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It's the McMansions' style, not size, that counts

Mary Umberger | House & Homes: On Real Estate

February 22, 2009

Personally, I have nothing against McMansions. I'm not even sure I could define what a McMansion is.

Maybe codifying the term is irrelevant. Many people who sniff at—even profess to hate—such homes will tell you that, as former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart so famously said of pornography, they know it when they see it.

In sum, though, we're talking here about oversize houses built on undersize lots, a genre that has been assailed for everything from tackiness to being emblematic of conspicuous overconsumption.

But determining how big is "too big" is an issue that has roiled many a town, and some of the nation's most notorious McMansion regulation battles have been fought in Chicago suburbs. Jack Nasar, a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State University, set out to quantify the tipping point that sets some people off.

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He surveyed 226 people, showing them computer-generated images of various streets that contained alleged McMansions of various styles and sizes. He found, to his surprise, that the people in the study didn't regard the houses as particularly dislikable until the homes were literally twice as big as their neighbors.

And generally, that double ratio applied only to the height of the new homes. The McMansions that were two times as wide as their neighbors didn't set people off nearly so much, he said.

The bigger reaction related to style. "We found that communities should try to be consistent with style," Nasar said. "That's what seems to concern people the most."

This doesn't exactly come as a lightning bolt in some embattled Chicago suburbs, but Nasar said not as many metro areas around the country have grappled with the teardown/McMansion phenomenon as Chicagoans might think. He previously surveyed 100 cities about the sizes of their homes.

"We found that half of them had McMansions, or oversize houses," he said. "But just roughly half of those had tried to regulate them."

The bait shopAmid the hoopla and angst over the new economic-stimulus legislation, the housing industry got at least part of what it had lobbied hard for—a slightly souped-up tax credit for first-time home buyers.

Before the final version of the law, the Senate version had housing practically giddy for a while at the prospect of a $15,000 credit. However, in the final compromise version, the credit got scaled back to $8,000. Nonetheless, that would seem to be an improvement over existing law, which offered a temporary $7,500 credit for first-timers and had to be repaid over time, rendering it more of an interest-free loan than a solid tax freebie.

But will the new credit actually help to pull housing out of the doldrums? A spokesman for the National Association of Home Builders told me in December that response to the existing tax credit had been underwhelming. Consumer anxiety over falling house values, job losses, and the difficulty of qualifying for a mortgage seemed to trump tax incentives, he said.

In January, the builders quantified that impression. The trade group surveyed 700 self-described "on the fence" consumers about what kinds of things might move them to sign a home-purchase contract, and a tax credit did little to stir them. It landed in sixth place on a list of 10 possible motivators.

What, then, would it take? Among the stuck-in-neutral buyers, 44 percent said they were waiting for better mortgage rates—but bear in mind that 41 percent also said they weren't even sure they could qualify for a loan. About 38 percent said they were waiting for home prices to fall further.

And those tried-and-true "incentives" of free granite countertops and other upgrades? Very weak interest, according to the survey.

Speaking of freebies, offering cars to home buyers seemed to be all the rage about a year ago, then they trickled away. Maybe they're coming back—I've come across a number of them lately.

Locally, Keller Williams broker Tricia Fox has listed a $2.5 million Gold Coast rowhouse that comes with its own new BMW Mini Cooper. (Fox said there was concern that the property's garage was tight on space, so the seller decided to throw in a diminutive car to compensate.)

Climbing the car-status ladder, though, an impatient home seller in Houston is dangling a new Lexus for the purchaser of his $1 million home.

If all of the above is just peanuts to you, a builder in a Phoenix suburb is trying to drum up buyers for any of several multimillion-dollar properties by throwing in a new Bentley, with a retail value of $200,000.

But wait—this just in: Not to be outdone, the seller of a $3.6 million home in Tiburon, Calif., may have come up with the ultimate automotive accessory for any residence, according to the San Francisco Chronicle—a Ferrari F430 Spider valued at $250,000.

Hear Mary Umberger at 12:49 and 11:15 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday and at 10:30 a.m. Saturday and Sunday on WGN-AM 720. Write to her at House & Homes, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., 5th Floor, Chicago, IL 60611 or send e-mail to housingnews@comcast.net