That is so tempting to do… but I am partial to the solution of a neighbor across the street which is just cover the whole thing with wood chips regularly and put in some raised beds.
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I wouldn’t know what the hell to do with that much money a year… I mean yeah I would like to earn more than I was earning but that is crazy.
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In the UK it’s typical to replace front yards with paving to provide off-road parking.
And we have no yard, because we live in one of those ‘Monster Houses’ you mention. Wouldn’t have been my first choice, but the craftsman homes were really expensive.
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household income != individual income
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Yeah, same here. I feel like I’m very, very comfortable here on something like a third of what a 1%er makes according to that chart. But I hustle to make it and I’m very fiscally conservative and risk-averse. I’m not sure what I would do with one of those giant houses, but ours is too small.
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I admit, I’d deserve it.
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That’s per city. I googled national numbers, and took a quick look at what was quoted in places like, yes Business Insider, Forbes, the NY Times ETC. The $1.2m number was, I believe, from a Forbes article about Mitt Romney circa 2012. And as I noted its the average skewed by the very high incomes of the ultra wealthy. You’ll also notice that Business Insider article doesn’t specify whether that the average income or the minimum to qualify in the 1% bracket. If you click through to the NYT widget they link bated for that article you’ll notice that its pretty clear they’re talking the baseline to qualify. The minimum(ish) yearly salary that qualifies one as part of the 1%. And I claimed above that that minimum nationally was something like $390k ish. The NYT widget, in its upper left hand corner lists this national number as $383,001. My number is also roughly in line with the basement of the numbers you list. Which makes sense as its a NATIONAL AVERAGE. It has to account both for the relatively wealthy large cities Business Insider listed. As well as the not very wealthy other areas in the country. Like wise this regional breakdown is a bad way to look at it. The top 1% in Flint Michigan (according to that tool) come in at $180,000. That’s a big salary, but nationally its well outside the top 1%. And well outside what we’re talking about when we bitch about “the 1%”. A teacher with enough time on the job, in the right school district can make $80k a year. If she is married to another similarly long standing teacher their household is a $180k house hold. Are teachers in the one percent? Likewise if the tool would allow us (it doesn’t) we might look at Bumblefuck West Virginia. Only to find that to be in the top 1% of earners for that locality one would have to make only $80k. That number is straight from my ass. But some part of the US will look like that, if you take it granularly enough.
Since those are the bottom of the 1% category, the rest of the 1% are earning anywhere from the numbers you cite on up. With, I’m willing to assume, most of them earning more (because, again, bottom)
So congrats you found the same information I did.
The other issue you might be missing is that this phenomenon. This type of development, this type of house. And the type of behavior I was trying to explain was intimately tied to the Housing Bubble and all those mortgage shenanigans. Many of these developments were funded or built by venture capital and investment banks specifically to fuel all those easy mortgages. So they could repackage those mortgages as securities. Its not as likely for some one to get a way inappropriate mortgage with shockingly low down payment these days as it was then (because the bubble burst) but it still can happen. And all of it is going to vary regionally. A house that costs $800k where I am goes for far, far less in other parts of the country. The house my buddy bought in Philly for around 200k (ish) a few years back would be a few $100k more expensive here. And in Detroit they say you can buy a house for a dollar.
As for the other numbers on whos buying what from which income bracket? Those are my impressions of the real estate market for my own region (1% income starting at over $600k!) based on local reporting on the real estate market. Who’s buying what houses around my town, and family and neighbors who are in the construction business. Often building and selling spec houses to these various upscale personages of distinction. The new arrivals I meet through my job; and what jobs they have, salaries they claim, and what the publicly listed asking prices are for the house they bought. That’s what it actually looks like on the ground in a bloated, speculation heavy, “hot spot” beach town real estate market in the NYC metro area.
That said you can still see the fallout of the crash all over. There are a lot of foreclosures in more out of the way places out here. Still. Some one I know bought one recently. House was gutted with a barely started renovation. A couple hundred feet from a HOA shared private beach access. On a full acre. $160k. An acre of empty land that close to the beach can sometimes go for more than that here (though not in that town). Before the bust happened it was next to impossible to find something that low at any point after 1995. Most of the McMansion/Model Home developments here (there aren’t a lot in the immediate area) are associated with golf courses. Most of the houses in them are now empty, if they were ever occupied. And most of the lots never even broke ground. There are empty spec houses with $2m asking prices all over. Often in neighborhoods where pricing tops out at ~$600-$800k.
All of these houses, sitting empty, demolished or foreclosed. Were built/bought/financed at highly inflated values not long before the bust, by people who on paper didn’t have the means to throw $1m+ at a house that was appraised at $700k. Or companies that expected astronomical returns in short order. They’ve got too much money wrapped up in this crap to drop the price. So the properties don’t sell (where as 10 years ago they would have), molder, and eventually get foreclosed, abandoned, or sold at vastly reduced price when the speculators go bust.
But the bubble came back here sort of fast. SO they’re starting it all over again. And plenty of people are paying too much for ridiculous, poorly built spec houses again. Because you wouldn’t BELIEVE how much they’re gonna be worth in just FIVE years (you probably shouldn’t).
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Well you keep adding kids to the family… 
On the plus side you have some built in house cleaning help… supposedly.
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Yeah, I wish I knew how that keeps happening! 
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But what if it were a Haunted McMansion, @doctorow?
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Terrorized by the ghost of khaki pants? The walls oozing with chardonay? Your shih tzu possessed by the vengeful spirits from the ancient acountants burial ground it was built on?
horrifying
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Har har har - for those not tuned into Architectural History, this is a Historic English country house designed by British architect Edwin Lutyens in the early 1900s. His work at this time is spectacular pinnacle of tudor vernacular, but the artifice of it could easily qualify him as the Father of the McMansion!
While its not really fair to compare his work to these lousy pseudo historic McMansions - Lutyens was a master of proportion and composition. But its worth noting that at the same time ole’ Edwin was cranking out these treaclely country manses the avant garde of the time were busy forming the foundation of the International Style which lead to what we commonly refer to as “Modernism”.
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Yeah, you got me, 
I rather liked his artifice, even if the roof of Castle Drogo does leak.
Nobody did it better. They’re still trying. For instance http://www.shoperenowharton.com
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How about the guy that hid his house behind straw bales after he built it, with the idea that the period for people to object to it would expire before they saw it and he could get retrospective planning permission?
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An interesting mixture of styles… more WTF than ugly.
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I’ve lived my whole life in urban CA in the Bay Area and in Southern CA, so I’m well aware of the McMansion. In the Bay Area, they infected older neighborhoods right inside Silicon Valley, in Southern CA, they seem to be more suburban.
In Southern CA, the McMansion is bought mostly by people who would never live “in the city” and make a lot of dough.
We have a friend (who I love) that bought a HUGE house in Suburban San Diego and the thing is that when you walk in, the first thing you think - who the hell designed this monstrosity?? It’s 2 floors and like 4000sf but chopped up and really horrifying the way it’s laid out.
For what they paid for this thing they could have bought an older remodeled house half the size (there’s only two of them) walking distance to the ocean or in a cool older neighborhood pretty much anywhere else with the same usable lot. I don’t get it. Then again, we live in a mid century 1100sf house in a pocket city neighborhood around which some people think is “scary”, so what do I know…
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I guess I’ve been in SF too long, because $2.25M 6 bedrooms, 7 2/2 baths, and a 4-car garage only thirty miles from Manhattan sounds pretty cheap to me. (You can probably get even better deals next door in Paterson, and the architecture might well be decaying prewar industrial instead of shit.)
he was told to tear it down.
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