Relaxed Politics

That is the question posed by the lead article in the November issue of Builder magazine. As an architect, I am not really supposed to even be reading this magazine. It is too low-brow, too mundane, too quotidian for the likes of us building artistes. We are supposed to take our cues from the publications of high design that no one but fellow architects look at. (Architects don’t read. They look at pictures) But I love the art of home building, so I do read this trade rag, along with Fine Homebuilding and The Journal of Light Construction, when I get a chance. But back to the question at hand. Is the McMansion dead? My answer is yes and no. In order to understand the question and my answer, let’s look at what evidence the article presents.

What exactly is a McMansion?

By some accounts, it’s the gargantuan greenfield tract home with a Hummer parked out front that perpetuates sprawl and makes gas guzzling a way of life. Others use the derisive term to describe ostentatious infill homes that—while walkable to schools, shops, and transit—tower over beloved bungalows in established neighborhoods in a way that is less than neighborly.

That is a pretty fair description of the McMansions I am familiar with, especially in Sun Belt cities across the South and Southwest.  Although here is a more qualitative definition from the article: “houses that are built to minimum code specifications and saddlebagged with spaces that are used less than 30 percent of the time by their owners.“  I would add that a “true” McMansion is not well designed – the scale and materials are wrong or badly used, and that it doesn’t sit comfortably on its piece of land.

This is a graceless space, to the right, is best used for parking your pet giraffe.
Fortunately because of the way I positioned my own practice (back when there was money for an architectural practice) I didn’t and don’t do much of that kind of work. But I have worked on my share of ostentatious houses for people with monstrous egos. I tended to get called into other firms to help them out when commercial clients decided to have the same architect who did their shopping center or their office building also do their house. One time I helped a three person family downsize from 24,000 square feet to just 12,000!

So is the McMansion dead? It appears to at least be dying because of the current depressed economy.

Even for those who can afford them, trophy homes constitute an image problem at a time when modesty has become fashionable. One recent CNNMoney.com poll asked more than 33,000 online readers if they thought American homes had gotten too big; 69 percent said yes.

[snip]

[I]t’s no surprise that American house sizes, which doubled from 1960 to the height of the boom, are now backpedaling. The average house breaking ground in the first quarter of 2009 was 2,335 square feet, down from 2,629 square feet in the second quarter of 2008, according to NAHB figures. Since 2007, median sizes for new single-family homes have fallen nearly 10 percent.

The problem is that you can’t really gauge buyer’s tastes in depressed markets. People buy what they can afford, if they buy at all. Being a magazine for production home builders, the article ends on this note:

Before the housing bust of 2007, the largest annual decline in median square footage occurred between 1979 and 1982, when new-home sizes dipped 8.2 percent, observes NAHB chief economist David Crowe. Four years later, house sizes were back up above their previous peak.

Atlanta builder Brendan Murphy sees this as evidence that old habits die hard. “We Americans have always associated bigger with better,” he says. “Look at how many crises the automobile industry has gone through with gas prices. And yet it always returns to large vehicles because that is what sells.”

It will be interesting to watch to see if Americans ever do end their love affair with bigger is better in either housing or cars.  In the meantime, let me end by introducing you to a concept that has grown tremendously over the past ten or twelve years, ever since  Sarah Susanka published her book, The Not So Big House.  I was and am part of this movement. (We’ll talk about that in a later post.) It will never die, but like a lot of things it also will never replace the American need to show off with big houses, big cars and big hair (or boobs, or jewelry, or whatever).

posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 9:00 am under Relaxed Politics.