What will happen to all the McMansions in the 1T?

[pbrower2a]

(05-20-2019, 09:17 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:

(05-18-2019, 11:07 AM)AspieMillennial Wrote: When a lot of the owners are dying off and they can't be sold for the ridiculous prices? Any idea what will happen based on the last fourth turning? Housing trends seem like a hyper version of a 3T even though we're in the 4T.

Most of them were/are poorly constructed in areas with poor infrastructure.  The exurbs will be swallowed up by rural revival.  I foresee a time where a single mcmansion may remain standing while the picket fences and suburban lawns are ripped up for growing vegetables while the rest either decays or is asset stripped.

In the near suburbs they will be chopped up into multi-family housing much like the old Victorian houses were last time around in the inner cities. 

The key question is will the 1T  attempt to repeat the last or will there be political will for vital infrastructure improvement.

Because the owners are upscale, the builders could get away with poor infrastructure. The McMansions themselves are often of shoddy construction that will make them unsuited for cutting up into apartments -- as will the poor infrastructure. I see them being torn down because they are inefficient land use. Asset stripping? Sure. Some people will cherish the chandeliers and other such 'luxury' appointments. They are unlikely to have any commercial value as office or retail space.

One day last year I paid a visit to what I thought an attractive town -- the town itself is attractive (Dexter, Michigan, just outside Ann Arbor -- but found myself into some McMansion developments. If you know rural Michigan at all it is a haven for Victorian housing, as Michigan had a population boom at that time. Were I developing houses in Michigan I would push 'neo-Victorian' buildings with fully-modern amenities, high-quality construction, and some revivals of nineteenth-century quirks. McMansions? Somebody has no appreciation of the architectural heritage of the region. 

I doubt that the owners will be starting any vegetable gardens in the interim.

A big question will be whether America becomes a pure plutocracy in which really well-built castles and palaces get built or a more equitable society in which exurbs become cities in their own right, like Naperville, Illinois and McKinney, Texas. There will be much redevelopment in real estate, whether in the wake of a destructive war or the predictable demise of most housing stock. The suburban post-WWII housing built for returning GIs and the infrastructure backing them were built to last a lifetime... probably of the children living there. But as the children born to those places in the late 40s and early 50s cross age 70, guess how the streets and sewers are now: messes. That housing is now obsolete, and obsolete, mass-market things get obliterated without regret.

McMansions were wasteful from the start, and if they start to be foreclosed upon, they will be destroyed for the most efficient housing available.



Built 1962, demolished 2005. Would you like to live in such a place? Grain elevators with windows.