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TODAY Wednesday 12 November 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Monsters of Wellesley, Massachusetts

In 1946, the year of my birth, the average size of a new-built house in the United States was approximately 1,500 square feet. Families were larger then, but even 300 square feet per person was (and still is) a princely portion when compared with the much smaller dwellings available to most people in most times in most places. Throw in a lawn, some trees, safe streets for Junior and Sis, a Chevy in the driveway -- heaven.

West of Boston, the town of Wellesley was an especially pleasant version of heaven and its dwellings ran a little bigger than the national norm: a new house in Wellesley in 1946 enclosed 1,673 square feet. In 1996, that figure had jumped to 3,617 square feet. Paradise now comes with walk-in closets.

I acquired this information from Deborah Knight, a crack enviro journalist. Her article in the 19 October edition of The Boston Globe Magazine, entitled "Make Way for Mansions," tells the story of Wellesley's new mega-houses, and tells it in the context of a growing national trend. "Trophy Homes;" "McMansions" -- giant houses are popping up all over the country, and for the usual two reasons: 1) people like lots of space and 2) they figure that a big house will make a big profit when it comes time to sell.

In Wellesley and already-settled towns like it, the standard procedure is the "tear-down". You buy a lot with a 2000 square foot house on it for $215,000. You tear it down, and put up a 6000 square foot house which can sell for $700,000. In a New England town with historical and cultural pretensions, you can imagine how the McMansions can drive a certain segment of the community absolutely batty. Modest Colonial houses on big lots are replaced by giant post-modernist cubes that hug the boundaries. Acrimonious town meetings wrangle with the question of the proper role of local government in controlling residential uses. The issue of class often breaks down into the by-no-means-limited-to-New-England phenomenon of well-off people whose parents went to college versus really-well-off people who are the first in their family to go beyond high school. The latter usually win because they have the market on their side.

The same market forces were at play in Berkeley, California, after the terrible fire in the hills there a few years ago. This was a community that talked ecology. But almost every homeowner who rebuilt on the ashes of his or her modest little Bay Area bungalow erected a large (and usually godawful-looking) mega-house. Got to maximize your investment, they all said; you have to think of your family first.

The upshot is that in little Wellesley, of the 28 new houses built in 1996, only one was smaller than 2000 square feet. Nine of them were over 4000 square feet. In nearby, less densely-settled towns, typical subdivisions featured no houses smaller than 4000 square feet.

Structural explanations? Debby Knight ticks them off: lots of buyer money through the stock markets and earlier housing investments; low mortgage rates; tax-deductible interest payments. If pressed, developers and new owners admit that the McMansions aren't as good for the environment as little saltboxes, but that's a factor out there somewhere, not anything close enough so that it should affect a consumer choice for something as important as a home.

It makes me want to give up and retire to that country house I keep drawing on the pad of graph paper stored behind the Liberty Tree finance books. If you count the third floor as only half a floor -- the eaves will make you stoop, after all-- and if we get rid of that guest room (what guests?) -- we'll almost come in under 2000 square feet ourselves, which will teach Wellesley a thing or two.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Seth Zuckerman, the Bard of Petrolia, California, has added to his great work in the Hypermaterialism section of our site. To his earlier explications of coffee and refrigerators he now contributes the story of plywood; find out the hidden ecological history of those ubiquitous 4X8 wooden sandwiches. Wonderful stuff.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

11/11: Armistice Day and the Next Great War
11/10: Mea Maxima Culpa
11/07: Inflexible Flyers
11/06: Meaningless Votes, Really
11/05: In Praise of SeaWeb
11/04: Reality Check
11/03: Green Loafing
10/31: Guilty Nationalist Pleasures
10/30: Europe Alone
10/29: Duck! (Again)

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