Are they the ones that do the ultraviolet light show? You probably haven’t seen it.
9 Likes
I think it’s whoever can shove the most “features” into the inside of a house for the least money.
“Who cares about the outside? you’ve got central a/c vaulted ceilings marble flooring and country cabinets!”
2 Likes
Needs more shiplap.
3 Likes
I’ve been going through the site for about 20 minutes now and there’s been a grand total of 1 post showing interiors, about 10 discussing exteriors with examples showing good architecture vs. bad and a plethora of asks with answers.
Did you only look at one post and then comment?
3 Likes
Actually, BoingBoing’s been extremely enthusiastic about the “tiny house” movement which have houses as tiny if not smaller than that apartment. But many tiny houses seem incredibly charming and well designed. That apartment was neither.
3 Likes
This is a Google Maps view of the house that set off the anti-McMansion campaigners in my local neighborhood.
I’m perfectly willing to defend the notion that this is an aesthetic blot on the landscape, completely out of scale for both the size of its lot and its surrounding neighborhood.
The neighborhood is predominantly largish, custom-built prewar one- and two-story suburban ranch-style homes, but it also has the usual sprinkling of modernist rebuilds and overdone renovations, which are perfectly fine.
But that thing is a monstrosity.
10 Likes
That’s awful. It’s like some sort of office building meets apartment block aesthetic.
4 Likes
Oh hey street view…
here are the modern houses near me
So yeah they don’t fit the style of the rest of the houses but if you wander around it is various styles from the 40s to the 60s anyway.
1 Like
Now this is stuck in my head…but that’s a good thing.
2 Likes
In Forest Hills, a neighborhood of queens, the tradition among the Bukharian community was to pave one’s lawn. It got ugly fast, and may have been the impetus for a string of arsons.
3 Likes
Looks like someone’s been watching Fixer Upper? And drinking?
8 Likes
I must admit I find home improvement shows like this to be addicting mostly for the many schadenfreude opportunities.
4 Likes
You might be interested in the work of the Open Building Institute.
“Through a series of experimental builds over the past few years, we learned that it is possible to construct a modular starter home—with an attached aquaponic greenhouse and loaded with ecological features—for under $25k in materials and in as little as 5 days.”
3 Likes
The architecture of these monsters sucks, but the true take-away is this is that its a symptom of the flawed structure of our Housing/Real Estate market.
House values, and there for what kind of houses developers can get financing for, and sales prices for are strongly influences by the appraisel industry. Appraisers use systematic evaluations that strive to remove subjective thinking, and rely greatly on values of comparable house sales - or “comp’s”. Unfortunately the objectivity built into the criteria leads to this kind of perverted excess of meaningless, and valueless, features which despite the uselessness add to the value of the property.
So in practice this plays out in ways that don’t make sense. To the casual observer, they can look at a McMansion and observe, that house sucks! Yet its value is extremely high. Does not make sense.
In this lala land created by the runaway influence of appraisals a houses value can always be increased by increasing square footage. Meanwhile features that cost more, and actually add intrinsic value to a home, like bigger or nicer windows, do not increase value, or at least do not increase value at the same rate it accrues with square feet. This begets multi peaked stone clad front facades, where the other three sides of the house are clad with vinyl siding and tiny windows. A stone front adds value. Crappy vinyl siding on the other three sides with bad windows does not decrease value. Meanwhile old homes suffer under this, houses that were built years ago at a level of quality that almost nobody can afford anymore appraise low, because current features are lacking in the historic configurations. But more often than not these houses are built to a much higher level of quality than current McMansions and almost universally that quality treatment was on all four sides of the house.
Where the artifice of this valuation system really makes itself evident is with energy efficient features (which admittedly are just starting to break into appraisals). So for instance adding insulation, which will in fact decrease the operating cost of a home and even make more cash available for debt service, will not raise the value of the home. In fact it will raise a red flag with lenders who will inform you the cost of your walls per square foot is higher than average, and it makes your well insulated home a riskier lending candidate. Absurd.
But seriously, this is how messed up the housing market is.
15 Likes
Excellent movie. Well worth watching. It starts as a documentary about this couple building the largest house in the U.S. As the Siegel’s fortune plummeted (though they’re still richer than almost everyone I know… as I recall they had to cut their staff from 11 down to 4 or some-such, the horror!) they kept making the documentary but it switched direction radically.
In the end, some of them actually come across as fairly sympathetic characters.
3 Likes
Where are you getting those numbers? The top 1% are still people who work for a living, and their incomes are in the 6 figures but not over a million.
Last year, according to Business Insider, the top 1% in each of 13 cities (ascending order) are earning:
Charlotte, NC: $383,846
Seattle, WA: $408,153
Houston, TX: $423,345
Philadelphia, PA: $424,552
Dallas, TX: $425,060
San Diego, CA: $428,000
Baltimore, MD: $433,473
Los Angeles, CA: $466,895
Chicago, IL: $479,844
Washington, DC: $513,000
Boston, MA: $529,343
San Francisco, CA: $558,046
New York, NY: $608,584
The top place in the country logs in at half what you quoted. That’s a big difference. And a $10M house is going to require a hefty down payment, a bank that’s willing to take on the mortgage (which, among other things, means the interest rate will be higher than for a standard mortgage), and a monthly cost just for the mortgage, mortgage insurance, and real estate taxes (not including things like utilities, upkeep, etc.) of somewhere in the neighborhood of $60-75K. That’s $720-900K per year alone. Not possible for the 1%.
(I used to be a mortgage officer at a bank.)
5 Likes
Anyone advocating a neo-baroque revival is idea-baroque.
6 Likes
THANK YOU FOR THAT!!! OMG, seriously. Getting documentation about that population is so difficult. I did not know there was a whole community in the U.S. to contact.
7 Likes
5 Likes
