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Death of the 'McMansion': Era of Huge Homes Is Over

They've been called McMansions, Starter Castles, Garage Mahals and Faux Chateaus but here's the latest thing you can call them — History.

In the past few years, there have been an increasing number of references made to the "McMansion glut" and the "McMansion backlash," as more towns pass ordinances against garishly large homes, which are generally over 3,000 square feet and built very close together.

What sets a McMansion apart from a regular mansion, according to Wikipedia, are a few characteristics: They're tacky, they lack a definitive style and they have a "displeasingly jumbled appearance."

Well, count 2010 as the year the last nail was hammered into the McCoffin: In its latest report on home-buying trends, real-estate site Trulia declares: "The McMansion Era Is Over."

Just 9 percent of the people surveyed by Trulia said their ideal home size was over 3,200 square feet. Meanwhile, more than one-third said their ideal size was under 2,000 feet.

"That's something that would've been unbelievable just a few years back," said Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder of Trulia. "Americans are moving away from McMansions."

The comments echoed those made in June by Kermit Baker, the chief economist at the American Institute of Architects.

"We continue to move away from the McMansion chapter of residential design, with more demand for practicality throughout the home," Baker said. "There has been a drop off in the popularity of upscale property enhancements such as formal landscaping, decorative water features, tennis courts, and gazebos."

"McMansions just look and feel out of place today, given the more cautious environment everyone's living in," said Paul Bishop, vice president of research for the National Association of Realtors.

And homebuilders are heeding the call: In a survey of builders last year, nine out of 10 said they planned to build smaller or lower-priced homes.

Even in Texas, the land of go big or go home, they're downsizing.

Diane Cheatham, owner of Urban Edge Developers in Dallas, said today, the average size of home they're building is 2,200 square feet, down from 2,500 in 2005 — which was considered small for Dallas back then.

She said the trend there is more toward building green homes instead of big homes. Right now, they're building a 1,200-square-foot uber-green home for a couple that's downsizing from 3,000-square feet, Cheatham explained.

1,200? Some of the hair in Texas is bigger than that!

"We've never built one that small," Cheatham confessed, but added: "I think that's just a good example of the trend right now."

For a little historical context, 1,200 square feet was the average home size in America in the 1960s. That grew to 1,710 square feet in the 1980s and 2,330 square feet in the 2000s.

What's more, many in the real-estate business say they think this trend of downsizing, or "right-sizing," as Flint likes to call it, is here to stay.

"This is absolutely a long-term effect," he said. "Think of families with small children who've been foreclosed upon ... When these teenagers are in a position to buy a home, they won't want to go through these experiences they saw their parents go through."

Of course, the question becomes, what do we do with all these McMansions that have already been built?

It's tempting to make jokes about what you might do with a former McMansion but with crime on the rise in neighborhoods littered with abandoned McMansions, Christopher Leinberger, in an article for the Atlantic, asked a sobering question: Is this the next slum?

Luckily, people are starting to get creative: A film collective in Seattle has taken over a 10,000-square foot McMansion there, using it for both living and work space. They turned a wine closet into an editing room and tossed a green screen in the garage. And in a suburb of San Diego, one couple turned a former McMansion into a home for autistic adults.

The demise of the McMansion has stirred a growing chorus of murmurs in the real-estate community about the possibility that it may force a dramatic redesign of the suburban McMansion tracts into mini-towns of their own, turning these icons of excess into more practical spaces like offices, banks, grocery stores and movie theaters.

Though, given some of the poor quality of materials and craftsmanship, it begs the question, would it be better to just tear them all down and start from scratch?

Yahoo Finance, August 19, 2010.

Weaver Street Realty was featured in the Chapel Hill News, celebrating its 20th anniversary.

Realty with Attitude

For 20 years, Weaver Street Realty has stayed true to its mission to combine business with ecology.

By Eleanor Howe, Correspondent

Weaver Street Realty in Carrboro is celebrating its 20th year, still loyal to its original mission: to promote alternative land use patterns from an ecological perspective.

"Even though Weaver Street does a lot of different kinds of business and has a lot of different people involved in it, I think we still share that prospective," Gary Phillips, the founding partner, said recently. This focus is underscored by the murals of red barns, corn fields and cows that adorn the front of the building at 116 E. Main.

Kathy Buck, who started the firm with Phillips and is now a landscape architect, agrees that the company has carried over its environmental philosophy to the present.

"If you were going to look for rural land, they would be a good firm to look with. It's a niche market for them, because a lot of other firms, while they sell land, their main focus is subdivision lots," Buck said. "All firms can't do everything, and some firms do some things better than others."

Phillips estimates that over the years Weaver Street Realty has been involved in about 45 projects with permanent conservation easements or water protection strategies; in 1990 the Triangle Land Conservancy designated the firm as developers of the year.

When Weaver Street Realty began life in 1982 it was actually on Weaver Street, where the Music Emporium is now. When the classic 1910 building on Main Street that used to house the Carrboro branch of the old Chapel Hill Bank became available in 1984, Phillips recognized that the large, open space would be perfect for auctions and leased it.

Phillips persuaded Jay Parker, who was helping renovate part of Carr Mill Mall for Aurora Restaurant, to join him in the auction business. Within a few years, the real estate side of the business had moved to two small offices in the front of the building. Auctions were still held in the rear, which was empty except for rows of bleachers.

By 1987, however, the realty business had taken over the entire building and the auction functions had moved to the White Cross community west of Carrboro.

Louise Barnum, who had been working in real estate in Chatham County, came on board that year, and the next year she and Parker bought into the company and became full partners with Phillips.

Today, the realty company and the auction company are two separate businesses, with 15 people working out of the Main Street building. The auction company, though not as active now as in the firm's early days, still does 20 to 40 community benefit auctions a year, many under the gavel of Don Basnight, who's celebrating his own anniversary — his 10th with the firm — this year.

And while they no longer advertise themselves, as they did several years ago, as "the muddy boots team," Parker says they are still very much drawn to "helping people who want to use their land in a different way." For Barnum, that involves connecting people through developments based on community, like Arcadia and Solterra, two co-housing groups for which she was buyer's agent.

For Phillips, who is also chairman of the County Commissioners in Chatham, where he's running for re-election and facing a primary battle, it means finding ecological buyers interested in conservation easements.

Barnum agrees that Weaver Street is a "niche" firm, but she emphasizes that "we also do houses. We put on our muddy boots, but we'll also put on suits. Granted, some of us — myself included — may be in vintage suits, but we do it."

A good example of the company's focus is Shott's Farm, a small development off Manns Chapel Road in Chatham County. The family who owned the land was not so much interested in maximizing its economic potential as in developing a community, Parker said. Barnum, who negotiated the sale, guided the owners to set aside an existing field and pond for common use, rather than splitting it between a couple of lots, as is usually done with such amenities. The sellers also decided not to entertain offers from spec builders so the people who bought the land would be the people who lived on it. Within a month of going on the market, four fifths of the lots were sold.

"I would love to do more developments like Shott's Farm, because it was so satisfying," Barnum says. "When a piece of earth gets carved up, that's it, and I want to slow down development that doesn't have that much connection with the community."

In another recent Chatham County transaction, the company became involved in a disputed sale of 175 acres in the Rock Rest community. As a result, Phillips said, "we bought the entire property and went in and talked to people there to see what they wanted, and that was as little as possible.

"When we divided it into only four lots, our investors vanished, so we cobbled together a financing plan with the support of Rock Rest neighbors and the property owner. All four lots sold within six months. The largest is 90 acres; the smallest is 25. There are significant conservation buffers on it, and the land can never be subdivided."

Two years ago, recognizing its lengthy involvement in Chatham County and the transitions about to take place there, the company opened a satellite office in Pittsboro "as a way to serve the whole of Chatham County," Parker said, adding that the company's business isn't limited to projects with ecological value.

"We've kept a focus on serving clients, and we see ourselves as showing people more than just a new group of houses," Parker said. "We can introduce them to the community and help them, if they're interested, find a field, a retreat, some farmland, or other unusual property. We don't turn away from helping people if they're not ecologically minded — we don't have some exclusivity — but we're invested there in helping people find something more than just the newest hundred-house subdivision near Pittsboro.

"That ranges from people who want to find 100 acres to live on, to groups who want to do something different, like Blue Heron, a small group that wanted to find a large piece of land to settle on and operate cooperatively."

The approach runs counter to the current "new urbanism" trend, exemplified by Meadowmont and Southern Village, of developing dense urban cores as a way to reduce suburban sprawl and dependence on the auto. That's something they all think about, Parker says.

"But the same thing isn't for everyone," he adds. "It's great that the development going on in town is more concentrated and that places like Meadowmont and Southern Village have mixed development. But there will always be people who want to live on more ground and don't want to live in the hubbub of a dense community, and they should have those choices. What happens in the county a lot is that it gets developed to its maximum density and becomes a little suburban satellite. We try to help people find ways that are more compatible to the land."