Unlike the McMansions that predominated prior to the financial crisis—over-inflated, fake-stuccoed colonials festooned with some tacky approximation of European finery—the new iterations are whitewashed and modern, their windows undifferentiated voids. The compound hip roofs of the aughts have been replaced with peaky clusters of clumsy gables, a nod to the faux-folksy “modern farmhouse” trend ushered in ten years ago by HGTV. Moore County, meanwhile, is a prototypical American sprawl scenario: boundless, monotonous growth laying waste to what was once a network of stolid retirement communities orbiting the quiet resort town of Pinehurst. Who the hell are all these new interlopers? When I ask, my mother simply says, “They’re military.” Indeed, Moore County has become a de facto upscale exurb for high-level military personnel and civil servants working in nearby Fort Bragg. But it isn’t only happening in North Carolina: like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the McMansion has replicated, reduplicated, and overtaken the country overnight.
But what is a McMansion, exactly? Well, you know it when you see it. Take a look at any remotely desirable area on Zillow, sort by “new construction,” and you’ll see an endless array of them: bloated, dreary, amenity-choked domiciles. (...)
McShitshow
McMansions began proliferating even before the term first appeared in the 1980s. (Meant to lampoon the graceless strivers of the nouveau riche, the portmanteau has no known direct origin.) But, it wasn’t until 2008 that the McMansion firmly imprinted itself on the national consciousness. Recall the endless newsreels of oversized, foreclosed houses that implied that the subprime mortgage crisis was caused not by the predatory lending institutions who foisted junk mortgages on inexperienced homebuyers but by the greedy poors who wanted more house than they could afford, all in order to imitate their idols on MTV Cribs. The McMansion did not cause the financial crisis; its role was negligible at best. But it became indelibly associated with debauched, prerecession excess—and, in the wake of the collapse, seemed as though it might become an anachronism, a memorial to a bygone housing bubble.
Nevertheless, once the economy began to recover, the McMansion quietly returned, albeit in more respectable costumes: a Disneyfied version of the Craftsman style, the Tudor, and today’s neutered modernism or its farmhouse equivalent. (...)
Reviewing the many case studies I’ve undertaken at McMansion Hell over the last seven years, it becomes clear that the McMansion, for all its garish variation, follows a consistent floorplan. A central foyer opens up on either side to a formal dining and sitting room, both rarely used outside of tense Thanksgiving dinners. Two-story McMansions feature a large, often curved, staircase that leads up to a mezzanine off of which the private rooms (bedrooms, offices) are located. On the first floor, the foyer empties into a large space for entertaining—a cavernous great room and an open kitchen, invariably with an outsized island, often with a breakfast nook. Off a secondary hallway is a master suite, purposefully distanced from all the other bedrooms; it is usually flanked by a sitting room and a decadent little bathroom. As square footage expands, so, too, do the amenities: a wet bar, a bonus or rumpus room in the basement, a gym, a den exclusively for watching television, a (decorative) library. These are merely tacked onto the existing core plan as the house metastasizes outward, upward, or both. The social structure of the nuclear heterosexual family permeates the plan. Rooms are excessively gendered, both for children and adults. Man caves and she sheds abound. (...)
McPocalypse Now
The real question now is, Who is still building, buying, and living in these houses? It is stubbornly difficult to nail down. According to Realtor.com, millennials are moving to the suburbs, where mortgages are often cheaper than urban rents. Boomers are downsizing for accessibility reasons, often competing with millennials for the same entry-level houses. Gen X—making up 22 percent of homebuyers—are now the ones “looking for larger, trade-up homes.” An American Home Shield survey indicates that the largest homes are being built in the West, in Utah and Colorado, with other concentrations forming in emerging tech hubs like Raleigh, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas. In essence, the only certainty is that when Americans get richer—through generational wealth transfer or through industry—they tend to seek out McMansions. When boomers die and bequeath their wealth to their children, those children will probably also build a bunch of McMansions.
Why? Some of the correlating factors are cultural, others architectural or material. For starters, you get more house for your money in the suburbs than in the city, where the price of land is astronomical. Buyers with children, but without the means to send them to private school, want to live in good school districts, which necessitates moving to wealthier neighborhoods on account of the American public school system’s entrenched racism and inequality. Architecturally speaking, the reason for the McMansion’s persistence is that it is the path of least resistance for building a house of a certain size. It’s hard to be efficient when forcing four thousand-plus square feet under one roof. Tailor-made architectural creations remain out of reach (or undesirable) for many people. The McMansion is a structurally stable, if visually clunky, formula. Contrary to almost four decades of urbanistic thought highlighting the need for walkability, density, and transit-oriented development, companies like Pulte Homes continue to construct McMansion neighborhoods near highway off-ramps and high-traffic arterial roads. They do this because people buy these houses and drive to work, and because building single-family homes doesn’t require suffering through rezoning battles or complying with extensive building code requirements, to name just two pesky bureaucratic hurdles of the plethora associated with multifamily residential development. Perplexingly, despite the ascent of interest rates that might otherwise deter buyers from procuring a mortgage, building McMansions remains immensely profitable. PulteGroup—which constructs housing under several subsidiaries, including Pulte Homes—made over $13 billion in 2021, and while that revenue encompasses a range of property types, McMansions are certainly among them. These are simple, crude realities.
The McMansion has also endured because, in the wake of the recession, the United States declined the opportunity to meaningfully transform the financial system on which our way of life is based. The breach was patched with taxpayer money, the system was restored, and we resumed our previous trajectory. The McMansion survived what could have been an existential crisis; it remains an unimpeachable symbol of having “made it” in a world where advancement is still measured in ostentation. It is a one-stop shop of wealth signifiers: modernist décor (rich people like modernism now), marble countertops (banks have marble), towering foyers (banks also have foyers), massive scale (everything I see is splendor). Owing to its distance from all forms of communal space, the McMansion must also become the site of sociality. It can’t just be a house; it has to be a ballroom, a movie theater, a bar.
It is a testament, too, to a Reagan-era promise of endless growth, endless consumption, and endless easy living that we’ve been loath to disavow. The McMansion owner is unbothered by the cost of heating and cooling a four-thousand-square-foot mausoleum with fifteen-foot ceilings. They see no problem being dependent—from the cheap material choice of the house to the driving requirements of suburban life—on oil in all its forms, be it in extruded polystyrene columns or gas at the pump. The McMansion is American bourgeois life in all its improvidence.
Seven years ago, I started the blog McMansion Hell to document—and deride—the endless cosmetic variations of this uniquely American form of architectural blight. I’ve mostly tackled prerecession McMansions, just for the novelty of houses both dated and perched on the ugly/interesting Möbius strip. But I worry that I’ve actually reinforced the idea that McMansions are a relic of the recent past. In fact, there remains a certain allure to these seemingly soulless suburban developments, and, more specifically, their construction and inhabitation. Increasing interest rates, inflation, and supply chain disruptions notwithstanding, the McMansion is alive and well. Far from being a boomtime fad, it has become a durable emblem of our American way of life.
McShitshow
McMansions began proliferating even before the term first appeared in the 1980s. (Meant to lampoon the graceless strivers of the nouveau riche, the portmanteau has no known direct origin.) But, it wasn’t until 2008 that the McMansion firmly imprinted itself on the national consciousness. Recall the endless newsreels of oversized, foreclosed houses that implied that the subprime mortgage crisis was caused not by the predatory lending institutions who foisted junk mortgages on inexperienced homebuyers but by the greedy poors who wanted more house than they could afford, all in order to imitate their idols on MTV Cribs. The McMansion did not cause the financial crisis; its role was negligible at best. But it became indelibly associated with debauched, prerecession excess—and, in the wake of the collapse, seemed as though it might become an anachronism, a memorial to a bygone housing bubble.
Nevertheless, once the economy began to recover, the McMansion quietly returned, albeit in more respectable costumes: a Disneyfied version of the Craftsman style, the Tudor, and today’s neutered modernism or its farmhouse equivalent. (...)
Reviewing the many case studies I’ve undertaken at McMansion Hell over the last seven years, it becomes clear that the McMansion, for all its garish variation, follows a consistent floorplan. A central foyer opens up on either side to a formal dining and sitting room, both rarely used outside of tense Thanksgiving dinners. Two-story McMansions feature a large, often curved, staircase that leads up to a mezzanine off of which the private rooms (bedrooms, offices) are located. On the first floor, the foyer empties into a large space for entertaining—a cavernous great room and an open kitchen, invariably with an outsized island, often with a breakfast nook. Off a secondary hallway is a master suite, purposefully distanced from all the other bedrooms; it is usually flanked by a sitting room and a decadent little bathroom. As square footage expands, so, too, do the amenities: a wet bar, a bonus or rumpus room in the basement, a gym, a den exclusively for watching television, a (decorative) library. These are merely tacked onto the existing core plan as the house metastasizes outward, upward, or both. The social structure of the nuclear heterosexual family permeates the plan. Rooms are excessively gendered, both for children and adults. Man caves and she sheds abound. (...)
McPocalypse Now
The real question now is, Who is still building, buying, and living in these houses? It is stubbornly difficult to nail down. According to Realtor.com, millennials are moving to the suburbs, where mortgages are often cheaper than urban rents. Boomers are downsizing for accessibility reasons, often competing with millennials for the same entry-level houses. Gen X—making up 22 percent of homebuyers—are now the ones “looking for larger, trade-up homes.” An American Home Shield survey indicates that the largest homes are being built in the West, in Utah and Colorado, with other concentrations forming in emerging tech hubs like Raleigh, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas. In essence, the only certainty is that when Americans get richer—through generational wealth transfer or through industry—they tend to seek out McMansions. When boomers die and bequeath their wealth to their children, those children will probably also build a bunch of McMansions.
Why? Some of the correlating factors are cultural, others architectural or material. For starters, you get more house for your money in the suburbs than in the city, where the price of land is astronomical. Buyers with children, but without the means to send them to private school, want to live in good school districts, which necessitates moving to wealthier neighborhoods on account of the American public school system’s entrenched racism and inequality. Architecturally speaking, the reason for the McMansion’s persistence is that it is the path of least resistance for building a house of a certain size. It’s hard to be efficient when forcing four thousand-plus square feet under one roof. Tailor-made architectural creations remain out of reach (or undesirable) for many people. The McMansion is a structurally stable, if visually clunky, formula. Contrary to almost four decades of urbanistic thought highlighting the need for walkability, density, and transit-oriented development, companies like Pulte Homes continue to construct McMansion neighborhoods near highway off-ramps and high-traffic arterial roads. They do this because people buy these houses and drive to work, and because building single-family homes doesn’t require suffering through rezoning battles or complying with extensive building code requirements, to name just two pesky bureaucratic hurdles of the plethora associated with multifamily residential development. Perplexingly, despite the ascent of interest rates that might otherwise deter buyers from procuring a mortgage, building McMansions remains immensely profitable. PulteGroup—which constructs housing under several subsidiaries, including Pulte Homes—made over $13 billion in 2021, and while that revenue encompasses a range of property types, McMansions are certainly among them. These are simple, crude realities.
The McMansion has also endured because, in the wake of the recession, the United States declined the opportunity to meaningfully transform the financial system on which our way of life is based. The breach was patched with taxpayer money, the system was restored, and we resumed our previous trajectory. The McMansion survived what could have been an existential crisis; it remains an unimpeachable symbol of having “made it” in a world where advancement is still measured in ostentation. It is a one-stop shop of wealth signifiers: modernist décor (rich people like modernism now), marble countertops (banks have marble), towering foyers (banks also have foyers), massive scale (everything I see is splendor). Owing to its distance from all forms of communal space, the McMansion must also become the site of sociality. It can’t just be a house; it has to be a ballroom, a movie theater, a bar.
It is a testament, too, to a Reagan-era promise of endless growth, endless consumption, and endless easy living that we’ve been loath to disavow. The McMansion owner is unbothered by the cost of heating and cooling a four-thousand-square-foot mausoleum with fifteen-foot ceilings. They see no problem being dependent—from the cheap material choice of the house to the driving requirements of suburban life—on oil in all its forms, be it in extruded polystyrene columns or gas at the pump. The McMansion is American bourgeois life in all its improvidence.
by Kate Wagner, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: © José Quintanar
