4 ms·

It's odd how the complaints are never about actual mansions. No, it's only when the middle-class gets bigger houses do we have journalists handwringing endless

It's odd how the complaints are never about actual mansions. No, it's only when the middle-class gets bigger houses do we have journalists handwringing endlessly about gauche they are.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
Isn't the typical McMansion people complain about $1M+? That's definitely not text-book middle class - which would be closer to the median house - which is less than half that price. There's not many places you're getting a 4 bedroom clown-house with a clown pool and 5 clown-y bathrooms and a 3-car clown garage for your 3 clown cars for $450k. And if you are, there's very few places this is a new-ish build. Most of the places you're getting something like this - it's like a 20+ year-old home in Montgomery Alabama or Akron Ohio or something... And usually this was once a nice house that someone renovated in the style of a clown for the McMansion buyer... You're either considering the average suburban home a McMansion or you think the top 10% is middle class. In fairness, both of these are common conceptions - but I think they're both worth critiquing.
- cjohnson318 3y ago
  > You're either considering the average suburban home a McMansion or you think the top 10% is middle class. If wealth were normally distributed, then the top 10% definitely wouldn't be the middle class. However, the way wealth is distributed, the average earner in the top 10% makes about $173K in 2020 dollars. Which is a lot in Louisiana, but not so much in SF or New York. https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increase-in-2020-top-1-0-of-earners-see-wages-up-179-since-1979-while-share-of-wages-for-bottom-90-hits-new-low/ https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increa...
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    You're not building a McMansion for less than $250 per square foot. And a McMansion is usually 3000+ sqft. In New York or LA or The Bay, you're not getting a McMansion for less than $2.5M. In Louisiana, you're not getting it for less than $800k. If anything - I think this pushes out who's buying a "real" McMansion probably closer to the top 5%. It's less affordable given where people live and how much more they cost where people make more money. Unless we're calling ugly 1800 sqft 3-bedroom suburban development houses "McMansions" - middle class people aren't buying them.
    - cjohnson318 3y ago
      > If anything - I think this pushes out who's buying a "real" McMansion probably closer to the top 5%. Yeah, I think you're right. I don't think America even has a middle class any more. The insanity of the housing market has really put that in stark contrast.
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  > Isn't the typical McMansion people complain about $1M+? The same style problems are heavily present in houses down to the high-$300k range around here. Straight-up visual gibberish, and not in the name of some kind of practical improvements as a trade-off—the contrary, if anything. Best I can tell, this has happened because complex façades and rooflines make a house look bigger. I've done a lot of house shopping over the years, and find that if I apply a McMansion-style-tuned eye to classically-styled houses, my guesstimate of square footage is consistently something like 30-40% low. Houses with a balanced and regular appearance and without a bunch of shit jutting out everywhere for no reason look smaller—by a lot—than a same-size McMansion.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  I do think it is very much a classism thing. Plant of "McMansion style" homes that Architectural Digest type snobs punch down on that are not $1M. Remember vast areas of this country have very cheap land. The demographics of people who enjoy writings like McMansion Hell skew much richer than the people living in that style of home. A McMansion style home in the burbs can cost about the same as a mediocre 1-2 bed / 1.5 bath in NYC.
micromacrofoot 3y ago
Actual mansions are several orders of magnitude less common.
pookha 3y ago
This has gone on for over a hundred years in the US. Victorian homes were greatly shit upon by the upper classes in the late 1800's.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  Citation? Anything other than moaning about the emergence of a middle class?
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Here's some of it - https://www.oldhouseguy.com/hatred-for-victorian-homes-in-1927/ https://www.oldhouseguy.com/hatred-for-victorian-homes-in-19... - but it goes back further and has echoes of the same McMansion complaints (they were builder/craftsman built instead of architecturally designed, often the buyers outstripped their ability to properly maintain, etc).
yamtaddle 3y ago
Being extremely concerned about appearing rich but having absolutely no idea how to do it is basically the defining outwardly-visible characteristic of the middle class (in a Fussellian sense of "middle class"). McMansions are a perfect expression of this: trying to look bigger and fancier than they are while being extremely cheap in every way that matters, and getting every "fanciness" signal all wrong. They're a common target because plainly-inept pretentiousness is very funny—it's a staple trope in comedy for a reason. It's not the size of the house per se that draws comment on McMansions. It's the intense and desperate but hopelessly misguided social signaling in their styling.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cjohnson318 3y ago
Sure, they're gauche, but when you're looking for a place to raise a family that's near good schools, near a grocery, doesn't require a remodel or update, has room for you to work remotely, and you can't afford to just "buy land and build something that fancy magazine editors would approve of", then you're limited to "gauche McMansions". Could we live in a 2,000 sqft house that was built in 1940? Sure! Would it cost us our savings and sanity to bring it up to code? Probably!
dmtroyer 3y ago
Never? Really? There’s plenty of complaints of the 1% and their excess.
onetimeusename 3y ago
There is a valid criticism of mcmansions but this article turned this into more criticism of the homeowners. I am sure that if suburban houses used a classical style they would be writing about the fascists who live in them or if the homes were brutalist how the style had sold out. But that said I think there is a valid critique of modern builders and homeowners in 2023. A family member's old home in a neighborhood they have lived in forever had a bunch of new people move in during 2021 and 2022 when interest rates were low. They brought giant lifted trucks that block sidewalks, put trailers and RVs and giant boats all over, tore down old trees to make way for chicken shacks and trampolines and plastic sheds. All of this violated the HOA contract but they know the HOA has a few hundred dollars to its name so they gave it the middle finger. Builders built new houses on odd empty lots that tore up landscape to add long driveways to get behind houses and now giant out-of-place houses overlook the backyards of old 100 year old houses. Builders don't care. That's why mcmansions exist in the first place. The homeowners don't care either. It's all perfectly legal but something still isn't right.

It's odd how the complaints are never about actual mansions. No, it's only when the middle-class gets bigger houses do we have journalists handwringing endlessly about gauche they are.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

Isn't the typical McMansion people complain about $1M+? That's definitely not text-book middle class - which would be closer to the median house - which is less than half that price. There's not many places you're getting a 4 bedroom clown-house with a clown pool and 5 clown-y bathrooms and a 3-car clown garage for your 3 clown cars for $450k. And if you are, there's very few places this is a new-ish build. Most of the places you're getting something like this - it's like a 20+ year-old home in Montgomery Alabama or Akron Ohio or something... And usually this was once a nice house that someone renovated in the style of a clown for the McMansion buyer... You're either considering the average suburban home a McMansion or you think the top 10% is middle class. In fairness, both of these are common conceptions - but I think they're both worth critiquing.

cjohnson318 3y ago
> You're either considering the average suburban home a McMansion or you think the top 10% is middle class. If wealth were normally distributed, then the top 10% definitely wouldn't be the middle class. However, the way wealth is distributed, the average earner in the top 10% makes about $173K in 2020 dollars. Which is a lot in Louisiana, but not so much in SF or New York. https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increase-in-2020-top-1-0-of-earners-see-wages-up-179-since-1979-while-share-of-wages-for-bottom-90-hits-new-low/ https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increa...
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  You're not building a McMansion for less than $250 per square foot. And a McMansion is usually 3000+ sqft. In New York or LA or The Bay, you're not getting a McMansion for less than $2.5M. In Louisiana, you're not getting it for less than $800k. If anything - I think this pushes out who's buying a "real" McMansion probably closer to the top 5%. It's less affordable given where people live and how much more they cost where people make more money. Unless we're calling ugly 1800 sqft 3-bedroom suburban development houses "McMansions" - middle class people aren't buying them.
  - cjohnson318 3y ago
    > If anything - I think this pushes out who's buying a "real" McMansion probably closer to the top 5%. Yeah, I think you're right. I don't think America even has a middle class any more. The insanity of the housing market has really put that in stark contrast.
yamtaddle 3y ago
> Isn't the typical McMansion people complain about $1M+? The same style problems are heavily present in houses down to the high-$300k range around here. Straight-up visual gibberish, and not in the name of some kind of practical improvements as a trade-off—the contrary, if anything. Best I can tell, this has happened because complex façades and rooflines make a house look bigger. I've done a lot of house shopping over the years, and find that if I apply a McMansion-style-tuned eye to classically-styled houses, my guesstimate of square footage is consistently something like 30-40% low. Houses with a balanced and regular appearance and without a bunch of shit jutting out everywhere for no reason look smaller—by a lot—than a same-size McMansion.
steveBK123 3y ago
I do think it is very much a classism thing. Plant of "McMansion style" homes that Architectural Digest type snobs punch down on that are not $1M. Remember vast areas of this country have very cheap land. The demographics of people who enjoy writings like McMansion Hell skew much richer than the people living in that style of home. A McMansion style home in the burbs can cost about the same as a mediocre 1-2 bed / 1.5 bath in NYC.

micromacrofoot 3y ago

Actual mansions are several orders of magnitude less common.

pookha 3y ago

This has gone on for over a hundred years in the US. Victorian homes were greatly shit upon by the upper classes in the late 1800's.

drewcoo 3y ago
Citation? Anything other than moaning about the emergence of a middle class?
- bombcar 3y ago
  Here's some of it - https://www.oldhouseguy.com/hatred-for-victorian-homes-in-1927/ https://www.oldhouseguy.com/hatred-for-victorian-homes-in-19... - but it goes back further and has echoes of the same McMansion complaints (they were builder/craftsman built instead of architecturally designed, often the buyers outstripped their ability to properly maintain, etc).

yamtaddle 3y ago

Being extremely concerned about appearing rich but having absolutely no idea how to do it is basically the defining outwardly-visible characteristic of the middle class (in a Fussellian sense of "middle class"). McMansions are a perfect expression of this: trying to look bigger and fancier than they are while being extremely cheap in every way that matters, and getting every "fanciness" signal all wrong. They're a common target because plainly-inept pretentiousness is very funny—it's a staple trope in comedy for a reason. It's not the size of the house per se that draws comment on McMansions. It's the intense and desperate but hopelessly misguided social signaling in their styling.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

cjohnson318 3y ago

Sure, they're gauche, but when you're looking for a place to raise a family that's near good schools, near a grocery, doesn't require a remodel or update, has room for you to work remotely, and you can't afford to just "buy land and build something that fancy magazine editors would approve of", then you're limited to "gauche McMansions". Could we live in a 2,000 sqft house that was built in 1940? Sure! Would it cost us our savings and sanity to bring it up to code? Probably!

dmtroyer 3y ago

Never? Really? There’s plenty of complaints of the 1% and their excess.

onetimeusename 3y ago

There is a valid criticism of mcmansions but this article turned this into more criticism of the homeowners. I am sure that if suburban houses used a classical style they would be writing about the fascists who live in them or if the homes were brutalist how the style had sold out. But that said I think there is a valid critique of modern builders and homeowners in 2023. A family member's old home in a neighborhood they have lived in forever had a bunch of new people move in during 2021 and 2022 when interest rates were low. They brought giant lifted trucks that block sidewalks, put trailers and RVs and giant boats all over, tore down old trees to make way for chicken shacks and trampolines and plastic sheds. All of this violated the HOA contract but they know the HOA has a few hundred dollars to its name so they gave it the middle finger. Builders built new houses on odd empty lots that tore up landscape to add long driveways to get behind houses and now giant out-of-place houses overlook the backyards of old 100 year old houses. Builders don't care. That's why mcmansions exist in the first place. The homeowners don't care either. It's all perfectly legal but something still isn't right.