Defining the Problem. What, by the way, is a McMansion? To some, it’s the gargantuan tract home in a new development with a Hummer parked out front. Others use the word for ostentatious infill homes that tower over beloved bungalows in established neighborhoods. To still others, neither type of house is a problem. Because people live by different standards, codifying offenders becomes difficult. “One market’s McMansion is another market’s standard-issue house,” notes Lang, former co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech who now heads up the newly minted Brookings Mountain West program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “If you’re in Dallas, 5,000 square feet is the house you buy on a two-faculty salary. But if you are in Boston or San Francisco, this is not a normal-sized house. It’s not fair to come up with a blanket definition. However, every area has its over-the-top houses, and people know which ones they are.”
“Like all stereotypes, it’s a term that has no definition and so is inherently unfair,” concedes Dave Wax, co-founder of the online company FreeGreen, which offers free house plans for small, high-performance homes. “That said, having a bad guy is necessary for any social change. And so the McMansion is the bad guy.”
Brian Hickey, founder of Teardowns.com, an online real estate marketplace for teardown properties, recalls one builder who attempted to replace a stretch of tired single-family homes in Chicago’s well-to-do Hinsdale neighborhood with a smaller, but no less historic housing type (brownstones). Neighbors protested, and Hinsdale rejected the idea, he says.
Architect Ed Binkley has witnessed housing size inertia in the Orlando market. “There are guys today with 75- to 80-foot lots that could easily be subdivided, but a lot of builders and developers are afraid to start the process because it’s time-consuming, and time is money,” he says.
Let’s Get Small. Some builders are preparing for the future by diversifying. Richard Perrone, a high-end builder in Sarasota, Fla., has spent the last 30 years building waterfront estates, some as large as 22,000 square feet. Now he’s working on an enclave of 14 high-quality bayfront homes. The first spec home measures 3,729 square feet.
“We believe there are buyers out there who want a very high-quality home; they just want a smaller home,” says Perrone. “So we’re taking everything we know about good design and putting it in a smaller package. For a while people were led to believe that more is better. I think for some that mindset is changing.”
Some production builders also are constructing smaller homes. KB Home recently introduced a series of house plans measuring just 880 square feet as a way of going head to head with low-cost bank-owned properties. “Any time there’s been an age of exuberance and the economy turns, people get back to ‘What do I need?’ rather than ‘What could I buy?'” KB CEO Jeffrey Mezger told BusinessWeek.
Boyce Thompson, editorial director of Builder magazine and a former editor of ProSales, isn’t so sure exuberant home plans have been snuffed out.
Dead–for Now. “If you define McMansions as homes with a surfeit of space that isn’t regularly used, then they are certainly dead for the time being,” Thompson said. “…On the infamous other hand, local governments have not rushed to change the zoning laws that played a huge part in the big-home trend. Builders don’t have much choice but to build up when faced with standard lot sizes, minimum square footage requirements, and high land costs, not if they want the project to pencil.
“There’s no telling what American home owners will want once the market returns,” he concluded “The drive to own a big home on a big lot in a great neighborhood runs very deep in this country. Which is why I’m not willing to sound the death knell on McMansions.”
Neighborhood groups also will help determine McMansions’ future. The National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) estimates as many as 500 communities in 40 states have launched campaigns in an attempt to curb the proliferation of super-sized homes in small lots. Some groups have ignited city-issued moratoria on new residential construction.
Among the most notorious is the “McMansion Ordinance” enacted in Austin, Texas, in 2006, which limits most new or remodeled infill single-family homes to 2,300 square feet with a height limit of 32 feet. A similar measure passed last year by the Los Angeles Sunland-Tujunga Neighborhood Council dictates that any floor with ceiling heights greater than 14 feet counts as twice the square footage of that area. Bye-bye, vaulted foyers.
“Teardowns may not always be stellar landmarks on their own, but the issue comes down to streetscape character,” says Adrian Fine, director of the Center for State and Local Policy at the NTHP. “It only takes one McMansion to disrupt that character and cause a domino effect.”
But one needs to balance what’s happening in Austin with the story of Nancy and Scott Cornelius of Fairfax County, Va., who recently downsized to a new, smaller home in a nearby 55+ community. To do so, they had to sell their big house in a development where homes run to 8,000 square feet.
It turns out that this wasn’t easy, but not because the house was too big. Rather, its 5,000 square feet made it one of the smaller homes in the area, and it was a rambler amid three-story colonials with three-car garages. Buyers wanted a bigger house with all the bedrooms upstairs. After a year on the market, the house finally sold–to a single woman with no kids. “It was a move-up that was manageable for her,” a local Realtor says.
Is America’s appetite for big houses trending toward more moderate portion sizes? Or is it a cyclical craving that will ramp back up once money is flowing freely again? Wait and see.
–This article is adapted from a story in Builder magazine, a sister publication to ProSales, and from a blog by Builder’s editorial director.
