was better because prices presumably would keep going up.
Now, housing analysts say the day of the McMansion has come and gone. An analysis just completed by Trulia shows that the amount buyers are willing to pay for McMansions over other homes has fallen 26 percent in just four years. As homes in general have been regaining value, McMansions have been losing appeal in comparison to others as the giants of the pre-crash years have aged.What distinguishes a McMansion from a real mansion was the McMansion's low quality and comparatively low price. Even in the 2000s, it was regarded as peculiar that some buyers would consider the purchase of a large house made out of cheap materials as a shrewd long-term investment.
As McMansions were being built in the early 2000s, some observers questioned whether the homes — named after the generic, mass-produced approach of fast food — would remain desirable. They were criticized for being ostentatious and cheaply built. They were often stuffed onto suburban lots that seemed too small, where the main structure appeared to be dominated by the three-car garage.
Targeted at Generation X in their homebuying prime as they raised families, many of the buyers in their 30s and early 40s lost the homes in foreclosure as values plunged. Now, McLaughlin said, there are few buyers for the pricey homes in part because of a change in demographics.
Across three generations -- Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials -- there is just not much enthusiasm for buying someone else's fake mansion.
Gen Xers have been scarred psychologically and financially from the crash in their home values, short sales and foreclosures, he said. With tarnished credit scores, many who lost homes can't afford to buy again.
Meanwhile, millennials are not marrying and having families at the rate of previous generations, loans are tough to get, and renting in cities is more popular with single affluent 20-somethings than buying large suburban homes. Baby boomers tend to downsize rather than replace family homes with McMansions, McLaughlin said.But wait! It turns out that some people do still want giant homes. But of a different style.
Still, people seeking size want homes that are built new rather than the dated McMansions that appealed to early 2000s tastes, said Tim Schiller, an @properties real estate agent who sells in Elmhurst.
"People 35 to 45 with two careers and 1.2 kids want bigger, bigger, bigger," he said. "But they want dark floors, gray walls and white kitchen cabinets," which are in contrast to the McMansion style. For clients trying to sell McMansions, he tries to persuade them first to redo the floors and cabinets as well as the paint. Then, he said, they sell at higher prices.
Such an overhaul, however, can approach $100,000. And redoing floors is hard to do when people live in the homes.
It's tough for a person to stomach making such expensive changes when they still appear new, Feinstein said. "A lot have beautiful cherry floors that were in vogue when built, but buyers now want floors darker or a rich brown."
Also, those who can afford and do desire giant houses prefer new ones.
Generally, buyers will pay 20 percent more for a new home than an older home, even when the older home is just five to 10 years old, McLaughlin said.It isn't just McMansions that are getting snubbed by homebuyers now. While low-priced homes are in demand and in short supply on the market, luxury homes built years before McMansions also are selling slowly, and sellers are being forced to cut their asking prices.
In the Chicago area, Re/Max research found that for homes and condos on the market for more than $1 million, prices dropped 9 percent during the first three months of this year.
The homes were not moving quickly despite brisk sales in the $200,000 to $300,000 range. Sellers had them on the market on average 155 days before arriving at a deal with a buyer. Last year it took 118 days.The rise of the "McModern"
What seems to be happening is that affluent young Americans are not buying McMansions because they are instead buying gigantic pseudo-modernist "McModerns" in the suburbs.
http://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-are-ditching-the-mcmansion-for-the-mcmodern-2017-8
For nearly 40 years, the McMansion has dominated American suburbs. The cookie-cutter homes, which typically measure between 3,000 and 5,000 square feet, are meant to exude affluence without costing buyers a fortune. Some architects have criticized the home style for its lazy design and haphazard construction.
In recent years, the McMansion has fallen out of fashion for a new type of home: the "McModern." Like the McMansion, the McModern is designed for the masses. But instead of borrowing from traditional architectural styles, McModerns take inspiration from modernist architecture, characterized by an emphasis on vertical or horizontal lines, ample natural light, and a clean aesthetic.It is interesting that McMansions and McModerns are described as being "for the masses".
Who exactly is buying the McModern?
Young urban liberals from the tech industry.
In a recent Curbed article, Wagner writes that McModerns have been popping up in liberal cities on the West Coast, the Southwest, and the East Coast. And they've become popular with young, tech-focused, highly-educated millennials.
Unlike the McMansion, the McModern is often more minimalist, she said. McModerns can lack the ornamentation that define McMansions, like bump-outs with mix-matched materials and cathedral ceilings.
Modernist architecture emerged in the first half of the 20th century. Famous architects who designed in the style include Frank Lloyd Wright (Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania), Philip Johnson (the Seagram Building in Manhattan), and Le Corbusier (Notre du Haut in Ronchamp, France).Aside from its cosmetic innovations, the McModern is substantially identical to McMansions.
Unlike most modernist homes, McModerns are usually not made by individual architects, but by home-building companies that use pattern books. Similar to the McMansion, the McModern is a single-family home constructed from cheap materials, like vinyl and stucco board.
As Wagner notes, many of today's homebuyers view the modernist building as a high-brow form of architecture. But with the McModern, many qualities of the McMansion still exist — it's still mass-produced and, therefore, a departure from the modernist playbook it takes notes from.McMansions are described as creatures of the 2000s, but their designs go back to the 1980s. The McModern is the first upgrade of the McMansion since the inception of the latter in the 1980s.
https://www.cbsnews.com/media/10-mcmoderns-that-are-taking-over-from-mcmansions/
Forget the once-popular "McMansion" that popped up like crazy in suburban neighborhoods during the 1980s and '90s. "McModerns" are the new trend that will soon be showing up on your street.
Most people can recognize a McMansion when they see one. They're large, inexpensively constructed houses that lack a cohesive architectural style. If you see craftsman-style columns on an otherwise Mediterranean-style house, for example, you could be looking at a McMansion.
With the resurgence of modernism over the last decade -- for which the 2007 TV show "Mad Men" is often credited -- the McMansion has adapted to homebuyer tastes.
"What's so interesting is it's the first evolution in exterior home trends in the last 20 or 30 years," said Kate Wagner, founder of the popular website McMansion Hell, which is dedicated to roasting the worst McMansion offenders. "The traditionalist design aesthetic of McMansions has been consistent since the 1980s."Under its cheap plastic skin, the McModern is really just a McMansion. This parallels the way wealthy young urban liberal hipsters are basically .... 1980s yuppies, all over again.
The McModerns resulting from this aesthetic shift aren't all that different from their predecessors, Wagner said. Think of modernism as more of an outfit that McMansions wear. The interior of a McModern will typically follow the same design logic of a McMansion, as if the house was built from the inside out. While the exteriors follow the straight lines of modern architecture, they still have an erratic appearance.
"You'll see different parts of the house clobbered together," said Wagner. "The entryway might be covered in stone, but there's aluminum panels for the garage. It gives it a piecemeal aesthetic."
So what makes McModerns so popular? For one thing, Wagner said, modernism is a design language that has been enthusiastically embraced by wealthy millennials, who are attracted to its simplicity.
McModerns also typically have a more cohesive architectural style than McMansions, due to their more specific inspiration.Lastly, McModerns preserve what a lot of homebuyers like about McMansions. They often have big rooms, open-concept floor plans, lots of garage space and luxury amenities like high-end kitchen appliances, spacious master suites and "bonus" spaces, such as sunrooms and offices.
While McModerns are popular for a reason, attracting lots of attention in recent months, they also have qualities that are easy for architectural purists to dislike. For Wagner, it's "the huge wastefulness of them." Not only are these homes oversized, she said, they don't advance architecture the way that homes built and owned by the (relatively) wealthy once did.The last point is important. The market for fake mansions is simultaneously a "mass market" and an affluent elite market because the elites of the past had good taste.
In traditional aristocratic societies of inherited wealth and status, the homes of the upper classes tend to be tasteful and elegant.
In contrast, in modern, democratic, industrialized, capitalistic societies in which upward mobility is more common, BIGNESS and vulgar ostentation are put on proud display.
There is much talk about "income inequality", and the McMansion/McModern show both sides of the issue.
A society with unusually high levels of upward mobility embodies equality of opportunity (at least, in the minds of those who do move up in the world). However, that same dynamic society might be expected to display a stark and growing inequality of condition, with an ever-increasing hierarchy of wealth.
Such a society might seem paradoxical in other ways as well. The ancient, fixed caste system would have been replaced by a more fluid class system, not by a socialistic ideal of radical equality. The social strata would be marked by a constant churn, with people from below moving up, and those on top eventually get knocked down by ambitious new talent. Such a society would be at once grimly stoic and wildly optimistic, with an unusual cultural (not economic) egalitarianism. This sense of equality would not be based on equal status, but on a hard-won understanding of the vagaries of fortune.
Frank Sinatra might have expressed it best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoXLKgX0MgU
In such a relatively fluid yet hierarchical society, most people -- despite their wealth, or lack thereof -- would consider themselves to be "middle class"
1) if they owned a house, and
2) if they did not have servants.
The perfect symbol of such a society would be a large, ostentatious house made out of plastic and fiberboard. (Servants not included.)
One problem with these big houses is...
... What if ten years from now nobody wants to buy the McModerns? There is a certain amnesia at play here, because it is obvious that nobody seems to want to buy the McMansions that were built ten years ago.
But the problem is not just Baby Boomers not being able to unload their McMansions.
To some extent, they don't want to sell them in the first place.
Aging in place
Another problem is that the older generation, the Baby Boomers, are not selling their houses. They are "aging in place" and not downsizing.
There are emotional reasons for this Baby Boomer reluctance to sell.
An article from 2015 explains just that.
As part of a broader initiative to understand where future home and community demand is headed, The Demand Institute surveyed more than 4,000 Baby Boomer households about their current living situation, moving intentions, and housing preferences.
We found that the common wisdom, which holds that Baby Boomers will downsize and head for a condo in a sunny place, appears to be wrong. First, nearly two-thirds of Boomers have no plans to move at all. They will “age in place” in homes and communities where they have often lived for a decade or more. Second, those who are moving are not going very far. Sixty-seven percent of movers will stay in-state and over half will move within 30 miles of their current home. Being close to their communities and families is very important to them as they age. “Wanting to be closer to family” is as common a reason for Boomers to move as seeking a “change of climate.” Third, and perhaps most surprisingly, we find that many Baby Boomers are still seeking their “dream home.”
Of greater economic importance, nearly half of those that will move (46%) plan to increase the size of their home or spend more for a home that is the same size as the one they have now. Perhaps this seems odd—why are they upsizing at this life stage? What we are seeing is that many who are living in smaller homes than they would like, and many who are renting, are now acting on the housing plans they had to delay as a result of the economic difficulties of the past few years.
There are also economic reasons.
Many of them are still recuperating from the 2009 Great Recession.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/by-not-downsizing-baby-boomers-help-clog-up-the-real-estate-pipeline/2015/12/01/ec88299e-978f-11e5-b499-76cbec161973_story.html
Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, says there are multiple factors at work here, especially the lingering effects of the housing bust and the Great Recession. Homeowners of all ages lost billions of dollars of equity wealth from 2008 to 2011, he argues, and many owners are still rebuilding sufficient equity to allow them to sell and move without having to bring money to the settlement. Boomers are a part of that group, and some have been forced to postpone their moves and sales.
Also, by not selling their homes, Baby Boomers have thus driven up the price of all real estate, including the price of smaller homes that they would have moved into. This feeds a vicious cycle. They cannot afford to buy because ... they hesitate to sell (because they cannot afford to buy, etc.).
David Crowe, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, points to a feedback-loop effect that is discouraging some boomers from listing and selling: Fewer listings means more competition for a limited supply of homes in hot markets. That competition pushes up prices for everybody, including boomers who might like to downsize but can’t find a replacement home that’s both affordable and acceptable. So they wait.
Eventually, the other shoe will drop. Boomers will get older and be forced to sell for all kinds of reasons. This sell off could lead to a national real estate "correction" toward lower prices.
But changes are coming. Fannie Mae’s Simmons observes that the boomer logjam is a temporary issue. “Boomers will not inhabit this vast inventory [32 million homes] forever,” and when their circumstances change — which they inevitably will, with age — watch out. “Their actions will reverberate through the housing market.”
Again, this is exacerbated by the economic dilemma of Millennials, who have neither the economic means nor the inclination to purchase large older homes.
These various problems exceed the issue of McMansions in particular. Nevertheless, they are worth studying in terms of the general real estate markets of the coming decade.
This is because there could be a real estate crash in the 2020s.
The housing market crash in the late 2020s?
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/13/boomers-worry-they-cant-sell-those-big-suburban-homes-when-the-time-comes.html
"The McMansions that soon-to-retire people purchased in the 80s and 90s are a very difficult sell right now," said Melissa Rubenstein, a former real estate attorney who now sells luxury properties with Re/Max HomeTowne Realty in Bergen County, New Jersey. Many are outdated and may not include a first floor bedroom and bath suite for aging in place or in-laws.
"We're finding these homes are an albatross for clients," said Michael E. Chadwick, a financial planner and owner of Chadwick Financial Advisors in Unionville, Connecticut.
"We've got several right now who have been trying to sell them and move south, and they've cut the asking price by over 30 percent each and they're still not going anywhere fast," he said.
Here's what's more: Homeowners who thought their big house was going to be their ticket to retirement may realize that's not the case once they analyze the numbers.Profits may vanish
"People look at purchase price and sales price and think they've made a lot, but once you factor in repairs, maintenance, taxes, insurance, upgrades, renovations, they lose money most of the time," Chadwick said."The taxes and insurance are outlandish. The younger generation doesn't want to own or take care of these homes. It's all about free time not being tied down to a property."
Then there's capital gains taxes: The more valuable and the more equity there is, the more taxes are due at the time of sale.
Large house owners have the most trouble when they've expanded or improved their home beyond the rest of the neighborhood. Then, they become stressed to learn they can't get the price they want, said Michael Fisher, a real estate agent with Century 21 Beachside Realtors in Orange County, California.
"They may have stayed in their small starter home due to personal financial or market conditions, keeping the children in the same schools or just love the area they live in," Fisher said.
"Rather than move as their needs changed they just added on a second story or expanded the home's footprint to accommodate their lifestyle," he said. "Now the home is as twice as large or more than any other home in their tract and can't get the same price per square foot as others have."
A recent report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies forecasts that the remodeling industry will remain robust over the next ten years. The growth will be driven, as ever, by the Baby Boomer generation, 80 percent of whom own homes, and two-thirds of whom have expressed a desire to “age in place.” This means that many of them are modifying their living quarters to include such “universal design” features as wider doors and hallways to accommodate wheelchair use.
Boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964—are a plentiful and relatively affluent lot; they’ve steered economic trends for decades. But as the oldest members of the generation amble into their 70s, housing analysts are wondering who will take up the mantle of remodeling—and home ownership—when they’re gone. Hopes are often pinned on the generation that last year overtook Boomers as the country’s largest: Millennials.There could be a housing crash in the 2020s if young Millenials don't buy those big houses in the suburbs when aging Boomers are forced to sell them nevertheless.
It’s a dilemma that has preoccupied Arthur C. Nelson, a University of Arizona professor who spoke with former CityLab staff writer Emily Badger in 2013 about what he dubbed “the great senior sell-off.” Nelson postulated that Boomers would soon be selling their homes in droves, but would be hard-pressed to find buyers—mainly because Millennials wouldn’t want to buy them.
Nelson pointed to the affordability issue as well as the fact that about a quarter of Millennials prefer urban housing, such as condos or townhouses, over the detached suburban homes that were the Boomers’ preferred habitat. Younger buyers, he said, will also be looking for starter homes—smaller than the big Colonials and split-levels that line America’s cul-de-sacs. “We can predict the next housing crash,” he said at the time. “That’ll be in about 2020.”Because Boomers are willing to renovate rather than move, this postpones the crash.
Four years later, Nelson tells CityLab that that he believes the sell-off will still occur—but later, in the mid- to late 2020s. This has to do with people deciding to defer selling their homes, hoping to get a better price later than settling for a lower price now. “Home values in much of the country are still less than those before the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009,” he says. Prior to the recession, the typical homeowner would sell a house about every six years. “It was like clockwork,” says Nelson. “This drove a lot of planning and development projections.”The demographic profile of the Millennial generation can be broken down according to their preferences of where they want to live.
- Around one-third of Millennials prefer to live in the suburbs.
- Another one-third of Millennials might prefer to live in the city where the good jobs and rich urban culture exist, but they are getting priced out by NIMBYs in the city who oppose further urban development, so they will also move to suburbs.
- The other third of Millennials, dedicated to city life, will opt to live in a condo in the "inner suburbs" on the edge of the city's downtown; a few hardcore urbanites will relocate to the downtown area of a cheaper city.
Regardless of when it occurs, the great senior sell-off won’t affect every Boomer equally. A large chunk of Millennials—Nelson posits around two-thirds—will want to buy suburban homes because they like the lifestyle, or because they will be priced out of cities like Washington, D.C. or Los Angeles, where housing costs are exorbitant. Most of the other third, he says, will want to live in central cities and the oldest, closest suburbs—though not necessarily downtown. The small percentage who prefer downtown living but cannot afford certain cities may move to more affordable ones, such as Philadelphia or Minneapolis.
Nelson predicts that the fringe areas surrounding cities will bring the biggest headaches for Boomers looking to unload their houses. Because Millennials will be looking for small homes when they finally start to buy in larger numbers, the sprawling McMansions of the exurbs won’t be desirable to many of them. “The Boomers in the exurbs are going to be in a real pickle,” says Nelson. “Even in a dynamic market like Washington, D.C. or other booming cities, the market for those homes is going to be soft.”What these two articles from 2017 fail to address is that those Millennials who do want to purchase and can afford a giant, mass-produced house in the suburbs would prefer:
1) a new house, and
2) a house of pseudo-modernist design (McModern).
So the situation of Baby Boomers stuck in their big houses could be even more dire than described.
One important question that goes unasked in the articles above is, Is there currently a housing bubble?
A related question is, What exactly is a housing bubble?
A housing bubble is not simply a dramatic rise in the price of housing.
A housing bubble exists when the price of housing rises to inordinate levels in relation to incomes in a certain area.
Glancing at the Case-Shiller index of house prices to income, it does seem that there has been a re-inflation of a housing bubble as of 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case%E2%80%93Shiller_index
The houses that would not sell easily would be characterized by being:
- expensive.
- large.
- old.
- of dated design.
- made of inferior material.
- far from downtown, in the outer suburbs.
The mainstream, commercial appropriation of dissent
The rise of the McModern is jarring.
The younger generation of Millennials are often described as embracing a "minimalist" lifestyle. For some of them, that seems to be true only cosmetically. It seems that many Millennials who can afford it want to buy a giant house with a (literal) veneer of minimalist pretensions (McModerns).
The earlier McMansion might be seen to reflect the appropriation of elements of the 1960s counterculture.
Enter evidence #1: The "great room", one of the classic features of the McMansion that combines the functions of many rooms into one room.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_room
A great room is a room inside a house that combines the roles of several more traditional rooms (e.g. the family room, the living room, the study, etc.) into one space. Great rooms typically have raised ceilings, and are usually placed at or near the center of the home. Great rooms have been common in American homes since the early 1990s.The great room is explained as an attempt to reproduce within a generic suburban house the grandeur of the medieval great halls.
The New York Times called the great room "the McMansion's signature space."
The concept of a great room hearkens back to the romanticized ideal of great halls and great chambers in medieval castles and mansions, which contained one large central room where everything happened. Developers of mid-range suburban homes in America tried to solve the problem of the "dead" living room and the split between the living and family rooms by "returning" to the idea of the great room. The general concept is one relatively central room, the crossroads of the house to be used for all of the family functions traditionally split between living and family rooms. The dominant feature of the great room is the raised ceiling, higher than other parts of the house, typically two stories with arching ceilings often referred to in real estate jargon as "cathedral ceilings".Modest glimmers of what would become the great room can be found in 1950s architecture.
The modern great room concept traces back to the "multipurpose room" in modernist homes built by Joseph Eichler in California in the 1950s and 1960s.[4] Developers started building high-end houses with great rooms in the 1970s and 1980s, at first simply adding vaulted entryways to ranch-style houses. An example of this is the house in the television series The Brady Bunch. Great rooms became a nearly ubiquitous feature of suburban homes constructed in America in the 1990s and 2000s.The "great room" comes into prominence in the 1980s, as it eclipsed the family room.
https://www.newhomesource.com/guide/articles/changing-room-names-reflect-how-we-live
“Living room” is probably an endangered term, threatened by the “great room” — an expanded and open cooking/living/entertainment space; the term probably came into common use in the ’80s and is now a popular design option, Lasner said.The emergence in the early 20th century of the "family room" itself reflected the disappearance of servants, and the need to have a space where children can be put under surveillance from the kitchen.
As servants, too, routinely became less commonplace, the kitchen grew in prominence as the lady of the house took over the cooking and needed simultaneously to be able to watch over the kids, he said.The "parlor" was an earlier 19th century development, and existed in relation to the outer "foyer". The parlor and the foyer were replaced in the early 20th century by the "living room".
The parlor, most associated with the Victorian era, was considered a relatively “public” room that walled off the family’s private (and less-fancy) spaces, he said.
“You’d keep the best china and best furniture there, and you’d receive visitors in the parlor if you were middle-class,” Lasner said.
Not every visitor made it past the foyer. Being invited from the foyer into the parlor connoted a certain privilege, he said.
“The foyer would have an uncomfortable hall stand, so if a tradesperson had come to the house and had to sit and wait, it would be uncomfortable, with no cushions,” to discourage any inclination to linger, he explained. “But if you had more business in the house, you would be invited into the parlor.”
The usage of “parlor” was gone by the 1920s, generally replaced by the “living room,” though that room’s exact arrival in the architectural lexicon is tough to pinpoint, he said.It is interesting how the living arrangements and vocabularies of the upper classes trickle down to the professional classes, the middle classes and the working class.
New names are constantly being coined for new types of rooms that reflect technological and demographic changes.
Where We’re GoingWhat is not mentioned is that the open floor plan -- the "great room" that often incorporates the kitchen, dining room, living room and family room -- that characterizes McMansions since the 1980s was directly inspired by the hippie ideal of living in a tent or tipi or yurt. (I once read that in the Parade section of a Sunday newspaper, but I cannot find the article.)
Homebuilders are still adding to our vocabularies — terms for rooms with specialized functions continue to pop up and be embraced by consumers. Fairly recent ones that have gained a toehold: media room, home office and “outdoor kitchen,” for example.
More are on the horizon, Pulte’s Dolenga said.
The company’s Del Webb division offers floor plans with a “hearth room,” which is a space next to the great room with a fireplace and two comfy seats, where the homeowners likely will hang out and read, she explained.
Pulte and other builders recently have popularized the notion of a “drop zone,” which usually is an expanded version of the mudroom (between the garage and the rest of the house), where the homeowner and kids can come in and drop everything — the clutter of backpacks, car keys, cell phones, etc. — but the space is designed so that the stuff has a place to go, in a neat and in an organized fashion, she said.
Then there’s the “planning center,” she said. At Pulte, it’s an area just off the kitchen: a dedicated computer space to pay bills, surf the Web on a tablet, do homework, etc.
One emerging design feature seems to be in search of a name. Lasner said that Lennar Corp. started something, semantically, with its NextGen floor plans in some markets. They function as a “home within a home” — essentially an apartment inside a house that allows multiple generations to live independently under one roof.
Other architects and builders also have designed variations on this theme, some of them units that are directly attached to the house; others are freestanding buildings on the same lot; still others are apartments built over a garage — all of them meant to appeal to multi-generational living. Lasner refers to such a concept as an “accessory unit,” though he admits the phrase lacks a certain panache.
If the concept catches on, what to call it? Pulte, for one, last year introduced in some markets an apartment-over-the-garage plan that it calls a “grand retreat.” But depending on their structure, they may be known as “granny flats,” “coach houses,” “backyard cottages,” “laneway houses” — the list goes on.
Stay tuned for what we’ll call the rooms of tomorrow.
The hippies were part of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, a popularized form of romantic rebellion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture
A counterculture (also written counter-culture) is a subculture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, often in opposition to mainstream cultural mores. A countercultural movement expresses the ethos and aspirations of a specific population during a well-defined era. When oppositional forces reach critical mass, countercultures can trigger dramatic cultural changes. Prominent examples of countercultures in Europe and North America include Romanticism (1790–1840), Bohemianism (1850–1910), the more fragmentary counterculture of the Beat Generation (1944–1964), followed by the globalized counterculture of the 1960s (1964–1974), usually associated with the hippie subculture and the diversified Punk subculture of the 1980s.It is stated that countercultures can trigger radical cultural revolution when they reach a "critical mass".
Is that true? Are there any example of such revolutions? The article does not provide examples.
Do countercultures even reach such a "critical mass"? Or was this "critical mass" (in the 1960s) really just a popularization of some previous less fashionable rebellion (in the 1950s), which was in turn commercialized (in the 1970)?
In fact, is this idea that a critical mass of dissent "can trigger dramatic cultural changes" itself one of the central beliefs of the counterculture? One facet of the 1960s counterculture explained by Theodore Roszak is that while political activists believed that economic and political change could alter a culture, this notion was discredited by the example of an imperialistic, repressive Soviet Union that was not so different from either traditional autocratic Russia or Nazi Germany. Consequently, for the counterculture, subjective, spiritual "consciousness raising", rather than economic and political revolution, would ultimately transform society by introducing a radical new "paradigm shift" (a sentiment still prevalent in the American academic world).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect
One can detect mutations and hybridities within the American counterculture of the 1960s.
Much of the 1960s counterculture, particularly in northern California, modified its hostility to science and technology and came to believe that some forms of technological innovation had potential to detach people from the centralized technological grid and re-attach them to nature.
In architecture, this modernized, rationalized form of the counterculture was embodied in Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome.
https://placesjournal.org/article/hippie-modernism/
The geodesic dome embodied the countercultural ideals of openness and holism. This ideal penetrated the general culture, and in its commercialized form it manifested itself in the great room of the McMansion.
Likewise, the outwardly modernistic style of McModerns is inspired by the ideal of the minimalistic lifestyle of Millennial hipsters in the city.
These innovations in and adaptations of high-end residential architecture represent a change of consumer tastes, not a cultural revolution, and mark a rejuvenation of the status quo, not its sundering.
In the cultural realm, like the political realm, the appearance of widespread, substantial dissent and its apparent success at triggering dramatic widespread transformations seems to be a mere illusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Grin_Without_a_Cat
To be sure, in these examples, it seems that the counterculture did trigger some cultural changes. But in the cases of the great room of the McMansion and the recent emergence of the McModern's pseudo-minimalism, these changes are cosmetic, commercialized and buttress the prestige of the upper-middle classes. Strikingly, the McMansion runs counter to the ecological principles of the 1960s counterculture, much the way the McModern contradicts minimalism. It is also perplexing that the purchase of these types of houses obviously run counter to prudent financial management, even though these houses are popular primarily because they are seen by businessmen as a shrewd investment.
