We went to my hometown this weekend to visit, Mata and Pata. It seems there’s a building boom happening there. Every available lot is being filled, setback to setback, with McMansions. Small ranches and capes are being demo’d and replaced with monsters. It is really sad… Giant over-scaled columns. Windowless walls of brick veneer. Absolutely no reference to their neighbors. These houses are nothing more than massive blocks of square footage. When will developers learn that there is true value in good design?
Tonight, the Slow Home sent me over to The Street for a very interesting article on what to do if a McMansion is proposed for the lot next door.
It’s a supersize worry: The McMansion down the street from your home will ruin the value of your property.
If you live in an upscale neighborhood and there’s an empty lot nearby, trouble could be coming your way. With real-estate prices sliding, how long before a developer with cash to spend picks up that space for a bargain and builds a three-story McMansion, dwarfing neighboring homes and shading the rest of the street?
The McMansion invasion has overtaken cities around the U.S. What exactly is a McMansion, you might ask? There’s no hard definition, but most people know them when they see them. They often start with the tear-down of a smaller, older home situated on a good-size lot in a nice neighborhood.
The developer then draws up plans to build out the new house so that its footprint extends to virtually each property line and it rises as high as the local building code will allow.
Read more…
The New York Times also has an interesting article on what some New Jersey towns are doing to combat the monster houses.
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I have moved my daily online communications to the Fivecat Studio Facebook and Twitter stream. The blog format is a great place for more developed ideas and I will continue sharing commentary here at Living Well in Westchester on a monthly basis.
I post to Twitter most every weekday evening between 7:30 and 11:00 PM. I use Twitter to share links to new products and interesting tidbits from the many industry blogs I follow on a daily basis.
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