2420 Nightmare on McMansion Street

Good lord...I agree that I don't begrudge anyone the home of their dreams, but this is just excessive. While I would like a basement and a larger kitchen, the hubby and I are happy with our three bedroom, 1,200 square foot townhouse (the third bedroom is used as our study/media room). Unless you're the Duggars, why do you need a 6,000+ square foot home? And Americans wonder why other nations think we're a bunch of wasteful, selfish idiots...

This article was written in 2005, since then things are changing and generally not for the better. Not only do they have to pay more for heating and cooling these places but property taxes are much higher for them.

Since most of these people bought at the near peak of the market they are under water as far as their mortgages go. They won't be able to sell the McMansion for what they paid for it, or if they can they'll probably have to bring money to the table to avoid a short sale or the tax hit is going to be horrible. These people are going to be stuck there for more than 10 years. Right now the trend is toward smaller more efficent houses with better details and less wasted space, face it their screwed.

It's just a huge waste of resources. Resources to heat and cool the place, and resources to build it.

Not to mention that most of these places are built out on undeveloped fringes of cities, meaning that the city has to pay more to develop infrastructure, like roads and sewers, out there. On top of that, these McMansion communities have NO resources within them, so the asshats who live there are forced to drive, increasing traffic and wear on the roads.

These asshats will be broke within a year. Maintaining a macmansion, especially in a place like DC, is not cheap. My parents live next door to a 6 car garage, indoor pool mcMansion and my dad once accidentally got the neighbor's electric bill. $900 a month and that was in the mid-90's(needless to say, my dad was ready to give all of us a scolding until he realized whose name was on the Bill). Not surprisingly, the neighbors ended up moving due to low finances.

This is why I am so glad I am single. I live in a rather large studio which is easy to clean, in a nice neighborhood, and is relatively cheap for the area. I don't have to put myself in debt for the next 50 plus years just so junior and bratleigh don't have to share a room.

These are the fucktards who now want us taxpayers to bail them out of their reversible mortgages. I rent and live within my means and have no sympathy for these assholes who got "bigger and better" McMansions to compete with their friends.

I'm going to quote from Violent Acres, if no one minds..."McMansions are for McIdiots." My mother and her husband (with whom I'm no longer on speaking terms, for reasons I won't burden you with here) bought one of those monstrosities, and it's the biggest piece of poorly contructed garbage I've ever seen. If someone farts quietly in the basement, you can hear it on the top floor. What a waste of money! And there's only two of them, one dog, and two cats. It must be nice to have enough disposable income to be able to waste it on shit like that.

V.A. post on McMansions...I love V.A.:
http://www.violentacres.com/archives/35/mcmansions-are-for-mcidiots

According to one recent column by a well known real estate writer, a member of Congress has floated a proposal to end the mortgage interest deduction for houses of more than 3,000 square feet. The reason given is environmental, to discourage the construction and use of McMansions and enable the US to meet certain treaties and laws.

My belief is that this deduction should be entirely scrapped anyway, as it benefits only the wealthy and is skewed toward big or really expensive houses. A married couple has to have over $10,000 a year in interest to be able to take it at all on Schedule A of the federal tax forms. Canada, Britain, and Australia have healthy housing markets and comparable rates of home ownership without the deduction. Buying a house might be a good thing for many people, but it is still consumption—and most people agree that consumption is often not a good thing, right?

Well, there's buying a well constructed, existing house in an established neighborhood and then there's building a shitass monstrosity in a newly created gated community 10 miles outside of town. The existing home is already here, ready to go, with sewer, electric, streets and sidewalks and was built to last more than 5 years.

What a pile of bullshit our gubment is. Deductions for hugeass homes, SUV's and spooting out children? And it's the people who live responsibly and ethically who pay and pay. Don't have children? Screw you! Move into a home you can afford? Get bent! Drive a reasonably sized vehicle? Eat it SUCKERS!

No wonder people worship stupidity and ignorance. It no longer pays to be smart. Bring back natural selection I say! Lions and wolverines should be released into the streets!

There are homes not too far from mine in LA that go up to 20,000 square feet. Who in the hell needs a supermarket for a house?

We are back to rolling blackouts in Southern California. Those homes are just too much to heat and cool, and I believe they should be taxed at a higher rate than other properties.

What's funny is that for all of his bluster about going green and global warming, Al Gore's McMansion uses 20 times the energy of the average American household

ah but al "not a full shilling" gore, buys carbon offsets, from his own company, so he is paying himself to pollute..

and i wonder why his company is now making a fortune , especially after his "video". saying you need to give him money ..

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I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii

Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

Gore needs money just about as much as I need working ovaries...

OMG - it's insane how excessive some of these houses are! Who needs thousands and thousands of sq ft in a house?

And even more ridiculous is the owners attitudes towards their empty houses:

"She never exactly wanted 8,000 square feet" but "it was almost ridiculous not to" because it's the most house they can afford. Umm, just because you can afford something doesn't mean you NEED to buy it! How about having a smaller mortgage, or investing your extra money, or buying something you really want instead of a bunch of unfurnished rooms that you admit you're not using and don't need!

Or the woman who loves that her 6000 sq ft home allows everyone in the family their own quiet space. Hello - having a reasonable sized house and a bedroom for every family member by definition, gives everyone their private, quiet space when needed. You don't need additional thousands of square feet to accomplish this!

Or the couple that are busy working all day long from their home office. Do you think your lifestyle needs 6500 sq ft?

Stupid bigger is better attitude...

Okay, rant over - stepping off my soap box

I hate McMansions! Those developments literally block the sunlight from regular neighborhoods located nearby. A few blocks away, there's a new subdivision of these monstrosities, and half of them have been set aside for Section 8. I think that's a slap in the face to every homeowner and taxpayer. Why in HELL should our tax dollars go to provide luxury housing for irresponsible single moos?!

Oh My God. This is unbelievable, those people are, I don't know, I lack the words. Stupid is one that comes to mind.Tthey actually buy their own prison for which they'll have to work the rest of their life!!

After college I lived in what we call in Belgium a beluik or cité -home. They are little dead-end streets with small houses stacked next to each other. Late 1800's to early 1900's blue collar workers houses. Most have been torn down, some preserved.

For a picture of one (click the picture you won't be able to read the text, all in dutch, not my actual street, mine was even nicer and more charming :-):



it's basically three rooms on top of each other with a really steep stair connecting them: first floor kitchen and really small bathroom, next floor living room and then under the roof: bedroom. Giving you a grand total of 60 square meters? Yep, you read it right: 60.

Best years of my live!!

Since I was single and didn't cook I didn't have any chairs for the first two years I lived there. The reason: I had a nice sofa in the living room and you can eat a sandwitch standing up... My furniture came from a second hand shop and cost a grand total of 120 Euro, when I moved, it went back to the second hand shop.

I was single but never longed for the comfort of a pretty girl because the street had it's charme, I could take them to a nice restaurant and I was the only guy they ever met who had a very nice and large collection of champagne, whiskey and cuban sigars in his bedroom (no room to put them anywhere else..).

Stuff should make your life better, not tie you down.

Debt is nothing more then the modern day whip, used to keep you in your place (and it doesn't matter if your black or white, if you are in debt you always need to be polite to your boss, your bank manager, the credit card company). And my old job, most people were so much in debt they took all the shit they poured over our heads on a daily basis, too afraid to loose the cunt job and be without a pay check for more then a month. Did my big mouth get me fired? Yep eventually it did but hey, I walked out of that place with over 14.000 euro in severance pay and had a new, better job 5 weeks later.

CF-europe,
Those buildings look lovely. I wouldn’t mind sipping champagne out on that lovely courtyard.

If you're ever in Belgium, always welcome!!

So anyway, I was talking to my niece yesterday about her new job as a dispatcher for a cable installation company. She told me that quite a few of the new McMansion owners are cancelling or reducing their cable and/or not running the AC.

It looks as if rising energy prices have put some homeowners in a bind. I wonder how many of them wish they'd bought a 1200 sq. ft. townhouse instead of a 3600 sq. ft. starter castle.

"It looks as if rising energy prices have put some homeowners in a bind. I wonder how many of them wish they'd bought a 1200 sq. ft. townhouse instead of a 3600 sq. ft. starter castle."

I hope they have fun heating that...but wait "the economy will always keep growing! It will NEVER collapse because we're SO MUCH SMARTER now." Dumbasses.

If you guys would see the RIDICULOUSLY HUMONGOUS homes being built in my area, you would laugh. We're talking 4500 sq ft minimum.

I cannot imagine these people's heating and cooling bills. And what's even funnier, is, when you drive around at night, these people have their lights on, no curtains on the windwos and no furniture in the place. Probably because they sunk every dime they have into the mortgage payment itself. And these are houses that have been there for at least 3 years, so you'd think by then they'd have them at least partially furnished.

I'm sure this winter we'll drive by and see ice sicles hanging from the inside of the windows.

The no furniture thing isn't a joke. It was happening years ago, and I even read newspaper articles about it. Now we've got even more shedenfreude going with the housing bubble collapse, where these people who've overextended themselves on mortgages can't afford to keep OR sell their starter castles.

And who is going to buy these giant wastes of space when the families are finally booted out? No one, because they're built shittily. Yeah, it's got a granite kitchen counter and merino wool carpeting, but the actual structure isn't meant to last more than 10 - 15 years tops.

its all about money, thats all this modern world is about. and status.

the builders of these houses, make them for a fast buck, then are gone, people are sold that big is best its a show of affluence, you need a state of the art suv, you need this.. to show u are better than anyone else. to have more "bling", and so on

but its all external. and ephemeral, a lot of these people who are sold this idea of being "successful", are the ones who have a self image that doesnt allow the possibility of being happy with what you have got. or living within your means. and i have seen a restless nature in the american people, they have to keep moving, every 3 or 4 years, rarely staying in the same house for more than 10 years, and when i say we have lived in this house where i live for 33 years. i get shocked looks.

i know i want my mansion, built to my own specific design, it will be as energy efficient as i can make it, insulation, double normal, underfloor heating more efficient than radiators, and so on.. with solar panels and rain water collectors. but it will be built to last..

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I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii

Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein