McMansion

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Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

Although we are accustomed to blaming it all on subprime loans, about half of the disaster was actually attributable to the less well-known fiasco in Alt-A instruments, which fed the McMansion market—the “liar’s loans” that were securitized and sold off stamped with a big triple-A. The worst recession of our lifetime, in other words, was in large part the result of our superiors’ longing to get themselves a piece of the grandiose. That astounding reversal of the usual chain of cause and effect changed the way I thought about the McMansion. I once thought of writing an essay tracking stylistic changes in the tract-mansion form—how, say, the fake French simplicity of Newt Gingrich’s 1987 McMansion gave way to the complex multigabled fakery of Michele Bachmann’s 2007 McMansion, with maybe a stop in between to contemplate Ricky Bobby’s McMansion in Talladega Nights.

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I once thought of writing an essay tracking stylistic changes in the tract-mansion form—how, say, the fake French simplicity of Newt Gingrich’s 1987 McMansion gave way to the complex multigabled fakery of Michele Bachmann’s 2007 McMansion, with maybe a stop in between to contemplate Ricky Bobby’s McMansion in Talladega Nights. But what I discovered is that the form doesn’t really change. Yes, the houses get bigger every year, gables and gazebos come and go, but what is really striking about the McMansion is its vapid consistency as the decades pass. What stays the same, and what always gets me when I walk through one of these houses, are the vacuous spaces. The vast stretches of painted Sheetrock. The gaping rooms that are too tall to decorate. The billowing industrial roof. The windowless walls.

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Hourly wages were dropping, the stock market was rising, taxes for the rich were falling, public housing was not a priority anymore, and in-your-face tract mansions were sprouting everywhere. Today we call those changes inequality, and inequality is, obviously, the point of the McMansion. The suburban ideal of the 1950s, according to The Organization Man, was supposed to be “classlessness,” but the opposite ideal is the brick-to-the-head message of the dominant suburban form of today. The McMansion exists to separate and then celebrate the people who are wealthier than everybody else; this is the transcendent theme on which its crazy, discordant architectural features come harmoniously together.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

Lang, Megapolitan America: A New Vision for Understanding America’s Metropolitan Geography (American Planning Association/Planners Press, 2011). America 2050, a think tank arm: See america2050.org under “Megaregions” (don’t skip the maps). Some foreclosed McMansions in exurbs are finding: Barbara Kiviat, “Reinventing the McMansion,” Time, September 28, 2009; Patricia Leigh Brown, “Animal McMansion: Students Trade Dorm for Suburban Luxury,” New York Times, November 12, 2011; Norimitu Onishi, “Foreclosed Houses Become Homes for Indoor Marijuana Farms,” New York Times, May 6, 2012. Some creative underwater owners: Alyssa Abkowitz, “Room for Rent—in a Mansion,” SmartMoney, February 14, 2011.

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In addition to representing a place to live, the home had suddenly become a wealth creation machine. It was the American Dream, squared. The homes themselves grew bigger and more ornate—Arcadia Land’s Jason Duckworth refers to this as housing’s “baroque” period—and soon we were identifying them with a new label, the McMansion. Though almost every builder started making them during the housing boom, the invention of the modern-day McMansion dates decades earlier; the first use of the term dates to around 1990 and was soon thereafter defined by the Oxford English Dictionay as “a large modern house that is considered ostentatious and lacking in architectural integrity.” But identifying the demand for a new category of housing in between high-end custom-built homes and tract housing can be credited to Toll Brothers, which came to mass produce the most expensive homes of any builder in the country.

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A 2011 survey of builders by the NAHB found they expected home size to drop to 2,150 by 2015. The median “ideal home size” for Americans, according to a survey by Trulia, was 2,100 square feet, right around what it was in the 1990s. Demand appears to be waning for McMansions. Only 9 percent of respondents in a separate Trulia-Harris interactive survey in 2010 said they wanted homes over 3,000 square feet—which by McMansion standards isn’t even that big. A majority of respondents, 64 percent, said they preferred homes ranging from 800 to 2,000 square feet. In a state-of-the-industry overview at the 2012 home builders’ show, Boyce Thompson, then the editorial director of the Builder group of magazines for publisher Hanley Wood, told the crowd that 56 percent of builders had changed their design strategy within the past two years to build smaller homes.

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

Could the once-desirable suburban and exurban communities—with their endless cul-de-sacs and gated McMansions—be on their way to becoming the blighted and abandoned communities of tomorrow? “The future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing,” wrote the urban planning expert Christopher Leinberger in an attention-getting essay in the Atlantic, “The Next Slum?”16 Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments and requiring relatively little upkeep. “By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built,” he writes.

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The bank said it was tearing them down to create a “safe environment” for the neighbors. It’s interesting to pause there and note that brand-new homes, standing empty, could be seen as posing a danger to a neighborhood. In fact, just as youths squatted in abandoned tenements in the South Bronx and bohemians homesteaded the empty lofts and factories of Brooklyn, many of the empty McMansions of the Sunbelt are providing shelter to homeless and jobless young people. It’s entirely possible, of course, that the bank just decided it was cheaper to destroy those houses than to keep them up to building code. In some similarly affected parts of the country, the bulldozers may not even be necessary; the homes are collapsing on their own.

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It’s not so much that regular middle-class people are wanton “overconsumers,” note Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi, it’s that we’ve been trapped by the ever-increasing costs of these necessities.4 That’s not completely true, of course. Some people did go hog wild, shelling out more and more for pricier cars and houses. Whether they were bigger (McMansions or Hummers) or better (Lexus Hybrids or renovated brownstones) is beside the point; the fact is that they cost more. The concentration of economic activity and talent in certain cities—New York, Washington, San Francisco, and so on—drove up demand, especially in prime, close-in neighborhoods. It wasn’t enough to buy a nice house; we’d entered the shelter chic, HGTV era—one needed the full complement of a designer Sub-Zero/Wolf/wine refrigerator kitchen; the humongous master bath with heated floor, massive soaking tub, and overhead rainfall shower; the tricked-out walk-in closet with special shelves and compartments for everything from shoes to shirts and hats; the home entertainment theater with in-ceiling stereo and flat panel on the wall; never mind a wine cellar of your very own.

Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The current model is the fast-food version of the American dream—some call it the McMansion. Its roots can be traced back to the manse on the agricultural estate, or the cabin in the woods. Unlike its predecessors, however, the McMansion is located in the center of a small plot of land, surrounded at close quarters by more of the same. The aesthetic deficiencies of this form of housing are so obvious that a number of well-known architects have made a name for themselves by seeking inspiration in its kitsch. But the real problems here are not aesthetic but practical. Like its culinary counterpart, the McMansion provides excellent value for its price.

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Americans may have the finest private realm in the developed world, but our public realm is brutal. Confronted by repetitive subdivisions, treeless collector roads, and vast parking lots, the citizen finds few public spaces worth visiting. One’s role in this environment is primarily as a motorist competing for asphalt. The McMansion: independent of its aesthetic qualities, an excellent value Outside the McMansion: a depleted public realm This disjunction between the private and public realm has resulted in a uniquely American form of schizophrenia, suburban Nimbyism. The reason people say, “I like living here, but I don’t want any others like me living here,” is that new suburban development does not provide them with any more of the satisfying private realm that they love; it only gives them more of the degraded public realm toward which they feel indifferent at best.

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It is the expectation, based upon decades of experience, that what will be built here you will detest. It will be sprawl: cookie-cutter houses, wide, treeless, sidewalk-free roadways, mindlessly curving cul-de-sacs, a streetscape of garage doors—a beige vinyl parody of Leave It to Beaver. Or, worse yet, a pretentious slew of McMansions, complete with the obligatory gatehouse. You will not be welcome there, not that you would ever have reason to visit its monotonous moonscape. Meanwhile, more cars will worsen your congested commute. The future residents will come in search of their American Dream, and in so doing will compromise yours.

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger

addicted to oil, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, big-box store, centre right, commoditize, credit crunch, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, Ford Model T, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, walkable city, white flight

And the new tenants will have to heat huge houses that are “outstanding in their fields”—exposed on all sides to the weather, unlike more efficient apartments and townhouses in more urban settings. Another problem is that today’s homes, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built in comparison to those grand houses and townhouses that were broken up into apartments half a century ago. Hollow doors and wall board are less durable than solid oak doors and lath and plaster walls. Many McMansions have been built with artificial components that do not have a proven track record of long life, such as plywood 146 | THE OPTION OF URBANISM floors using glues that dry out over time and roofs that are built to last no more than ten years.

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Housing aimed at “lower” income households, those making less than $200,000 per year, will definitely be avoided at all costs. Only those that are “just like us,” known as JLUs in the jargon, will be allowed. MOVE - U P FO R - SALE HOU S ING —This housing will also be in the fa- vored quarter, though is less likely to be in a gated community. This type includes so-called “McMansions” and other oversized homes that provide “value.” Although large, these houses are not especially well built (hollow doors, sheetrock walls, and midlevel appliances). Yet on a price-per-squarefoot basis, they are very reasonably priced. The “curb appeal” of these homes is extremely important; they must look as large and impressive from the street T H E S TA N DA R D R E A L E S TAT E P R O D U C T T Y P E S | 5 5 as possible.

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Census, metropolitan land use in the latter half of the twentieth century outpaced by at least four times the rate of metropolitan population growth, as we relocated farther and farther from the center to an ever-expanding fringe.15 In all probability, the land consumption in the last two decades of the twentieth century was actually at least six to eight times faster than metropolitan population growth, because the USDA does not consider some of the lowest density development popular over the past generation, such as McMansions on two-acre lots,16 as urban land use. A 2006 Brookings Institution study focused on “exurbia,” the fringe of a metropolitan area that is also not considered urbanized by the USDA, found even more extreme land consumption.17 Completely car-dependent, exurbia has on average fourteen acres of land for every house (compared to 0.8 acres per house for the typical new suburb), meaning that if exurban land consumption is also considered, there has been a far more rapid geometric increase of ten to twenty times faster than population growth during the last two decades of the twentieth century.

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

. ——— “World Megacities: Growing & Becoming Less Dense,” New Geography, http://www.newgeography.com/content/004823-megacities-growing-and-getting-less-dense. COX, Wendell and PAVLETICH, Hugh. (2014). “11th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey: 2015,” Demographia, http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf. COY, Peter. (2012, November 16). “The Death of the McMansion Has Been Greatly Exaggerated,” Bloomberg Business, http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-11-16/death-of-the-mcmansion-has-been-greatly-exaggerated. CRITSER, Greg. (2010, September 2). “A Pill For Los Angeles? Medicating the Megacities,” Newgeography.com, http://www.newgeography.com/content/001742-a-pill-for-los-angeles-medicating-megacities. CROSSLEY, David. (2009, October 12).

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“In Northern Italy, the Agony of Aging Not So Gracefully,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/world/europe/22genoa.html. ROSENTHAL, Jack. (1974). “The Outer City: An Overview Suburban Turmoil in the United States,” Suburbia in Transition, New York: New Viewpoints. ROSS, Benjamin. (2014, May 4). “Disaster in the age of McMansions: America’s dangerous addiction to suburban sprawl,” Salon, http://www.salon.com/2014/05/04/disaster_in_the_age_of_mcmansions_americas_dangerous_addiction_to_suburban_sprawl/. ROTHMAN, Hal. (2003). Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the 21st Century, New York: Routledge. ROXO, Sergio and HERDY, Thiago. (2013, June 13). “PM de SP usa tropa de choque para conter protestos em escalada de violencia,” Globo, http://oglobo.globo.com/brasil/pm-de-sp-usa-tropa-de-choque-para-conter-protestos-em-escalada-de-violencia-8680923.

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But besides being environmentally imperative, the shift to denser development is also seen as somehow morally justified. Retro-urbanists—those who long for a return to the traditional pre-1950 city—represent a kind of moral imperative. Typically, this is cast as a choice between 4,000-square-foot McMansions and unbridled consumption on one side and more sustainable high-density urban living on the other. Columbia University’s Earth Institute executive director Steven Cohen speaks of a future “with smaller personal spaces, more frequent use of public spaces, bikes, parks, high-tech media, and constant attention to one’s environmental footprint.”26 Prince Charles’s vision of “eco-cities”—although more medieval than modern in its form—also embraces a similar viewpoint, urging British people to live in smaller spaces and grow their food in community gardens.

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

More than ever, homes have become a symbol of conspicuous consumption, as beneficiaries of the ’90s stock market boom began in many communities to buy real estate, bulldoze existing (and perfectly functional) homes, and replace them with megahouses of 10,000 square feet and more. “Starter castles,” some have named them. Others call them monster homes. On America’s Streets of Dreams, the competition is fierce. McMansions. . . Double McMansions. . . Deluxe McMansions. . . Deluxe McMansions with Cheese. . . Full Garage Deals. . . each one a little bigger and glitzier, popping up like mushrooms in a frenzy of home wars. In places like the spectacular mountain towns of the West, many such megahomes are actually second homes, mere vacation destinations for the newly rich.

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“In line with growing class polarization, the classic posture of submission is making a stealthy comeback,” charges Ehrenreich, who worked as a maid for $6.63 an hour to research the story. She points out that one franchise, Merry Maids, even advertises its maid services with a brochure boasting that “we scrub your floors the old-fashioned way—on our hands and knees.”14 Doing research for her best-seller Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich went a-scrub-bing from McMansion to McMansion in Portland, Maine, working under rules that prohibited her from even taking a drink of water while cleaning a house. She discovered that some homes had hidden video cameras to be sure she stayed on track. She was amazed at what messes people left for her. Especially the children, one of whom exclaimed “Look, Mommy, a white maid!”

City on the Verge by Mark Pendergrast

big-box store, bike sharing, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, desegregation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, gentrification, global village, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, jitney, land bank, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, power law, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, young professional

One mother in the Pittsburgh neighborhood said that her teenage daughter had been raped on the front porch of an abandoned home. It is little wonder that a contemporary article on the Next American City website called Atlanta “a portrait of dysfunction.” The vacant homes in the southern part of the city stood in stark contrast to the gigantic “McMansions” thrown up in wealthy northern Atlanta neighborhoods. These had become so numerous by 2006 that Shirley Franklin issued a temporary moratorium on such massive home building on lots where older, smaller homes once stood. Sometimes the good intentions of white liberals who supported the BeltLine failed to connect with black residents on the southern and western sides of town.

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They envisioned theater, dance performances, studios, and cultural centers—all fine ideas, but with little connection to the immediate needs of devastated neighborhoods. Richard Bright, a West End minister and health educator, instead noted that the BeltLine “could be a marvelous opportunity to develop comprehensive planning” to address local concerns about housing, health, and jobs. By 2009, there was no need for a moratorium on building McMansions or anything else. Many ambitious projects faltered and failed because of the credit collapse, including several around the BeltLine. The Georgia office of the Trust for Public Land was stuck, to the tune of $25 million, with property not yet acquired by the city that Jim Langford had purchased near the top of the real estate market.

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The same streets feature some familiar homes, set back behind sweeping lawns, though Latinos rather than African Americans mostly maintain the yards. As this book went to press, my elderly mother still lived in that big brick colonial on the hill, but its next-door twin, built by the same developer in the early 1950s, had been torn down a few years before to make way for a monstrous McMansion. Other gigantic homes have replaced various domiciles throughout Buckhead. In recent years when I accompanied my parents on their morning dog walk, we sometimes went to Garraux Road, an exclusive dead-end street off Ridgewood that is quiet and wooded, with only a rare vehicle. As we walked down the road, we could see a fortress-like home behind a wrought-iron fence with guard dogs.

The Barefoot Investor: The Only Money Guide You'll Ever Need by Scott Pape

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Own Your Own Home, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Robert Shiller, Snapchat

You can't hide it. It's there on display for everybody to see and judge. But it's the opposite when it comes to money. It's easy to hide your financial flab from the world. I've found that it's often the most financially flabby people who appear to look the fittest. They can have a McMortgaged McMansion, a leased Lexus and a maxed-out platinum credit card, and you'd never know that behind closed doors they're the financial equivalent of pudgy North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. No-one knows that they're walking around with the financial equivalent of cankles. At least if you've got a muffin top you've got the motivation to buy an Ab King Pro on a late-night infomercial, or sign up for Light n' Easy.

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I learned a lot about life and money from my grandparents — they were part of the so-called Silent Generation who lived (and thrived) through the not-so-Great Depression. What did that mean in a practical sense? Well, they paid their bills on time … with cash. They saved their money … rather than relying on credit cards. They didn't expect handouts … being on the dole was something to be ashamed of. They lived in modest homes — not McMansions — and they celebrated when they paid them off. And they created a real legacy, which — ultimately — is what this book is all about. Introducing the Barefoot Steps Some finance books are wishy-washy on what you should do. They say things like, ‘Write down your dreams'. Others are written by weirdos who have colour-coded spreadsheets for their undies drawer and whose idea of a holiday is the Bendigo caravan park (communal toilet option).

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Jerry Seinfeld talks garbage You may have read that Australia has the highest rate of household debt in the world. Yet our massive debts are just a symptom of the real problem: our out-of-control spending. Did you know that Australians on average live in the biggest homes in the world? Our supersized McMansions are 10 per cent bigger than the Yanks' (our nearest competitor in the battle of the housing bulge). Is it because we have bigger families? No. Is it because we have more room to build? No. (If you've ever been to a house-and-land package estate, you'll see that the houses are huge and they take up almost every inch of the block — and they're packed in like sardines.)

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Just as the high gas prices of 2007 and 2008 spurred a flight into smaller cars and hybrids, the homes that will be built in coming years will not only be more energy efficient, but, on average, they will likely be smaller. Can Americans learn to love them as they have loved their McMansions? Affordability will drive the transition. People want to own homes, but they also want them to be smart investments. There are other potential benefits to downsizing. Some argue that McMansions are just too large for optimal social connection. One housing researcher opined that these oversize homes are “good for the dysfunctional family.” But a simple shrinking of homes isn’t the answer. Instead, we need a repurposing driven by smart design, another quantity-to-quality shift.

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While the walking home is a curiosity, the beginnings of a trend toward ecovillages and cohousing solve the size dilemma particularly efficiently, by letting residents share spaces that are used only intermittently. Cohousing communities include guest rooms, larger spaces for entertaining, gyms, or even media rooms, pools, and other amenities that sit empty much of the time in McMansions. By combining resources, owners can obtain the benefits of large homes, but at a fraction of the cost. Recent press reports suggest the demand for small houses and living spaces is growing rapidly, given the obvious appeal of life without a mortgage, or a surfeit of stuff. The developer of one green project in Seattle that involves condos atop a Hyatt hotel is betting that the eight-hundred-square-foot size he’s offering will be a winner, as others in the field write the obituary of the “big house.”

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Richard Fry and Paul Taylor, “A Rise in Wealth for the Wealthy; Declines for the Lower 93%,” Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends, April 23, 2013, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/04/23/a-rise-in-wealth-for-the-wealthydeclines-for-the-lower-93; Benjamin Ross, “Disaster in the Age of McMansions: America’s Dangerous Addiction to Suburban Sprawl,” Salon, May 4, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/05/04/disaster_in_the_age_of_mcmansions_americas_dangerous_addiction_to_suburban_sprawl; Dan McLaughlin, “In Defense of Homeownership (or, Why Food and Housing Are Different),” Federalist, May 5, 2014, http://thefederalist.com/2014/05/05/in-defense-of-homeownership-or-why-food-and-housing-are-different; Josh Barro, “Everyone Wants to Be a Homeowner.

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For example, Chris Leinberger at Brookings argues as follows: As people age, and as the percentage of traditional family households drop in the nation as a whole, demand for single-family houses—largely stimulated by young families with children—will also drop. The replacement generation, the millennials, won’t have much use for large-lot homes on the leafy cul-de-sacs that their parents once occupied. Exurbia, he predicts, will largely be populated by poor families crowding into dilapidated, bargain-priced former McMansions in the new “suburban wastelands” that demographic forces will create. Suburbs, not inner cities, will be the new epicenter of inequality, even though the percentage of poor people, as shown above, has remained far higher in the urban core.88 The Coming Conflict over Land Use Real-world behavior, however, is overwhelmingly inconsistent with such fervently held expectations of the coming wave of density.

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

.… It’s just that they’re killing off the architectural style and urban substance that once made this area so attractive.” Sheffield combines “workmen’s cottages” from the nineteenth century and expensive new homes on narrow lots, built to replace older homes that have been torn down. (photo credit 2.2) To an outsider, it doesn’t look that way. The vertical McMansions built in the last few years stand mostly as conspicuous exceptions to the long rows of Victorian cottages. They are conspicuous mainly because there are still relatively few of them. But there is no denying that the biggest story in Sheffield, at least until the real estate bust of 2008, was the arrival of the superrich.

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Kerry Wood, the onetime star pitcher for the Cubs, became a resident of the neighborhood. So did Penny Pritzker, the Hyatt heiress identified by Forbes magazine in 2009 as the 647th-richest person in America, who built a home of more than eight thousand square feet on Orchard Street, just south of Armitage, a street that some locals have taken to calling “Gazillionaire’s Row.” The McMansions in and around Sheffield don’t look anything like their suburban counterparts. The limits on height and lot size guarantee that. A majority of them are simply tall, narrow glass boxes. Some manage to blend in rather well with the surrounding buildings. But their extravagance is undeniable, even if not all of it is visible to the passerby.

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The owners of the smaller houses that still dominate the neighborhood can’t really be said to have suffered economically. They bought for next to nothing, in many cases have paid off the mortgages, and could sell them for a fortune. The one depressing fact of life for the owner of a Sheffield cottage is taxes. Some home owners whose buildings fall far short of McMansion status find themselves looking at property tax bills that can run as high as $11,000 a year. The most common complaint that long-term Sheffield residents make about the newcomers, however, is that they don’t have much interest in broader community life. There’s been “a tremendous diminution in participation in civic affairs,” says Martin Oberman, who used to represent Sheffield on the Chicago City Council.

Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

Another common case of cultural clash is when mega-homes are built in established neighbourhoods of vintage houses and leafy lots. And if these mega-homes bring new ethnic groups, the design dispute can turns into a racial and ethnic confrontation. Variously called monster or mega-homes in Canada and McMansions in the United States, they often are permissible within the existing zoning envelope, except that the existing homes were not built to the maximum of the permissible volume. Hong Kong Chinese moving into the Kerrisdale and South Shaughnessy neighbourhoods of Vancouver ignited the resident English Canadians’ protests.

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Hong Kong Chinese moving into the Kerrisdale and South Shaughnessy neighbourhoods of Vancouver ignited the resident English Canadians’ protests. The City of Vancouver’s planning department and the city council intervened and mediated between the two communities, coming up with new design guidelines (1993) requiring that new homes have regard for the streetscape and architectural compatibility.46 Los Angeles’s McMansions, often associated with rich Iranians, were regulated through special city ordinances in 2008 and 2010 requiring that they be consistent with the lot size, character of the neighbourhood, and steepness of slope.47 230 Multicultural Cities The neighbouring towns of Markham and Aurora in the Toronto area were petitioned by numerous Chinese homeowners for a change of their house numbers that had the digit four (4).

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Ontario Municipal Board, Tilzen Holdings Ltd versus Town of Markham (1998), O.M.B.D. no. 319, File no. PL 956623.D950049, Z960134, M970061. Mohammad Qadeer, “Pluralistic Planning for Multicultural Cities: The Canadian Practice,” Journal of the American Planning Association 63, no. 4 (Autumn 1997), 487. “LA Mayor Signs Law to Limit McMansions in Hillsides,” www .catadjuster.org/Forums/tabid/60/aft/11759/Default.aspx. Author’s interview with town officials in October 2009. Qadeer, “Pluralistic Planning for Multicultural Cities,” 487. Shuguang Wang and Jason Zhong, Delineating Ethnoburbs in Metropolitan Toronto, CERIS Working paper no.100 (Toronto: CERIS – Ontario Metropolis Centre, 2013), 20.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

China’s airports aren’t the source of its noxious air; its coal-burning power plants are. (China burns more coal than the United States, Europe, and Japan combined.) In the United States, as many as half of our own emissions emanate from “the built environment,” the energy consumed to build and service sprawl. We emit more carbon living in McMansions. For another, air travel’s actual share of our carbon footprints is currently 3 percent and falling (at least in the United States), thanks to a bounty of incremental and potentially revolutionary advances meant to slow and hopefully end its carbon contributions. The next generation of airliners, headlined by Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, is lighter and more fuel efficient than last century’s models, complemented by new engines that burn quietly and clean.

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And still no one had thought to make any provisions for what should and what shouldn’t be built beyond the perimeter, because even in the year following Sputnik, no one could foresee what would happen next: Ronald Reagan’s blank checks for Star Wars and the contractors who cashed them would conspire to plow under the hillsides and erect the prototypical edge cities that redefined our urban landscapes. Dulles would be the anchor. The airport’s saving grace was its size, nearly four times the landmass of LAX, and more than all of greater LA’s airports combined. No one could build horse farms or McMansions close enough to complain about the noise, leaving the airport to operate in peace and (relative) quiet. It wouldn’t emerge from its torpor until Reagan took office in 1981. His plan for winning the Cold War—to outspend the Soviets into oblivion—opened a gusher of defense contracts that poured out of the Pentagon and spilled across Virginia in the 1980s.

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The mountain megas’ airports have added forty million passengers in just the last twenty years, which is why Denver was forced to build DIA and why Las Vegas and Phoenix are both planning second airports. While Lang worries about a lack of nonstop flights, the greater threat to Denver is the tide of migration. Even in the depths of the recession, the aerotropolis was filling faster than expected, was sparser than it should be, and was top-heavy with starter McMansions. Reunion and the surrounding boomburbs have been zoned for forty-four thousand homes and roughly 150,000 people. The nascent aerotropolis is making the same, albeit less fatal, mistakes of a Schaumburg or Fairfax at warp speed, spreading across so many cities, counties, and assorted municipal entities that no one is in a position to fill in everyone on the bigger picture, which is how Cal Fulenwider was able to sell his own in the first place.

Green Interior Design by Lori Dennis

big-box store, carbon footprint, clean water, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), McMansion, the built environment

That’s why we look at economic downturns as an opportunity to revisit the lessons of conservation taught to us by our parents and grandparents. This responsible way of thinking has resulted in an interest in smaller, healthier, well-built, energy-efficient homes. In the past few years we’ve seen more than one headline discussing the death of the McMansion. Thankfully, we are now seeing the principles of sustainability becoming mainstream and an increase in behavior that values sensibility over excess. Showing off how much we have is simply out of style. The fact is that the average family size has been declining for thirty-five years. We just don’t need such big homes anymore.

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Alberto, 82–83 libraries, 137 life cycle, 102, 127 lifestyle, indoor-outdoor, 9, 13, 62, 62, 77, 84 lighting, 1, 72–73, 75, 122, 132 accent lighting, 72 accessories and housewares, 72–73 ambient, 72 artificial, 184–185 automated systems, 74 bathroom, controllable, 73 bathroom, flush-mount chandeliers, 73 bathroom, framing the face, 72 bathroom, LED, 73 bathroom, statement, 73 bathroom, wet-rated, 72 bathroom, working with what you have, 73 bathroom lighting tips, 72–73 bathroom wattage, 73 candles, 74 chandelier, 180 closet, 41 compact fluorescent bulbs, 72 control, 95 cove, 139 dimmers, 13, 74, 180 energy-efficient, 153 floor lamps, 139 fluorescent, 72 home office, 184–185 indirect fluorescent lighting, 72, 184 lamps, 72 layers, 72 LED, 13, 72, 74, 184–185 LED bulbs, 72 LEED, 74 motion sensors, 153 multipurpose spaces, 138–139 natural, 6, 13, 72, 159, 180, 184–185 nighttime, 184 plan, 72 pollution, 153 recessed, 139 recycled, 74 sconces, 139 sensors, 74 small bathroom, 73 solar tubes, 184 sources, 74 sunlight, 159–160 table lamps, 139 task, 72, 180, 184 timers, 74, 139 under-counter lighting, 72 UV, 78 UV rays, 159 light-reducing electrical loads, 13 Ligne Roset, 28 line drying, 129 linens bedding, 162 bedroom, 157 towels, 162 living room, 51–54, 64–65, 71, 116, 133, 134, 135, 135, 137, 137, 138, 138, 139, 139–141, 142, 147–148, 171, 173, 175, 177, 186 formal, 137–138 reorganizing, 139 Livos, 113 location, 168, 173 lofts, 135 Loop, 64 Lori Dennis, Inc., 105, 108, 109, 109, 137 low-density polyethylene (LDPE), 193 Lutron Electronics, 74 M MALIN+GOETZ, 74 manufacturer-consumer relationship, 2 manufacturing environment, 28 marble, 32 materials, 6 mattress. See Bedroom McMansions, 133 media use, 132 melatonin, 156, 159, 164 memories, 65 mercury, 195 metal, mixed, 81 methane, 78 methyl bromide, 117 microwaves, 131 millennials, 2 minimalism, 2, 9 mirrors, 41, 72, 103, 122, 137, 181 Mitchell Gold, 162 Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, 28 Modern Fan Co., 185 modern farmhouse look steps, 123, 126 attractive opposites, 123 clean lines and contemporary flair, 126 family-centric spaces, 126 neutral color palette, 126 personalizing, 126 modularArts, 109 mold or mildew, 6, 105, 114, 131 cleaning, 192 and dehumidifiers, 192 Molekule, 165 money, 4 monochromatic rooms, 80–81 Mrs.

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World by Srdja Popovic, Matthew Miller

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, desegregation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Rosa Parks, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, urban sprawl

In Serbia, for example, everyone told me that it was impossible to stand up to Milošević because he had the army, the police, and the statecontrolled media. In Burma, they told me that their culture of obedience guaranteed that people would never challenge the junta. And when I visit the United States, people constantly complain that all that Americans care about is lling their Walmart shopping carts and mowing the lawn in front of their McMansions. But guess what? Martin Luther King Jr., was from America, monks are leading the demonstrations in the streets of Rangoon, and today Serbia is a democracy. The rst step to building a successful movement, I told the Egyptians, was to get rid of the idea that whatever had happened somewhere else could never be replicated at home.

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leaders even caught himself cheering on the dictator, gushing (to his embarrassment only moments later), “Go get them, Slobo!” But it was a normal reaction, because when your cave is in danger, you root for the chief to succeed. Even if the guy is a jerk. This helps explain why all forms of violence—whether we are speaking about the killing- elds variety we see in Syria or the protest burning of McMansions by militant environmentalists in the United States—are so much less e ective in bringing about lasting social change than peaceful measures are. Violence scares people, and when people are scared, they look for a strong leader to protect them. And this relates, as does everything else in this book, to the pillars of power.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

A tax-deductible home equity loan is savings. Though it costs 50 to 100 grand to redo a kitchen with Miele appliances and a Sub-Zero refrigerator, these are really investments since the data show that kitchen and bathroom remodeling typically retain 97 percent of their cost during resale. Ditto for the house—or McMansion—itself, which has more than doubled in size (and increased in price twenty-fold) since the 1950s. Likewise, the Hummer is tax-deductible (since it is classified not as a car but as a light truck). Not to mention the time-share in the private jet (ostensibly for business use—wink, wink). Even the bacchanal thrown by Wired magazine—replete with custom martinis and corporate goodie bags—is really an investment in customer relations.

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So things—like meals—that once were produced and consumed in order to satisfy a basic individual human need can sometimes become positional goods, too. One consequence is the increasing role that material goods play as positional goods—something Hirsch didn’t consider. Mrs. and Mr. Elsewhere absolutely have to have the latest iPhone, McMansion, or SUV There’s nothing inherent about an iPhone that makes it a positional good. Some (but not all) of its features are material improvements on previous models. It may save us time and effort to have all of our music, phone numbers, and photos in one handy little gadget. Or it may not, as some users are finding.

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

As David Owen points out in Green Metropolis, New Yorkers consume far less energy, gasoline, and land per resident while producing less in the way of pollution, trash, and greenhouse gas emissions than their suburban peers.2 If everyone in the borough of Manhattan alone were forced to live at the density of Oklahoma City—one of America’s least dense major cities—it would take up roughly 1,600 square miles of land, an area approximately the size of Delaware. As all those apartment dwellers and transit riders bought McMansions and cars, gasoline and electricity consumption would nearly double, along with attendant increases in emissions and air pollution. If this hypothetical transformation of urban form happened in one instant, it would be appropriately recognized as one of the worst environmental catastrophes in US history.

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The purpose of these zoning rules is merely to force houses and the lots they sit on to be bigger than they might otherwise have been. This, in turn, raises housing costs, providing local policymakers with a subtle way of excluding less affluent residents by way of setting high minimums. The development pattern that results from these policies—a landscape of McMansions on Potemkin estates—is also the groundwork for American sprawl. Unlike single-family zoning or minimum parking requirements, uptake on minimum floor area and lot size reform has been underwhelming. This is too bad, as reforming these two rules would likely have a profound impact on American development patterns: for cities and towns along the coasts, scrapping minimum floor area requirements would allow the market to meet the burgeoning demand for “microunits” and “tiny houses,” which can be as small as 280 square feet.

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

The city of Gilbert, starved of property tax revenues, announced it was laying off sixty-seven police officers, even as empty ranch-style houses were being converted into methamphetamine labs. In Maricopa, yet another bank had been knocked over; Phoenix, long known as America’s kidnapping capital, was fast becoming the hot spot for such serial bank robbers as the “Raggedy Ann Robber” and the “Bad Hair Bandit.” As I drove through yet another zombie subdivision of deserted McMansions, where the only other vehicle on the road was a sheriff’s van full of convicts in black-and-white-stripe uniforms, a grim-sounding announcer implored listeners to stay out of abandoned houses, and to report any suspicious activity to the local sheriff. To me, it was the sound of the suburban dream turning into a nightmare.

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The revival of New York, which many gave up for dead in the ‘70s, was the prototypical urban renaissance, and cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis, and Portland never lost their center-city vitality. As the era of cheap fossil fuels that kicked the North American metropolis into a manic state of overdrive comes to an end, the ideology of growth for growth’s sake has also reached its limits. When it comes to houses and cities, bigger is not better. Bigger is more McMansions; bigger is subdivisions so sprawled people never get to know their neighbors; bigger is ever longer, ever more soul-sucking commutes. Bigger is stupider. When I started this journey, the future of smarter transportation in North America looked pretty bright. The way the Obama administration was talking, it sounded as if there was hope for, if not a high-speed rail equivalent of the interstate highway system, at least a transport network more equitably balanced between automobiles and trains.

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“Frank Lloyd Wright & His Automobiles.” Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, 21/1 (Winter 2010). Howard, Ebenezer. Garden Cities of To-Morrow. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965. Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Kalita, S. Mitra. “No McMansions for Millennials.” The Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2011. Kotkin, Joel. The New Geography. New York: Random House, 2000. ——. The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. New York: Penguin Books, 2010. Logan, Michael F. Desert Cities: The Environmental History of Phoenix and Tucson. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.

The Peripheral by William Gibson

Anthropocene, business process, fake news, intentional community, McMansion, pattern recognition, telepresence

COMPLICATED 56. THE LIGHT IN HER VOICE MAIL 57. GOOD CHINA 58. WU 59. ADVENTURE CAPITALISTS 60. BROWNING IN 61. TIMESICK 62. NOT EXPECTED 63. THREW UP 64. STERILE 65. BACKDOOR TO NOW 66. DROP BEARS 67. BLACK BEAUTY 68. ANTIBODY 69. HOW IT SOUNDS 70. ASSET 71. McMANSION 72. HALFWAY POSH 73. RED GREEN BLUE 74. THAT FIRST GENTLE TOUCH 75. PRECURSORS 76. EMULATION APP 77. WHEELIE BOY 78. FRONTIERLAND 79. THE JACKPOT 80. THE CLOVIS LIMIT 81. ALAMO 82. THE NASTINESS 83. ALL THE KINGDOMS OF THE WORLD IN A MOMENT OF TIME 84. SOHO SQUARE 85.

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“Who are they, these assets?” “She isn’t saying. Ash and Ossian don’t like that. It would be whoever has access to the Gonzales White House, I imagine, not that she’s ever suggested as much.” He picked up his fork. “Eat these while they’re still warm. Then we’ll go down and see Ash.” 71. MCMANSION Pickett’s place, as much as she’d ever see of it, wasn’t what she’d imagined at all. Reece had driven her past a white gatehouse with window slits, but hadn’t turned in. Further along, past a long stretch of white plastic fence, fabbed to look like somebody’s idea of Old Plantation, he’d turned in to a less-important-looking gate, already open, where two men in cammies and helmets were waiting, beside a golf cart.

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The man who held the leash sat beside her, in the back, and the other man drove, and neither one of them said a word, as they drove her to Pickett’s house, some back way, on single-lane gravel that hadn’t been properly graded. The house had floodlights trained on it, bright as day and ugly as shit, though this was just the back of it. They’d painted everything white, she guessed to tie it together, but it didn’t. Looked like somebody had patched a factory, or maybe a car dealership, onto a McMansion, then stuck an Interstate chain restaurant and a couple of swimming pools on top of that. There were sheds scattered, beside the gravel and further back, and machinery too, under big tarps, and she wondered if he actually built drugs here. She’d figured he wouldn’t, but maybe he didn’t have to give a shit.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

Consider first the armaments industry and the resources consumed in war: some $2 trillion dollars a year, a vast scientific establishment, and the life energy of millions of young people, all to serve no need except one we create ourselves. Consider the housing industry here in the United States, with the enormous McMansions of the last two decades that again serve no real human need. In some countries a building that size would house fifty people. As it is, the cavernous living rooms go unused, for people feel uncomfortable in their inhuman scale and seek out the comfort of the small den and the breakfast nook. The materials, energy, and maintenance of such monstrosities are a waste of resources.

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Of course, we would lose a vast number of “jobs” as well, but since these are not contributing much to human well-being anyway, we could employ those people digging holes in the ground and filling them up again with no loss. Or, better, we could devote them to labor-intensive roles like permaculture, care for the sick and elderly, restoration of ecosystems, and all the other needs of today that go tragically unmet for lack of money. A world without weapons, without McMansions in sprawling suburbs, without mountains of unnecessary packaging, without giant mechanized monofarms, without energy-hogging big-box stores, without electronic billboards, without endless piles of throwaway junk, without the overconsumption of consumer goods no one really needs is not an impoverished world.

…

I will offer one more piece of evidence for my view: if the growth of money really were driving the technological and cultural meeting of new needs, then wouldn’t we be more fulfilled than any humans before us? Are people happier now, more fulfilled, for having films rather than tribal storytellers, MP3 players rather than gatherings around the piano? Are we happier eating mass-produced food rather than that from a neighbor’s field or our own garden? Are people happier living in prefab units or McMansions than they were in old New England stone farmhouses or wigwams? Are we happier? Has any new need been met? Even if it has not, I won’t discard the entire corpus of technology, despite all the ruin it has wrought upon nature and humanity. In fact, the achievements of science and technology do meet important needs, needs that are key drivers of sacred economics.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

This means that we must be more tolerant of tearing down the short buildings in cities in order to build tall ones, and more intolerant of the activists who oppose emissions-reducing urban growth. Governments should encourage people to live in modestly sized urban aeries instead of bribing home buyers into big suburban McMansions. If ideas are the currency of our age, then building the right homes for those ideas will determine our collective fate. The strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilization’s success and the primary reason why cities exist. To understand our cities and what to do about them, we must hold on to those truths and dispatch harmful myths.

…

With a government-guaranteed loan, Levitt’s buyers only needed to come up with $400 to buy a home packed with modern appliances and surrounded by leafy space. Levitt’s eight-hundred-square-foot ranch houses now seem tiny and quaint, but to New Yorkers who had grown up in crowded tenements, they were the McMansions of their day. Neither federal housing policies nor interstate highway spending were designed to be antiurban, but they certainly hurt cities. The highway program was meant to connect the country, but subsidizing highways ended up encouraging people to commute by car. Encouraging home buying through the home mortgage interest deduction and government-guaranteed mortgages was meant to correct alleged imperfections in the mortgage market and create propertyowning citizens with a stake in their country.

…

., Suburb Reader. 176 splurging on housing subsidies: Gans, Levittowners, 13-14, 22. 176 GI Bill . . . for middle-income buyers: U.S. Government Printing Office, Congressional Research Service, A Chronology of Housing Legislation and Selected Executive Actions, 1892-2003, Mar. 2004, www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CPRT-108HPRT92629/html/CPRT-108HPRT92629.htm. 176 the McMansions of their day: Hayden, “Building the American Way,” 276. 176 disproportionately to middle-class enclaves: U.S. General Accounting Office, Resources, Community, and Economic Development Division, House of Representatives, Community Development: The Extent of Federal Influence on “Urban Sprawl” Is Unclear, Apr. 30, 1999, GAO/RCED-99-87 Research on “Urban Sprawl,” www.gao.gov/archive/1999/rc99087.pdf. 176 overwhelmingly single-family houses: U.S.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Where the produce is rotten but no one is forgotten On strawberry Philadelphia Drive Children in the sprinkler, junkies on the corner The smell of fried foods and pure hot tar Man, you needn’t travel far to feel completely alive On strawberry Philadelphia Drive On a hazy day in 19 something and 5 In that 19 something and 5, Todd Swallows was five, and his family was living at Lake Lakengren, thirty miles west of Dayton, near the Indiana border. As an adult, Todd would marvel that he had grown up in a “gated community,” even if it didn’t conform to the usual connotation. Lakengren, a planned development around a two-mile-long man-made lake, did in fact have a couple entry gates, but the Swallows’ home was no McMansion. It was a simple 1977 yellow-brick rambler bought for less than $90,000. Still, a gated community was a gated community, and it was hard to begrudge Todd the claim: he was staking it not for bragging rights but to underscore the extent of his fall. Life at Lakengren was far from perfect. Todd’s mother had a temper and was not reluctant to resort to corporal punishment when it came to a son who was precociously bright, doing puzzles meant for much older kids, but also hyperactive.

…

The shrunken city was dominated by Black people and white urban professionals who, removed as they were from each other, could find common cause in the liberalism ascendant in the national Democratic Party: pro–civil rights, pro-refugee, pro–safety net. In between, in the declining working-class inner suburbs and declining nearby towns like Eaton and Middletown, were those left homeless by this sorting out, former Democrats and descendants of Democrats who felt as alienated from the liberal coalition in Dayton as from the McMansion conservatives on the periphery. Now these voters had found their home. On March 15, Trump lost the Ohio primary to the state’s governor, John Kasich. But he did better in Dayton’s Montgomery County than in any of the state’s other nine largest counties, racking up big numbers in the most depressed precincts and winning more votes in the county than Hillary Clinton had received in winning her own primary—remarkable given that the county had not gone Republican since 1988

…

Providing additional gravitational pull were the tax breaks bestowed on the data centers by the state of Virginia and local governments, especially Loudoun and Prince William Counties. For these Washington exurbs, the data centers were ideal neighbors: they spun off tax revenue to pay for the deluxe schools demanded by residents moving into new McMansions, but they added few cars to the clogged roads. In that sense, the paltry number of jobs that came with them was, to use tech lingo, a feature and not a bug. They cost between $50 million and $70 million apiece. They went up without identifying details—anyone passing by had no idea for whom, or for what, they were being run.

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, clean tech, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, food desert, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

“What will change everything is simply getting your community together,” Roberts says in a video on the You + Dallas website. “Have some friends over at your house and talk about the problems in your community, walk out the door, and start creating solutions.” It really is that simple. * * * Notes 1. S.M. Kalita and R. Whelan, “No McMansions for Millennials,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 13, 2011, accessed 19 Jan 2013. 2. A. Loukaitou-Sideris et al., Reclaiming the Right of Way: A Toolkit for Creating and Implementing Parklets, (Los Angeles: UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, 2012). 3. J. King, “SF Parklets a Homegrown Effort,” SFGate, July 9, 2012, accessed Dec. 29, 2012. 4.

Walk Away by Douglas E. French

Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, Elliott wave, forensic accounting, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, loss aversion, low interest rates, McMansion, mental accounting, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, the market place, transaction costs, unbiased observer, wealth creators

A point that Murray Rothbard made frequently and that investor Doug Casey often makes today is that one of the benefits to American society if the U.S. government repudiated or defaulted on its debt would be that people would think twice about lending it more money. Politicians will waste money with impunity if the government can continually borrow. The same can be said for individuals. Taking on too much debt to live in more house than a person needs (McMansions as they were called in the boom) is a waste of capital. Mortgage debt is unproductive debt. Robert Prechter, owner of the Elliott Wave International writes in his book Conquer the Crash that the lending process for businesses “adds value to the economy,” while consumer loans are counterproductive, adding costs but no value.

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Warren Tyagi

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, business climate, Columbine, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, McMansion, mortgage debt, new economy, New Journalism, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, school vouchers, telemarketer, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

According to these experts, housing prices would reverse their forty-year upward trend and drop during the 1990s and 2000s—anywhere from 10 to 47 percent.24 Of course, the over-consumption critics have a ready explanation for why housing prices shot up despite expert predictions: Americans are bankrupting themselves to buy over-gadgeted, oversized “McMansions.”. Money magazine captures this view: “A generation or so ago . . . a basic, 800-square-foot, $8,000 Levittown box with a carport was heaven. . . . By the 1980s, the dream had gone yupscale. Home had become a 6,000-square-foot contemporary on three acres or a gutted and rehabbed townhouse in a gentrified ghetto.”25 Where did so many people get this impression?

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Was it an “exercise room,” a “media room,” or any of the other exotic uses of space that critics have so widely mocked? No. The data show that most often that extra room was a second bathroom or a third bedroom.29 These are meaningful improvements, to be sure, but the average middle-class family in a six-room house has hardly rocketed to McMansion status. For the Children The finger-waggers missed another vital fact: The rise in housing costs has become a family problem. Home prices have grown across the board (particularly in larger urban areas), but the brunt of the price increases has fallen on families with children. Our analysis shows that the median home value for the average childless couple increased by 26 percent between 1984 and 2001—an impressive rise in less than twenty years.30 (Again, these and all other figures are adjusted for inflation.)

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Gail Steketee, Randy Frost

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, dumpster diving, Ford Model T, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, impulse control, McMansion

They were people who were simply unwilling to part with the beloved treasures that they "might use one day" and that their own homes could no longer accommodate. Alongside this growing appetite for rented storage space, the average house size had increased by 60 percent since 1970—although this trend may be changing since the real estate crash of 2008. Many of these oversize homes, often referred to as "McMansions," also come with their own storage sheds. Perhaps we are becoming a nation of hoarders. A generation earlier, in 1947, the psychoanalyst and humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm forecast a society obsessed with possessions. He argued that humans can be characterized by one of two basic orientations toward the world, "having" or "being."

…

Apartment floor collapses from weight of old magazines. (February 8, 2005). Mainichi Shimbun (Japan). Arndt, J., Solomon, S., Kasser, T., & Sheldon, K. M. (2004). The urge to splurge: A Terror Management account of materialism and consumer behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14, 198–212. Associated Press. (May 24, 2007). The rise of the "McMansions." Daily Hampshire Gazette. Beaglehole, E. (1932). Property: A study in social psychology. New York: Academic Press. Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15, 139–168. ———. (1991). The ineluctable mysteries of possessions. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 6, 17–55. ———. (1995).

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Bernie Madoff, big-box store, discrete time, East Village, high net worth, McMansion, off-the-grid, Panamax, Pepto Bismol, Ponzi scheme, sovereign wealth fund, white picket fence, Y2K

Say it’s the other hotel, not the one on the mainland with the view of the horizon but the one on that island, that man-made island whose name he can’t remember that’s shaped like a palm tree. In that case, the view is of the stagnant trapped water between the palm fronds, as it were, a gaudy row of McMansions shimmering in the heat on the opposite shore. He liked that suite. It was enormous. Vincent spent a lot of time in the hot tub. But no, that’s memory, not the counterlife. Vincent isn’t in the counterlife. He feels it’s important to keep the two separate, memory vs. counterlife, but he’s been finding the separation increasingly difficult.

…

He feels it’s important to keep the two separate, memory vs. counterlife, but he’s been finding the separation increasingly difficult. It’s a permeable border. In memory, the air-conditioning was so aggressive that she had trouble keeping warm, which was why she was always in the hot tub, whereas in the counterlife she’s not there at all. In the counterlife he turns away from the view of McMansions and leaves the room, walks out into the wide corridor with its elaborately patterned strip of carpeting, into the elevator made of dark mirrored surfaces, which opens unexpectedly into the lobby of the Hotel Caiette, where Vincent sits with Walter, the night manager, on leather armchairs. This is a memory: they came back here a year before he was arrested.

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare by Ryan Dezember

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, interest rate swap, low interest rates, margin call, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, rent control, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs

Out-of-towners had shown up to build a faux French Quarter in the woods along the barge channel and were asking big-city prices for tiny lots within walking distances of huge swaths of vacant land. It didn’t make any sense. An old man from Mobile paid nearly a million dollars for a shape-shifting, twelve-and-a-half-acre splotch of sand at the mouth of Perdido Pass and wanted to build thirty or so tiled roofed McMansions on it with docks instead of driveways. Even the public beach in Gulf Shores, the center of gravity along Alabama’s coast, was poised for a dramatic makeover. Bob Shallow’s investor group from south Florida had bought out, to the tune of $20 million, a cluster of small businesses at the public beach in Gulf Shores.

…

Over that same period, the inflation-adjusted price of homes rose by more than a third, according to the Bank for International Settlements. Millions of millennials buried in student debt and priced out of ownership spell big trouble for the baby boomers who staked their late-in-life financial health on someone coming along to pay a big price for their McMansions. It’s possible that the big rental investors underestimate how deeply ingrained homeownership is among American aspiration. Plenty of people probably feel like Walt Whitman when he wrote a few years before the Civil War that “a man is not a whole and complete man unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on.”

Alpha Trader by Brent Donnelly

Abraham Wald, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, deep learning, diversification, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, fail fast, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, global macro, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, high net worth, hindsight bias, implied volatility, impulse control, Inbox Zero, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, law of one price, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, McMansion, Monty Hall problem, Network effects, nowcasting, PalmPilot, paper trading, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, price anchoring, price discovery process, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, very high income, yield curve, you are the product, zero-sum game

I think that Alpha Trader can help anyone – trader or not – become a more effective player of games. It sure did for me. Dr. Ben Hunt Co-founder and CIO Epsilon Theory A QUICK STORY BEFORE WE START FAIRFIELD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT MAY 6, 2010 | 4:55AM The Connecticut air is cold and damp. The trader moves in silence. He steps quietly through the pitch-black darkness of his Colonial McMansion and toward the door. As he disarms the home security system, the BEEP BEEP BEEP of the keypad code he enters is impossibly loud in the quiet of the predawn morning. He steps out of the house, closes and locks the door, and hops into his car. As he rolls down the driveway and into the foggy morning, he inserts a Deadmau5 CD and blasts it at high volume in an effort to wake up and get pumped for another day of trading.

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Thing is, you don’t like Italian bonds. You think they are priced for perfection. Then again, you know if Italian bonds rip and all your peers deliver returns of 10%+ while you drop 3%, it’s going to look bad. Your wife just delivered your second child and you just upsized to a 5,700 square foot McMansion in Westchester. Maybe it would be better to just plug your nose and buy the stinking Italian bonds. If the bonds crash… You and all your peers end the year down and investors be like: “What are you gonna do! Bad year for macro!” Quite often, herding is caused by career risk. It often feels riskier for a trader to go against the herd than it is for him to just follow along.

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I hope this demonstrates the way good and bad decisions, great calls, dumb mistakes, and heaps of trader bias can all influence a single trading day. FAIRFIELD COUNTY, CONNECTICUT MAY 6, 2010 | 4:55AM The Connecticut air is cold and damp. The trader moves in silence. He steps quietly through the pitch-black darkness of his Colonial McMansion and toward the door. As he disarms the home security system, the BEEP BEEP BEEP of the keypad code he enters is impossibly loud in the quiet of the predawn morning. He steps out of the house, closes and locks the door, and hops into his car. As he rolls down the driveway and into the foggy morning, he inserts a Deadmau5 CD and blasts it at high volume in an effort to wake up and get pumped for another day of trading.

Celebration of Fools: An Inside Look at the Rise and Fall of JCPenney by Bill Hare

business climate, fake news, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, McMansion, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, vertical integration, walking around money, warehouse automation, women in the workforce

To the south were upscale merchants and restaurateurs whose establishments buffered Plano's core of expensive residential subdivisions—some of which were simply separated from shopping strips by tall, thick brick walls and elaborate landscaping. The houses, on surprisingly small lots, were mainly variations on the Texas Gothic McMansion theme, largely distinct from one another only in scale. These choice properties were filling up all of the remaining suitable land and were mostly celebrated by their new owners—"choice," of course, being a relative term. Compared to Connecticut or the Coast, the new Plano palaces could be had for a song.

…

From then on, those in the executive suite increasingly postured as Penney people, paying lip service to HCSC and The Penney Idea while other things dominated their agendas. This culminated in the move to Texas. Running a company built upon the concept of thrift and hard work first, rewards second, the Howell administration tore JCPenney from its roots because they wanted to live in affordable McMansions on golf courses in gated communities. They wanted easy commutes and commodious office suites with custom-made views. They wanted geographic centrality with a good, accessible airport. While the old generations ate, slept, and drank merchandise and stores and put up with any abuse and inconvenience in communion, the Howell crew was dedicated to getting the numbers and driving the stock.

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Recounting their own stories of moving into older historic neighbourhoods not unlike Kensington Market, they write, ‘There was an aesthetic pull of “sentiment and space” to at least some of our neighborhoods: we have no desire to live in the aesthetic landscape of uniform subdivisions of postwar aluminum-sided ranches or post-Reagan McMansions nor the class homogeneity that often accompanies them.’ Throughout their article, Schlichtman and Patch aren’t arguing that the displacement caused by gentrification isn’t a serious urban problem, nor are they condemning the forces that compel middle-class people with what might as well be called a brunching sensibility.

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

American ideology, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, gig economy, high net worth, income inequality, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, mental accounting, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, plutocrats, precariat, school choice, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Penny told me, “One of the reasons we’re not in the suburbs, I feel like there’s a lot of show of wealth. … I just, kind of, reject a lot of that.” One of the wealthiest women I talked with lived in a house in the suburbs worth over $12 million. She was appalled by the excesses of her neighbors, who lived in what she called a “McMansion.” She told me of her first visit there, lowering her voice, “The gates opened up to this huuuge house. And the play set—like, we don’t have a play set. But, like, a play set in the backyard was, I’m not going to kid you, bigger than this whole room. It was something you would see out of—I don’t know.

…

She said, “I mean, obviously I think we have a large apartment by a lot of New York standards, but, you know, it’s not got pillars and a curved driveway.” “Pillars and a curved driveway” are rarely seen in New York City; they are an iconic image of wealth in the social imaginary, just as the trailer park described in chapter 1 is an iconic image of poverty. Invoking these comparisons, whether to imaginary rich people or to their actual McMansion-dwelling neighbors, my respondents situated themselves in the symbolically-middle, legitimate space of reasonableness. In making these comparisons, my interviewees subordinated having to showing. That is, having is acceptable as long as it is not shown (or shown off) in particular ways. Yet they faced the possibility of seeming to “show off” in relation to people with less, including coworkers, family, friends, other parents, and household workers.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

MAKE GOVERNMENT DOWDY Prime Minister Gladstone was so bent on saving money that he told his government to use cheaper writing paper. In Abraham Lincoln’s time, Washington was a small southern town that was regarded as a hardship posting for diplomats (you got paid more to serve in the swampy summer). Now it has become one of the richest zip codes in the country, with Ritz Carltons, Tiffanys, McMansions, and Morton’s steak houses spilling into the Virginia and Maryland suburbs. Politicians who used to rush back to their hometowns when they finished their political careers now routinely stay on in the capital as lobbyists and “advisers.” The presidency has become ever more imperial. Presidents sweep through Washington, DC, in giant motorcades.

Panderer to Power by Frederick Sheehan

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California energy crisis, call centre, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, place-making, Ponzi scheme, price stability, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, VA Linux, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Shapiro, “The Boontown Mirage,” New York Times, April 6, 2008. 45 At least, according to foreclosures.roost.com. on June 23, 2009: “There are 1042 homes that are up for auction at an average auction price of $172.” David Rosenberg, then Merrill Lynch’s chief North American economist, observed, “[T]he bottom line is that all those McMansions [the 4,000 or 5,000-square-foot houses] that were bought during this housing boom are going to go the way of the 1973 Lincoln Continental.” Rosenberg went on to say the “housing bubble was the most overowned, overleveraged and oversupplied real-estate market ever and its unwinding will take years.”48 The McMansions are and will continue to draw energy like a 1973 Lincoln Continental. The average new house had grown from 1,500 square feet in 1970 to nearly 2,400 square feet in 2004; 90 percent of new houses in 2004 were equipped with central air conditioning.49 The houses were getting bigger, but they were not big enough.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

In like manner, Frank continues by example, the Brobdingnagian rack of antlers on the North American bull elk may intimidate other males competing for status and mates, but it endangers the species by decreasing efficiency of escape from wolves and other predators through thickly branched forests in which said rack would become entangled. This principle of individual success versus collective failure is so important to Frank that he goes so far as to predict that his fellow economists will, in time, come to see Charles Darwin as the most important economist in history. The human analogue of tails and antlers for Frank are McMansion homes, expensive business suits, high-heel shoes, and extravagant coming-of-age parties. Much of his thinking here is derived from research conducted by behavioral economists, who report that relative position on the economic ladder – “positional rank” – matters more than absolute value to most people.

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The University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller makes a strong case for just such selective effects in his book The Mating Mind.20 Sexual selection, he argues, has driven organisms from bowerbirds to brainy bohemians to engage in the creative production of magnificent works in order to attract mates – from big blue bowerbird nests to big-brained orchestral music, epic poems, stirring literature, and even scientific discoveries. Those organisms that do so most effectively leave behind more offspring and thus pass on their creative genes into future generations. Thus, contrary to what Frank argues, a viable case can be made that the evolutionary arms races he so detests – men’s suits, women’s high heels, McMansion homes, and elaborate coming-of-age parties – are products of a larger system that drives our species to be so successful. By carrying out the biological analogy into political policy, if anything we should be rewarding the most ostentatious displays of power, prestige, wealth, creativity, health, vigor, and intelligence with tax breaks and even subsidies!

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

The differences of wages, and the lack of difference of productivity, made the shift to Asian imports inevitable: When everybody went offshore to the Orient, we opened Pandora’s box. After that, you couldn’t manufacture clothing without being in Asia. You can never shut that box and say we can go back to where we were. It’s open. It’s done. It’s finished.32 FROM LEVITTOWN TO MCMANSIONS: THE POSTWAR EVOLUTION OF HOUSING By 1940, the American housing stock had advanced a long way from the simple, isolated dwellings of 1870. Urban housing units by 1940 were networked with the five basics of electricity, gas, telephone, running water, and sewers. None of this existed in 1870, except for gas and water in a few upscale urban neighborhoods.

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The increase in the real value compared to median sales price mainly seemed to happen in the 1980s. In the twenty-five years after 1990, the size of the median single-family house continued to creep higher, reaching 1,900 square feet in 1990 and 2,364 square feet in 2013. Half the houses by definition were larger than the median, and the largest became known as “McMansions”—both those in older suburban neighborhoods, where they replaced smaller “teardowns,” and those in remote, often gated, communities on the fringes of metropolitan areas. Between 1992 and 2013, the fraction of newly constructed homes with four bedrooms or more increased from 29 percent to 44 percent, of those with three bathrooms or more from 14 percent to 33 percent, and of those with a garage holding three or more cars from 11 percent to 21 percent.36 The trajectory of house prices up for most of the postwar period and down after the 2006 peak of the 2001–6 housing price bubble has split the generations in their amount of wealth.

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Most residential structures last almost forever, and the topography of urban and suburban America allows the tracing of the transition from the Georgian townhouses of the early nineteenth century to the Queen Anne Victorians of 1880–1900 to tiny and forbidding Levittown structures of the early postwar years to the McMansions of today. Most residential construction has been on new sites, and relatively little has been torn down.6 Structures last for a long time, but the life of equipment is shorter—and the implication of this leads inexorably to the conclusion that the “user cost” of equipment capital is much higher than for structures simply because equipment does not last as long and thus has a higher depreciation rate.

So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

East Village, feminist movement, Google Hangouts, McMansion, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)

While I’ve never gotten paid for having sex with any gross people, I have been a sex worker of sorts. My first office job was as the administrative assistant of a Tantric sex nonprofit, which we’ll call “Electric Yoni.” Such places exist, and they exist just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, through the rainbow tunnel, where McMansions meet divination on Highway 1, Marin County, California. I arrived at the job fresh off four years of psychedelics, deep in woo-woo, talking about energy, the Tao, and telekinesis—believing that an outside fix, an amethyst crystal, the proper measurement of snake oil could save me from myself. Every day I commuted back and forth from my apartment overlooking a crack dealer who swung a golf club in the lower Tenderloin, San Francisco, over that bridge, feeling sort of blessed and sort of miserable.

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Brooks, Dr. Strangelove, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, global supply chain, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, liberation theology, low skilled workers, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, stem cell, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

And while Continental Europe celebrates social solidarity and Asia values extended family ties, Americans fall back on themselves: they spend some $700 million on self-help books every year.16 The United States is the first country in history to classify more than half its population as suburban. That brings every material convenience from two-car garages to spacious rec rooms. But suburbs can also display a soul-destroying homogeneity—from the cookie-cutter McMansions to the anonymous big-box discount stores. Three decades ago Jane Jacobs, an admirer of traditional cities, observed that “every place becomes more like every other place, all adding up to Noplace.”17 Tom Wolfe remarked in A Man in Full (1998) that “the only way you could tell you were leaving one community and entering another was when the franchises started repeating and you spotted another 7-Eleven, another Wendy’s, another Costco, another Home Depot.”

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“Evangelical” is no longer a code word for an uneducated hick. The more that business tycoons and national celebrities are willing to identify themselves as Evangelical, the more rank-and-file workers are happy to attend Bible groups and talk openly about their faith. THE PHILADELPHIA STORΥ If religion seems to work in the McMansions and office suites, it also addresses very different issues at the other end of American society. Philadelphia is about as different as you can get from Houston or Colorado Springs—a proud Northeastern city that is steeped in American history and divided into long-established neighborhoods. If Houston’s problem is unrestrained growth, Philadelphia’s is relentless decline.

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson

accelerated depreciation, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, Donald Shoup, edge city, gentrification, global village, index fund, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, knowledge worker, land bank, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, megaproject, megastructure, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, postindustrial economy, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

In November 2009, the city of Seattle expanded its existing backyard cottage ordinance beyond the pilot program (Chapter 2) to all single-family zoned lots that are at least 4,000 square feet. More than two dozen other municipalities in Washington state have passed similar ADU ordinances, as have many in Oregon. And, unlike the recent trend of Mc-Mansioning in older subdivisions, permitting ADUs is undeniably more suited to the times; environmental awareness and economic and demographic trends alike support downsized dwellings. The incremental nature of change through re-inhabitation may lead to seemingly more authentic places in the long run, but they are less likely to catalyze larger redevelopment plans.

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She suggested that these would inspire the new Cottonwood’s declension of urban, outdoor spaces at the center of the site toward its less dense, open spaces and greens at the edges and distinguished between how the city’s historic places were enlivened by people rather than by a dozen paving materials and McMansion gables—common contemporary means of evoking tradition. Longson reiterated how this particular site’s history as a place of gathering and dining would be amplified by the new plan to better serve today’s community. Landscape architect Alan Ward of Sasaki Associates described the visual and ecological qualities of the open spaces.

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

We lost the gorgeous little Variety Photoplays, a theater that opened as a nickelodeon in 1914, went XXX in the 1960s, starred in Taxi Driver, became a jack-off house for gay men seeking liberation, went off-Broadway legit, got bought by NYU, lost the fight for landmarking, and was demolished in 2005 for a heartless glass tower by the Toll Brothers, infamous pioneers of mass-produced McMansions, the worst of suburban luxury schlock. I can’t list them all. But if you ask me to name the most painful loss, at the moment of this writing, I would say it is De Robertis Pasticceria & Caffe. A perfectly preserved Italian-American pastry shop, unchanged on First Avenue since 1904. One day in 2007, I sat down to chat with Annie De Robertis, who first went to work for her grandfather at eleven years old, folding cake boxes and filling cannoli.

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Around 2005, the billionaire “King of Diamonds” Lev Leviev and real estate magnate Shaya Boymelgreen bought the Batcave with plans to turn it into “Gowanus Village,” a complex of luxury apartments and townhouses. The NYPD raided the place and tossed out the squatters. It will now become Powerhouse Workshop, a gritty-glitzy center for the arts. In 2009, the Bloomberg administration gave a sweetheart deal to the Toll Brothers, creators of the suburban McMansion. Toll asked the city for a “spot rezoning” to turn a three-acre chunk of Gowanus into a tract for a large luxury residential building. The city obliged. When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated the area as a Superfund hazardous waste cleanup site and Toll backed out, the Lightstone Group took over and built a residential mega-complex with amenities like yoga and wine tasting, plus a waterfront “esplanade park” complete with boat launch and “water access point.”

Isn't That Rich?: Life Among the 1 Percent by Richard Kirshenbaum, Michael Gross

Downton Abbey, McMansion, New Journalism, rolodex, women in the workforce

While some friends remain passionate about the surfing lessons, the $100-a-pound lobster salad (from you know where), and the purple-streaked Sagaponack sunsets, there is a distinct group of people using their Hamptons estates less and less, with no plans either to sell or rent. “Whole neighborhoods are on timers,” said a busy housesitter I ran into in the local hardware store. “At nine fifteen, it lights up like the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.” As Dana and I were driving home from the party, we passed by a neighbor’s house, a recently assembled McMansion with turreted peaks and outsize turn-of-the-century demilune windows. “Have you ever met them?” Dana asked me. I recalled popping by with a bottle of French rosé when the couple first moved in. “Yeah,” I said, “when I took over the housewarming gift.” “I’ve never met them.” She shrugged, turning onto our property.

Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America by Writers For The 99%

Bay Area Rapid Transit, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, desegregation, feminist movement, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, intentional community, it's over 9,000, McMansion, microaggression, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, We are the 99%, young professional

Though many in their Westchester town had lowered their flags to half-mast when Barack Obama was elected president, Ivanya Alpert and her husband, Dmitri Laddis, see Occupy as a sign that a more promising politics is emerging. They are tired of their kids’ class sizes growing, due to budget cuts, as rapidly as their neighbors expand their McMansions. Their local public pool was sold off to a private bidder because the town couldn’t afford to keep it open every summer. Alpert and Laddis spent their one date night of the year in Zuccotti Park. A group called Parents for Occupy Wall Street, which began with a Family Sleep-Over in Zuccotti Park in October, quickly became a national phenomenon, reaching as far as Honolulu.

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

Although the clock could never be turned back, the societal impact that modern birth control (and abortion) had upon family formation and savings has been subversive. Affluent baby boomers uniquely would worship at the alter of consumption early in life, deferring marriage. Then, thanks to government policies that subsidized housing in multiple ways, they would stretch already thin balance sheets to invest in McMansions and second homes that carried mortgages payable well into old age. The more plebeian of that generation would not miss out either, leasing cars, maxing out credit cards, and eventually grabbing for the brass ring through variable rate interestonly primary mortgages augmented with home equity loans that could extract any accumulation of net worth to be devoted to more pleasurable ends.

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We are now feeling the reverberations in Social Security, the demographic implosion of Europe, Russia, and even China (with its one child limitation). It may even partly explain why the mortgage crisis occurred in the present time, for late family formation of the baby boomers along with the worship of material gain led to the McMansion craze as this generation hit its peak income level of 50-something. How many 30-year mortgages were purveyed to 45-year-olds who have inadequately saved (consuming through their extended youth) but plan to retire at age 65, much less fund college tuitions in their golden years? Like the wonderful mental elevation experienced from the first hit off a sensimellia-filled bong or the snort of a line of cocaine, the “me” generation hopes for immediate gratification.

Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough by Clive Hamilton, Richard Denniss

call centre, death from overwork, delayed gratification, experimental subject, full employment, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mega-rich, Naomi Klein, Own Your Own Home, post-materialism, post-work, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, wage slave, work culture

Today, though, newspapers, commentators and political leaders speak as though the 135 AFFLUENZA imagined financial difficulties of the wealthy are the result of hard times rather than inflated expectations. The problem then becomes a matter of public concern. The real concerns of yesterday’s poor have become the imagined concerns of today’s rich. Struggle Street, it seems, has become crowded; the trouble is the new residents want to build McMansions there. One effect of this conflation of the poorest citizens’ circumstances with those of the wealthy majority is to reinforce a widespread belief that times are difficult—despite the fact that we are richer than we have ever been and much richer than the vast majority of people in the world. Deprivation syndrome persuades politicians to distort policy to ‘reduce the burden of taxation’ and to increase welfare payments to middle-class households that are living lives that would, in other places and at other times, be regarded as luxurious.

Playing With FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early): How Far Would You Go for Financial Freedom? by Scott Rieckens, Mr. Money Mustache

Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, cryptocurrency, do what you love, effective altruism, financial independence, index fund, job satisfaction, lifestyle creep, low interest rates, McMansion, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, remote working, sunk-cost fallacy, The 4% rule, Vanguard fund

It’s about finding meaning outside of work and using money as a tool — I like to picture it as a lasso — to harness that meaning in daily life. This is the beauty of FIRE: Once you see how “stuck” that luxurious, consumeristic life is, you can’t unsee it. In fact, you notice it everywhere you look: the obligatory holiday parties, the roadside billboards for car financing, bumper-to-bumper commuter traffic, the new McMansion development down the road, the melancholy that sets in every Sunday evening. Likewise, once you taste a truly free life, untethered to a schedule or a paycheck or a career ladder, you can’t untaste it. Once you ask yourself the most important questions — What do I want to do with my time, and what makes me happiest?

Small Space Organizing: A Room by Room Guide to Maximizing Your Space by Kathryn Bechen

estate planning, index card, McMansion, new economy, Pepto Bismol

And according to the Wall Street Journal in 2009, for the first time in twenty-seven years, home buyers opted for smaller homes. CNN Money reports 7 percent smaller—or one average-sized room. We’re rethinking whether or not we really want a huge home, a big yard, and all the “stuff” that goes with that lifestyle. Do you? I can comfortably say, I don’t. You see, I can admire beautifully designed and decorated “McMansions” with the best of them. I have toured and written about them, organized them for clients, and had close friends and colleagues who live in them. But I also know, from hearing the comments of homeowners who dwell in large houses, that the cost—economically, personally, and professionally—of paying for, cleaning, and maintaining a big home can be phenomenally restrictive rather than life-enhancing, at least for some people.

Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living by Elizabeth Willard Thames

Airbnb, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, buy and hold, carbon footprint, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, financial independence, food desert, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, index fund, indoor plumbing, lifestyle creep, loss aversion, low interest rates, McMansion, mortgage debt, passive income, payday loans, risk tolerance, side hustle, Stanford marshmallow experiment, universal basic income, working poor

Based on the facts that, at the time, over 65 percent of units in Cambridge were rented and rental prices in the area were high and climbing higher, we’d hatched a plan to someday flip whatever we bought into a rental property. And this house, located in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Inman Square, was ideal because it was a rare exception: a single-family home with two stories and a basement, four bedrooms, two baths, and over 1,600 square feet. It was, by Cambridge standards, a McMansion. It was also ugly, had negative curb appeal, was located behind what had formerly been a crack den (not in a hyperbolic sense), and it showed like something out of a ’70s sitcom that never made it past the pilot episode. I’m talking lace doilies on every surface, enough bleeding crucifixes to scare the former Catholic in me, and family photos covering so much wall space I could barely tell what the living room paint color was (probably for the best, as it turned out).

I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories From the Edge of 50 by Annabelle Gurwitch

Alan Greenspan, Large Hadron Collider, McMansion, multilevel marketing, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, urban planning, zero-sum game

In the same way that high levels of lead in pottery have been linked to the decline of the Roman Empire, I would venture to say that our exhaustive fascination with celebrilites heralds the decline of Western civilization more than even the popularity of Funyuns.* A small accomplishment I celebrate is that in my forty-nine years I have yet to invite cameras to document me splashing white wine on the masklike face of a celebrilite in a cookie-cutter McMansion. Two days later I hear I have gotten a callback for the DirecTV spot. This one is mine, I’m confident. All I have to do is stand in a kitchen and rub my nose. I’ve stood in kitchens. I’ve rubbed my nose. Many times. I expect to rub it again in the future, so why not with a camera rolling? At the callback, a group of thirty actresses in my category are corralled into a holding area.

The Butcher's Guide to Well-Raised Meat: How to Buy, Cut, and Cook Great Beef, Lamb, Pork, Poultry, and More by Joshua Applestone, Jessica Applestone, Alexandra Zissu

back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, gentleman farmer, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, mass immigration, McMansion, refrigerator car, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration

Livestock aren’t the same 24 thing as wild animals. If we didn’t want them for dinner, they wouldn’t be here. And if we released them all into the wild in a mass vegan fantasy, they wouldn’t survive. This is an important thing to understand. Also important: no matter how you raise them, livestock, like McMansions, aren’t the most environmentally friendly things going. They require a lot of water, food, and land. They create greenhouse gases and contribute to global warming. But most Americans aren’t going to stop eating meat entirely. And the argument can be made that tofu from pesticide-intensive, genetically modified soy crops isn’t hugely eco, either.

The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife by Marc Freedman

airport security, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Blue Ocean Strategy, David Brooks, follow your passion, illegal immigration, intentional community, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, McMansion, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, transcontinental railway, working poor, working-age population

Andersen suggests that we are in the aftermath of what might be characterized as the bloating of America, a mass overextension that occurred between 1980 and the late 2000s. Mortgages mushroomed, debt ballooned, and our houses expanded, along with our waistlines. We could easily add the golden years to the package, as they went from an assumedly brief proposition at the end of life, a well-earned respite, to a thirty-year McMansion of a stage, inflated until it literally constituted the second half of adulthood. But it became both unattainable, for most individuals, and unsustainable, for a society soon to have more people over sixty than under fifteen. (And we’re relatively young in the community of nations—Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, and Spain will see over-sixty populations approaching or exceeding 40 percent by the middle of the twenty-first century.)

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

But slowing progress in the name of jealousy is almost criminal; even jealous tendencies are a lame excuse. Self-loathing and an “I’m not worthy” attitude is probably more like it—other adolescent emotions. But then I see another, more adult, emotion—nostalgia. Ah, remember how simple life used to be. We don’t need progress and financial derivatives and horizontal drilling and McMansions and fully loaded Hummers (though we’ll keep the Apple iPad). Let’s go back to the old days, and simpler times. Or maybe it’s a Homo erectus tribal instinct. Maybe we have collectivism, a “we’re all in this together”/ fraternité/égalité, in our DNA. I had the privilege of visiting Israel with my grandfather in the 1970s as a twelve-year-old.

Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States by Bernadette Hanlon

big-box store, classic study, company town, correlation coefficient, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, feminist movement, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, McMansion, New Urbanism, Silicon Valley, statistical model, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white flight, working-age population, zero-sum game

Suburbia, at one time built solely for the elite of society and later the middle class, now includes a mix of people from the very rich to the very poor. Over two centuries of development, suburbia has evolved into a new reality that includes continued growth and prosperity and decline and poverty. Gated communities, McMansions, and the supersize subdivision exist alongside much poorer suburbs struggling with issues of blight, fiscal stress, income decline, increasing poverty, and Decline Is a New Suburban Reality / 13 housing deterioration. In this chapter, I examine the evolution of this suburban dichotomy. The problem of suburban decline, particularly as it relates to inner-ring suburbs, is one side of this dichotomy and the primary focus of this chapter.

The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time by Allen Gannett

Alfred Russel Wallace, collective bargaining, content marketing, data science, David Brooks, deliberate practice, Desert Island Discs, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gentrification, glass ceiling, iterative process, lone genius, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, pattern recognition, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, work culture

Office space in the formerly rundown SoMa neighborhood now rents for an average of $72.50 per square foot (matching pricey Manhattan), and studio apartments sell for an average of over $1,200 per square foot, which means that a small 450-square-foot studio costs more than $540,000, which is enough to buy a McMansion in many suburbs. As for the Park Hotel, it has turned into a techie commune where aspiring entrepreneurs and software engineers can rent minuscule rooms for $1,000 per month. So why are people moving there in droves? Somewhere along the way, SoMa turned into one of the epicenters of the start-up industry.

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

airport security, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, defund the police, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, index card, McMansion, Minecraft, pre–internet, QAnon, Skype, social distancing, Transnistria

Had ours been the only place affected, it might have been easy to have the repairs done, but between the hurricane and the flooding, thousands of homes had been either destroyed or severely damaged—and that was just in North Carolina. Our other house, luckily, was relatively unscathed. It’s next door to the Sea Section, and when it came up for sale in 2016, Hugh disregarded my objections and bought it. His argument was that if he didn’t get it, someone would most likely tear it down and construct the sort of McMansion that has become the rule on Emerald Isle rather than the exception. The size of these new houses was one thing—eight bedrooms was common, spread over three or four stories—but what came with them, and what you really didn’t want next door to you, was a swimming pool. “It happened to us ten years ago,” moaned my friend Lynette, who owns an older, traditionally sized cottage up the street from us.

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

They tend to prefer basic colors and classically tasteful styles, but being too fashion-forward draws unnecessary attention to themselves; moreover, it is largely inconsistent with their middle-class comfort zone and the principle of stealth wealth. Myth: The wealthy live in mansions, or at least McMansions. Reality: A small minority live in palatial estates, but most live in houses that are better described as spacious but modest. The average value of their main residences is about $2 million, with the median being closer to $1.2 million. Depending on your background and where you live, that may sound like a lot.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, do what you love, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, fundamental attribution error, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Yet some sobering research shows that, pulled into their own little worlds by an individualistic me-first culture and accelerating demands on their attention, American couples and families often fall short in this regard. Particularly in times of social and economic turmoil, we’re reminded that not only as individuals but also as members of a society we choose to focus on certain targets and suppress others: risky profits or steady savings; McMansions or “green” homes; multilateralism or unilateralism; SUVs or mass transit; celebrity or character. As the nation faces crises in the economy, the environment, international affairs, and other vital areas, we can no longer afford to indulge in the kind of collective ADHD that’s symbolized by President Ronald Reagan’s removal of the solar panels that President Jimmy Carter had installed in the White House during an energy crisis thirty years ago.

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Sanders, biofilm, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, low interest rates, McMansion, medical malpractice, old-boy network, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

A spry, avuncular octogenarian with an acute mind and an almost extrasensory ability to read people, Procacci divides his time between the Philadelphia area, where the company is headquartered, and Naples, Florida, where he lives in The Vineyards, a self-contained minicity complete with golf courses, schools, and a hospital. The Vineyards was one of his tomato fields until the mid-1980s, when he and his brother decided that the ground would be more profitable if they put in a crop of McMansions and swimming pools. Procacci, the son of Italian immigrants, has been in the produce business since 1935. Then eight years old, he came home from school in Camden, New Jersey, to see a loaded vegetable push cart in front of the family house. “Don’t come home until you’ve sold everything,” his father ordered.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Alan Greenspan, business process, full employment, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, McMansion, PalmPilot, place-making, post-work, sexual politics, telemarketer, union organizing, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero day

The problem of rents is easy for a noneconomist, even a sparsely educated low-wage worker, to grasp: it's the market, stupid. When the rich and the poor compete for housing on the open market, the poor don't stand a chance. The rich can always outbid them, buy up their tenements or trailer parks, and replace them with condos, McMansions, golf courses, or whatever they like. Since the rich have become more numerous, thanks largely to rising stock prices and executive salaries, the poor have necessarily been forced into housing that is more expensive, more dilapidated, or more distant from their places of work. Recall that in Key West, the trailer park convenient to hotel jobs was charging $625 a month for a half-size trailer, forcing low-wage workers to search for housing farther and farther away in less fashionable keys.

So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y'all Don't Even Know by Retta

centre right, Downton Abbey, lock screen, McMansion, messenger bag, pink-collar, retail therapy, Skype, Snapchat

I’m in a place now where I make enough money that I can get what I want when I want it, not miss my mortgage payment, help my parents, pay my reps their 10 percent, and still have money in the bank. I don’t want a Rolls-Royce. I don’t need a jet. I don’t need a place in the Alps. Those aren’t the things I want. I want to go out for dinner and I want to go on vacation. I don’t need a giant mansion. I’d be cool with a McMansion. It’d have to be a manageable enough size that I could afford to pay someone to keep it clean. I do, however, want a claw-foot tub. Scratch that. I like the look of a clawfoot tub but I don’t want to fuck around with getting in and out of one. No sense in bustin’ my ass when all I want is a good soak.

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

This change is unheralded but dramatic: the United States’ female labor participation rate has fallen from sixth among twenty-two OECD countries to seventeenth between 1990 and 2010. * * * After dropping Karla off at her special-education school, Giron went to go see the three clients she had that day. Her first stop was at a tidy McMansion near the Hoover Dam, nestled in a desert neighborhood with startling jewel-green lawns. Her elderly client had had two strokes and uses a walker. “He has a lot of trouble balancing and walking,” Giron said. “If I don’t go and give him a bath, he doesn’t get a bath.” On this now-bright morning, she bathed him and changed his sheets, popping her third load of laundry of the day into a washing machine.

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos by Sarah Lacy

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, BRICs, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, Firefox, Great Leap Forward, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, income per capita, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, McMansion, megacity, Network effects, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), paypal mafia, QWERTY keyboard, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

We’re talking about toilet paper. Having spent the previous decade of my career parsing business pitches on medical devices, new drug compounds, chipsets, rational databases, super routers, and Web sites, I can’t remember the last time I had this un-techy of a conversation. But here’s the remarkable part: Just as those McMansions on the hil s could be under construction anywhere in the world, as I sit and talk business with Kagabo, I can’t stop thinking about how much he reminds me of an entrepreneur I’d recently interviewed in the United States: Tony Hsieh, CEO of the ecommerce shoe company, Zappos.com. Part of this resemblance is physical: Both men have thin, slight builds, close-cropped hair, and boyish faces.

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, big-box store, business cycle, cashless society, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, vertical integration, women in the workforce

With a diversified portfolio of business investments, risks for investors would go down. Business investment wouldn’t be the province of a few millionaires and their private equity; it could be done by average Joes with their pension funds. How much better would the world be if workers’ pension funds were invested in activities that produced jobs instead of McMansions? Regulation doesn’t need to tell firms what to do, but it does need to provide the transparency for investors to act wisely and to help markets make technological transitions when there is a great deal of change. U.S. housing markets continue to require Fannie and Freddie and Ginnie to clear their secondary markets.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

I now read newspapers. August 22 We just can’t handle solitude without a rich interior life. At first there was this bewildering, wind-swept void where my online world had been. Now, haltingly, I place other things in that void. A book. A walk through Shaughnessy to monitor the construction of various McMansions I have my eye on. But, of course, nothing—nothing—is as enthralling as the lovely, comforting, absence-destroying Internet. You can’t really revert to a prior state of mind because (as Nicholas Carr points out) our brains may be changeable and plastic, but they aren’t necessarily elastic. My online mind waits angrily for its food.

Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff by Dinah Sanders

A. Roger Ekirch, Atul Gawande, big-box store, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, clean water, clockwatching, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, credit crunch, do what you love, endowment effect, Firefox, game design, Inbox Zero, income per capita, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Kevin Kelly, late fees, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Merlin Mann, Open Library, post-work, side project, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand

When we’re thinking about relying less on cars, we are reminded that it’s time to start an even bigger “letting go” in much of the western world. We rich nations have got to say farewell to the strange notion that has gripped us for the last half century: our suburban life style—with its two-car garage, McMansions, lawns in the desert, strip malls, and daily auto errands—is unsustainable. There's never going to be more oil or natural gas readily available than there is now. Suburbia relies on these energy sources for its residents to be able to get to shops or work and to heat or cool their very large homes as well as to build the homes and the accoutrements associated with this lifestyle.

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Berlin Wall, Black Swan, business process, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, full employment, illegal immigration, index card, information security, Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, McMansion, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, off-the-grid, PageRank, personalized medicine, recommendation engine, RFID, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, workplace surveillance

Naturally, the key is to find more people in the U.S. population who could conceivably vote for a Democratic candidate and to come up with just the right pitch for each voter. The trouble, he believes, is that millions of potential Democrats are camouflaged. For one reason or another, they pass for Republican voters. Some live in McMansions with fairway views and drive Hummers. Some no doubt carry weapons, revere the military, or spend much of their free time praying. Others are staying hidden because they haven't been much impressed to date by Democratic candidates. To turn these people into Democratic voters, Gotbaum says, his party needs to surpass the Republicans in pinpointing potential supporters from within massive databases.

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline

big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, clean water, East Village, export processing zone, feminist movement, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megacity, messenger bag, Multi Fibre Arrangement, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Skype, special economic zone, trade liberalization, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, Veblen good

The First Thanksgiving, “Daily Life: Clothes,” Scholastic.com, www.scholastic.com/scholastic_thanksgiving/daily_life/clothes.htm. 7. Jan Whitaker, Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), 55, 66. 8. Neil Reynolds, “Goodwill May be Stunting African Growth,” Globe and Mail, December 24, 2008. 9. Christopher Solomon, “The Swelling McMansion Backlash,” MSN.com, http://realestate.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=13107733. 10. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditures 2010, www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm. 11. Eben Shapiro, “Few Riches in Rags These Days,” New York Times, January 5, 1991. 12. “Corporations: Jumpers at Jonathan Logan,” Time, August 31, 1962. 13.

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

Asset classes have to get very big before they can have an impact on the financial system as a whole, let alone potentially require the taxpayer to step in when things go wrong. And even if you do fret about speculative excess, he says, better that investors’ animal spirits are directed toward solving the biggest social issues than to funding the purchase of McMansions. But he is alive to the potential dangers of securitization. For example, the benefits of diversification come about only if assets in the fund genuinely do not all rise and fall together—in the jargon, if they are “noncorrelated.” Putting your money into a basket of equities spreads your risk across a lot of different companies, but that isn’t much help if the whole stock market tanks; investing in mortgages across the United States is all very well unless there is a national downturn.

Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir by Wednesday Martin Ph.d.

Anthropocene, delayed gratification, haute couture, McMansion, messenger bag, stem cell

But put women on farms, a drastically more sedentary state of affairs than gathering, and make calories more plentiful, and you quickly ratchet up body fat levels—and fertility. This lifestyle, with its hallmark monthly menses, stuck with us when we moved out of the fields and farmhouses and into the malls and McMansions and apartment buildings, of course. And so babies spaced a couple of years apart became the norm. This is why, in every town in America, you see mom pushing her tiny baby in a stroller while the two-year-old rides on the stroller board. Over time, the original, pre-agricultural state of affairs has come to seem strange to us.

Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cost per available seat-mile, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, housing crisis, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Larry Ellison, late fees, legacy carrier, McMansion, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, young professional

There’s a famous, perhaps apocryphal, story from the late 1920s, of Joseph Kennedy listening in horror as the guy shining his shoes offered him stock picks. According to the story, Kennedy knew right then and there that the market was about to tank. I had a similar moment of clarity looking out at the denuded hills and half-finished homes of the Brightwater development. The place was an unmitigated disaster. The company was slapping up chintzy McMansions cheek-by-jowl and charging $800,000 for the smallest, cheapest units. I went into one of the few completed model homes and sat down at the mock kitchen table. Through a nearby window, I could see the house next door a few yards away. I imagined some poor homeowner trying to relax in her kitchen while the drone of her neighbor’s dishwasher came drifting through the window.

Happy Inside: How to Harness the Power of Home for Health and Happiness by Michelle Ogundehin

clean water, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Indoor air pollution, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, McMansion, microplastics / micro fibres, Own Your Own Home, placebo effect, sharing economy

Buffett famously lives in the same modestly sized, 6,570 square-foot (610 square-metre), five-bedroom house that he bought in Omaha, Nebraska, for $31,500 in 1958 (worth about $650,000 today; less than 0.001 per cent of his net worth), and has been known to take his own lunch of a McDonald’s quarter-pounder and fries to his annual general meetings. Arguably he could afford any McMansion he likes within immense private grounds, and he could dine at his pick of restaurants, or at the very least get his burger delivered. But he does not, and his choices speak not of miserliness but of immense confidence and strength of character. They say that he has nothing to prove to anyone but himself.

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles by Michael Gross

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, Donald Trump, estate planning, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, Henry Singleton, Irwin Jacobs, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, passive investing, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

There would be one long staircase just going up, And one even longer coming down, And one more leading nowhere, just for show. —SHELDON HARNICK, “If I Were a Rich Man,” Fiddler on the Roof Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. —FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT (1867–1959) CONTENTS COVER TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT DEDICATION EPIGRAPH CAST OF CHARACTERS INTRODUCTION PART ONE: McMansions, 1911–2011 Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 PART TWO: Ranchos, 1539–1906 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 PART THREE: Lots for Sale, 1906–1932 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 PART FOUR: Great Estates, 1932–1959 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 PART FIVE: White Elephants, 1958–1979 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 PART SIX: Trophy Houses, 1980–2011 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY PHOTO CREDITS ABOUT THE AUTHOR Burton Green (photo credit fm1.1) Max Whittier (photo credit fm1.2) Edwin and Harold Janss (photo credit fm1.3) Minnewa and Alphonzo Bell (photo credit fm1.4) Charles Canfield and Jake Danziger (photo credit fm1.5) Harold Lloyd, Charles Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks at the Beverly Hills Hotel (photo credit fm1.6) Neil Steere McCarthy (photo credit fm1.7) Diane Stockmar, Dolly Green, and Burtie Green at Stockmar’s wedding (photo credit fm1.8) Harold Greenlin (left) with Habib Carouba and their lawyer George Choppelas (photo credit fm1.9) Steven Macallum Powers (left), Bernie Cornfeld and friend (photo credit fm1.10) Stewart and Lynda Resnick with Barbara Davis (right) (photo credit fm1.11) CAST OF CHARACTERS This book is about sixteen great estates in the best neighborhoods of Los Angeles—the contiguous communities of Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Holmby Hills, and Beverly Park.

…

Nothing is indigenous in Los Angeles, a quality perfectly captured in the faux-historical pastiche that has come to be seen as the architectural style of the Triangle. Everything and everyone here comes from somewhere else. Impermanence defines the place. The book you are reading is an attempt to give back to this magical kingdom some of the history it has, perhaps willfully, forgotten. PART ONE McMansions 1911–2011 { OVERLOOKING BEVERLY PARK } (photo credit 1.1) Beverly Park I met Roger, an athletic-looking guy in a college T-shirt and jeans, standing on that ridge where I was looking down on Beverly Park. He was leaning on a Cadillac beside a buxom blonde. They were practicing real estate voyeurism, too.

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

As if still pitching the show to TV executives, Wolfe often describes his vocation as “Indiana Jones meets Sanford & Son”—a cross between treasure hunter and junk dealer. In looking for properties to pick, Wolfe completely reverses our notions of good and bad. Staying away from freshly painted McMansions with satellite dishes and manicured yards, he gravitates toward houses with tall weeds out front, buildings and cars painted in dated colors like avocado and harvest gold, and rust on just about anything. The more signs of age and disrepair, the better. “Our secret to making a profit is that we skip the middleman, meaning we don’t buy from thrift stores, antique malls, or flea markets,” Wolfe and Fritz write in their book, American Pickers Guide to Picking.2 “Instead, we go straight to the source.”

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

There has been a growing awareness that behind all the goods and services we consume is a vast amount of industrial activity much of which depletes resources, pollutes soil, water, and air, destroys habitats, and contributes to global warming. Most of the food we eat is produced by industrial-scale agriculture that uses huge quantities of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, as well as water and energy. Acres of woodland and farmland are destroyed each day to make land available for more McMansions. Technology in many areas may have become cleaner, but this in itself cannot fix the problem. We think of the digital revolution as environmentally friendly, yet by the end of the twentieth century the manufacturing of each computer was generating 140 pounds of solid waste a year, some of it hazardous, and 12 million computers (300,000 tons) were being junked each year, mainly into landfills.5 Motor vehicles are undoubtedly becoming cleaner with respect to the amount of energy they consume and in the sort of exhaust they put out; but these improvements are more than offset by the rapid increase in the number of cars on the road in places like China and India.

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

The housing boom also spawned the now infamous subprime mortgage—a scheme devised by Main Street realtors and Wall Street bankers to finance home buying with loans that let the borrower buy in with little money down but carried high interest rates. The expensive payments would be made later by refinancing the mortgage as prices continued to rise. These subprimes were sold to middle-class strivers upgrading to McMansions as well as to the working poor. The increased demand pushed housing prices further into the stratosphere—until, inevitably, they fell back to earth. When the subprime borrowers could no longer make their payments, foreclosure signs went up, lowering the value of other houses in the neighborhood.

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen

Apple II, Brian Krebs, Burning Man, corporate governance, dumpster diving, Exxon Valdez, fake news, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, index card, Kickstarter, McMansion, Mercator projection, offshore financial centre, packet switching, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, traffic fines, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zipcar

Chris could handle everything online, and his people wouldn’t have to put in an appearance until move-in day, when they’d stop by the rental office to flash their fake ID and pick up the door key. He moved two of his cashers, and Marcos, his pot connection, into the Archstone Mission Viejo, a labyrinth of McMansion-style apartments painted the colors of a sunset and clinging to a hill dotted with palm trees and high-tension lines alongside Interstate 5, ten minutes from his house. He was also looking to expand his crew. One girl had dropped out and moved to Toledo after her second in-store bust, and two others had quit in disgust when Chris impregnated his teenage girlfriend—he was now paying for an apartment for the young woman and their son, whose existence he kept secret even from his mother.

The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Coming Currency Crisis With Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments by Charles Goyette

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, housing crisis, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, index fund, junk bonds, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, McMansion, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, oil shock, peak oil, pushing on a string, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short selling, Silicon Valley, transaction costs

—Buckminster Fuller Agriculture When investment legend and commodities bull Jim Rogers says that ten years from now instead of twenty-nine-year-old stockbrokers driving Maseratis, it will be twenty-nine-year-old farmers, he’s making an important point about the shifting economy. People’s spending hierarchies experience dynamic changes in lean economic times. People can live without the excesses of Wall Street. They can live without Hum mers, McMansions, and flat-screen TVs in every room. But they can’t live without food. The world can get along just fine with less so-called investment banking. It can’t get along with less farming. This goes for the rest of the world: a growing population needs additional food. Since 2000 Asia’s growth has been equal to almost one and a half times the total population of the United States.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

The place took nine years to build, reportedly at a cost of $200 million. Its highlight is Katsura House, a replica of a teahouse from a sixteenth-century royal compound in Kyoto. The replica, which was built in Japan, then disassembled and shipped to California, is 10 percent bigger than the original. Non-billionaires settle for McMansions priced in single-digit millions, like a “secluded Tuscan estate” that the nouveau riche Chandler Guo, the self-proclaimed “Bitcoin King,” snapped up for $5 million in 2018. As for “regular” houses, those no longer exist. In March 2018, a drab, tiny, 848-square-foot house in Sunnyvale sold for $2 million, more than $2,300 per square foot, the highest square-foot price ever recorded on the Multiple Listing Service.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

It took a global financial catastrophe to make them reverse themselves in this way—a recurrence of the Great Depression complete with Wall Street swindles, a burst financial bubble, and weeks of panic as unemployment spiked, assets tumbled, and the economy’s foundations quivered. The confident days of the free-market consensus seemed to be shuddering to a close. The promise of a universally affluent postindustrial era now looked as empty and forlorn as a row of abandoned McMansions on some lonely cul-de-sac in the Nevada desert. It wasn’t merely Barack Obama’s singular identification with “Hope” and “Change” that made him seem like the reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt; in contrast to every other candidate, he recognized how political convention had given us economic disaster.

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Sometimes small begets small in an effortless way. I grew up in a modest postwar suburban bungalow that was bulldozed after my parents sold it to make room for a house twice the size. In a smaller world, these giant suburban homes will become as obsolete as the SUVs parked in their driveways. The suburban landscape is defined by energy-sucking McMansions. Before long, these storehouses of consumer goods will be demolished to clear the way for smaller homes better suited to the finite dimensions of tomorrow’s economy. A smaller home will be a blessing when income growth starts to slow. The need to buy less stuff will free up much-needed cash to pay for energy and food.

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

That was odd, because she should have been, at the very least, content. She was doing well at work. Her firm had picked her for its management-training programme. She was with a great guy, and they lived in a pretty town near Sacramento called Davis, in a luxury apartment surrounded by manicured lawns and McMansions. “I felt like I had it made,” Strobel recalls. “Like I had everything I could possibly want.” From the outside looking in, to anyone who caught sight of her new three-diamond ring, or saw her and Smith out partying in town, or came over to their fancy home and saw the rooms full of stuff and closets full of clothes, she did.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

Researchers are also testing proposals for a tax on red meat, which they find would not only curtail emissions but deliver a wide range of public health benefits, while driving medical costs down.19 The beef industry is just one example. There are many others we could consider. We could scale down the arms industry and the private jet industry. We could scale down the production of single-use plastics, disposable coffee cups, SUVs and McMansions (in the United States, house sizes have doubled since the 1970s20). Instead of building new stadiums for the Olympics and the World Cup every few years we could reuse existing infrastructure. We know that to reach our climate goals we will need to scale down the commercial airline industry, starting with policies like a frequent flyer levy, ending routes that can be served by train, and getting rid of first-class and business-class cabins, which have the highest CO2 per passenger mile.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

So while folks at Burning Man are just starting to build themselves a homeland, Summit has already taken that step. Already, there are more than five hundred home sites on the land, with people like Richard Branson, Kobe Bryant, GE’s CMO Beth Comstock, and Nike president Trevor Edwards already committed to the project. And instead of the typical McMansion resort plan, they are actively fostering community by prohibiting oversize statement homes and concentrating development into tightly clustered neighborhoods. Everything is being built to platinum-level LEED environmental standards. It’s the world’s first ecstatically inspired eco-town, though it didn’t start out that way.

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer

back-to-the-land, Black Swan, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, David Strachan, deindustrialization, Easter island, European colonialism, Extropian, failed state, feminist movement, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, hydrogen economy, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, McMansion, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Project for a New American Century, Ray Kurzweil, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

The traditional homes of many nonindustrial cultures embody millennia of evolution and provide excellent human habitat, while leaving the wider environmental systems around them relatively 119 120 T he E cotechnic F u t u re unharmed. Most homes in the modern industrial world, from the sprawling McMansions of the well-to-do down to the apartments that house the poor, provide relatively poor habitat for human beings; unlike more traditional housing, which is designed to foster many of the activities of human life, many modern residences make room for sleeping, consuming manufactured products and very little else.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

By 1970, that was down to five and twelve minutes respectively.7 And because our dollar goes so much further, we’ve developed a taste for new products and services. You no longer get a plain cup of coffee from a pushcart—you get a Starbucks latte with a shot of vanilla. You’re no longer satisfied with a cape-style bungalow—you want a McMansion. Over the years middle-class life has gotten better and better: products that seemed like luxuries during the early postwar years have become standard fare. And as a result, accoutrements once reserved for the rich and famous have become increasingly pedestrian. Even better, the blessings of American prosperity haven’t been limited to the upper crust and those aspiring to get there.

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter

back-to-the-land, crack epidemic, David Attenborough, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, hobby farmer, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mason jar, McMansion, New Urbanism, Port of Oakland, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, Silicon Valley, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog

Bobby nodded and went to get a shopping cart to block the parking spot. He waved at our truck as we drove away, back to the hills, back to the stables. We had to cross the county line to get our horse poo. Oakland’s county, Alameda, gave way to Contra Costa County, land of rolling hills, working cattle ranches, and more recently rich folks with McMansions. Lucky for us, rich people like horses. And horses make a lot of manure. Which piles up and composts away until an enterprising gardener arrives and offers to take away this jackpot of tilth and nutrients. The horses whinnied when they heard us drive up. I backed the truck as close as possible to the mother lode: a massive mound of composting manure the size of a small barn.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability by David Owen

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, delayed gratification, distributed generation, drive until you qualify, East Village, Easter island, electricity market, food miles, Ford Model T, garden city movement, hydrogen economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, linear programming, McMansion, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, Murano, Venice glass, Negawatt, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, peak oil, placebo effect, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, unemployed young men, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

Unfortunately, many critical structural incentives in the United States actually:• guarantee harmful outcomes (as was also the case in the buildup to the present credit crisis, in which lenders and borrowers were extravagantly rewarded for taking the steps that led to their self-destruction); or • cater primarily to political and commercial self-interest (as in the promotion of ethanol, which has made politicians look busy on the energy issue and has enriched the producers of ethanol but has harmed just about everyone else); or • make people feel better without accomplishing anything substantive (as in the economic abracadabra that makes homeowners feel they’re saving the world by installing heavily subsidized solar panels on the roofs of suburban McMansions). We have encouraged sprawl, automobile dependence, and energy gluttony from the beginning, in part by concealing from ourselves the true long-term and short-term costs—and when potentially useful disincentives have arisen spontaneously we have generally rushed to neutralize them, as in the demands, in late 2008, that fuel taxes be reduced to bring down the price of gasoline, or in work-relief proposals to help revive the economy by building new roads or making it easier for people to buy new cars and build new houses.

JPod by Douglas Coupland

Asperger Syndrome, Drosophila, finite state, G4S, game design, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, neurotypical, pez dispenser, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, sugar pill, tech worker, wage slave, Y2K

They spent eight days lolling about the Pacific with almost no food, water, light or sanitation. Kam had to hide out at my place for a few weeks until things calmed down. He was philosophical about the mistake: "I had to give the bastard a freebie on that particular shipment, and I also had to buy a McMansion for his mother in West Van, one bordering the golf course. Of course, the mother's gaga and could live in a Maytag box for all she cares." In any event, Kam ended up staying with us in Chinatown—the poverty nostalgia factor—and Kaitlin and I couldn't be happier. He makes no noise at all when he's home, and the fridge is bursting with tons of free food, renewed daily.

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs by Gina Keating

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, company town, corporate raider, digital rights, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Netflix Prize, new economy, out of africa, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Superbowl ad, tech worker, telemarketer, warehouse automation, X Prize

Santa Cruz, especially the section populated by well-to-do residents on the west side of the San Lorenzo River, is vehemently antigrowth and antimansion, and even fought a widening of Highway 17 that would have shortened the hour-long commute to Silicon Valley. The town’s east siders share their wealthy neighbors’ isolationism—not so much to keep out vulgarian McMansion builders as to preserve a surf-shack culture reminiscent of a 1960s beach party movie. We turned north toward the center of town, near where the Pacific Coast Highway runs inland for a few blocks through a tony little business district, before it heads back toward the California coastline. Randolph parked the Volvo at a meter on Pacific Avenue, and we began to walk—past a vintage movie theater, a few upscale chain stores, and local boutiques.

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

The heads of public corporations, desperate for increased stock valuations in an increasingly volatile market (and beholden to investors who could potentially oust them at any point) began sloughing off any non-essential components of their business, from janitors to entire arms of a company, in order to make it as lean and “agile” as possible. You might know this strategy by the more common but vague name of downsizing. The rhetoric of downsizing suggests that whatever is being cut was never really necessary: You downsize from a sprawling McMansion to a home that fits you just fine; you reduce greed and redundancy and extravagance. That understanding followed it into the workplace, too. Sure, more Americans had enjoyed economic prosperity and stability during the Great Compression. But the companies had become, at least from the profit-margin-obsessed perspective of Wall Street, bloated.

Work Less, Live More: The Way to Semi-Retirement by Robert Clyatt

asset allocation, backtesting, buy and hold, currency risk, death from overwork, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, eat what you kill, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial independence, fixed income, future of work, independent contractor, index arbitrage, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, rising living standards, risk/return, Silicon Valley, The 4% rule, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Use your local knowledge to snatch a prize smaller property at a good price, perhaps even before it gets to market, giving you the chance to share the seller’s savings from not paying a realtor. (See “Retiring Outside the U.S.” and “Deciding Whether It’s Possible to Semi-Retire,” below, for information on moving to another state or country, which can also help beat high home costs.) Resource A growing trend toward high-quality but not-so-big homes suggests that the McMansion ideal may be fading—and there are resources aimed at the new cottage dwellers. 138 | Work Less, Live More Susan Susanka has a number of books and resources under the theme of The Not So Big House online at www.notsobighouse.com. These homes are intimate, beautiful, and functional without being big.

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

It will serve as the perfect backdrop to Black’s spectacular art collection, which comprises many masterpieces worth hundreds of millions of dollars. On summer weekends, the power scene moves either to the Hamptons on Long Island or “to the country,” lingo for north of the city. Virtually all financiers own McMansions, equipped with pools, tennis courts, and guesthouses, surrounded by lush formal gardens, tall privet hedges, and security features. The upkeep costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and often requires the employ of an estate manager. Even within clusters, supernuclei form. In the Hamptons, superhubs congregate around Meadow Lane, Gin Lane, and Dune Road.

You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall by Colin Ellard

A Pattern Language, call centre, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, congestion pricing, Frank Gehry, global village, Google Earth, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, job satisfaction, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, peak oil, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Snow Crash, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban sprawl

Enclosing walls, and the refuge they offer, are avoided by arranging wide aisles around the outside of the seating area that are designed to draw people to the service counters. Food courts are brightly lit, often with skylights and high ceilings. Tables are arranged in such a way as to discourage groups of diners any larger than two. The effect, very much like trying to have lunch in the middle of an overdone foyer in a suburban McMansion, is artfully contrived to encourage people to slap down their money, wolf down their food, and plunge themselves back into the shopping fray.6 Perhaps a more apt metaphor would be to imagine primitive Homo sapiens sitting down for a nice lunch in the middle of a wide open stretch of savannah. He would undoubtedly run a great risk of becoming lunch, rather than consuming it, so would be unlikely to linger for dessert.

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edmond Halley, fear of failure, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, McJob, McMansion, Naomi Klein, pneumatic tube, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, tech worker, The Great Good Place, trade route

To the extent that Ashland is known at all outside Oregon, it is as a summer destination for theater-loving tourists; the town is home to the popular Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which puts on about a dozen different plays a year. Recently, Ashland has become a trendy locale for wealthy Californians, who have built scores of McMansions out in the foothills. Still, it’s a nice place. For years, the local government protected Ashland’s appeal by keeping chain stores out of the town’s core, forcing them to open on the outskirts. This nonconformist ethic was part of the city’s collective identity. When the McDonald’s outlet down by the highway on-ramp went out of business, the entire town seemed to rejoice, as though this was proof of the community’s inherent goodness.

Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker

8-hour work day, active transport: walking or cycling, barriers to entry, book value, buy and hold, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, diversification, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Easter island, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, game design, index fund, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, junk bonds, lateral thinking, lifestyle creep, loose coupling, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, passive income, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, psychological pricing, retail therapy, risk free rate, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, wage slave, working poor

Rather, it's shelter in Finland or Alaska that is an absolute need--insofar that staying alive is a need, but nobody needs to live in Finland or Alaska, even though I'm sure those are nice places.45 Even though the rankings on this list probably match the rankings of most people, it's by no means universal. Having experienced the freedom of living in an RV or a boat for a while, some people would never dream of substituting this for a 4,000square-foot McMansion with its endless cleaning and maintenance issues, and the need for walkie-talkies to find lost family members. The list is individual, because any choice has consequences in other domains (see Contingency goal-setting). For each individual, there are similar lists for eating, clothing, transportation, health, time, tools, toys, activities, status, etc., each ranging from essentially zero cost to more than one can imagine.

Home Sweet Anywhere: How We Sold Our House, Created a New Life, and Saw the World by Lynne Martin

connected car, Downton Abbey, East Village, Hacker News, haute cuisine, McMansion, pink-collar, Skype

People think of the Napa area of Northern California as the wine-growing capital of the state, but the Central Coast is catching up fast. More than 140 wineries snuggle among them as they step back from the ocean, with new wine tasting rooms sprouting up almost daily. The restaurant and bar scene has become sophisticated, and McMansions dot the countryside. Cattle and vineyards vie for space in the landscape. We had dreamed of some downtime and many relaxed evenings with my daughters and their families. But while we certainly enjoyed lots of family fun during the holidays, in California, time seemed to speed up. We found ourselves far busier than we ever were on the road, and the days evaporated with social events and chores.

American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic by John Temple

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", airport security, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Mason jar, McMansion, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, tech billionaire

They’d put in half a day, then take a long lunch, and work maybe a couple more hours in the afternoon. Then Chris wanted to go out to eat every night, hit the gym, then head to a strip club, find some girls. Night after night. It was an exciting life, where you might spend the morning installing windows on a mid-level McMansion in Port Charlotte, then drop everything and charter a cruiser to the Keys. Derik could keep up with Chris’s pace, and they had the same stupid sense of humor. Chris was obsessed with this girl who danced at a place called Emerald City Gentleman’s Club in Port Charlotte. Her stage name was Katie, kind of a plain name for a stripper, surrounded by Jades and Fantasias and Candis.

Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep

battle of ideas, British Empire, call centre, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, illegal immigration, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Kibera, knowledge economy, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, urban planning, urban renewal

The value of the house could help to lift a family out of poverty. One day Adnan took me to see the property where he expected to begin. His driver, who went by the name James, steered us past the funhouse-mirror world that was the outer reaches of Karachi. We passed enormous but shabbily built houses, the local equivalent of McMansions. We passed apartment buildings and sandy lots. Adnan called a halt at a bazaar built on a street median. “You have to see this,” he said. Mats on bamboo poles kept sunlight out of the improvised shops. We ducked under a mat into a pool hall, with a magnificent table of carved wood and green velvet sitting on the earthen median.

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Energy consumption is about 8 percent of gross domestic product, but it has outsize implications for foreign policy, national security, and the environment. In the twentieth century the United States constructed a society geared around low-cost and plentiful energy that doesn’t work as well in an era of high-cost energy. Driving a Hummer fifty miles to Walmart from an exurban 4,200-square-foot McMansion, which costs a ton to heat, didn’t make much sense in the first place; it made even less sense in 2009 and 2010, with unemployment high and gas and heating oil at $4 per gallon. The addiction to foreign oil, and our inability to quickly remake the systems that rely on it, contribute to the sense of helplessness in the face of decline.

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

Each refinancing of these subprime mortgages, as they were called, came loaded with fees and balloon payments that made them more profitable for the brokers and investors. Subprime mortgages were not limited to low-income families. They were also available to middle-class professionals upgrading into McMansions. This new flow of money pushed housing prices up almost everywhere and, in the faster-growing parts of the country, into the stratosphere. In real terms, average home prices in the United States almost doubled in a decade.10 Third, pressured by Wall Street and real estate lobbyists to continue the housing boom, the Clinton and George W.

Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kickstarter, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, McMansion, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Plato's cave, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, value at risk, yield curve

“Builders that built speculative homes are trying to move them by offering large incentives and discounts, and some anxious buyers are canceling contracts for homes already being built,” observed Robert Toll, CEO of luxury home builder Toll Brothers, after its stock crashed 50 percent for the year by August. Forbes magazine tartly observed: “When even Toll Brothers, the high-end builder, suffers cancelations, you know the real estate boom is over.” On October 6, home builder Kara Homes, known for their construction of “McMansions,” filed for bankruptcy protection, less than a month after reporting that the company had enjoyed the “two most profitable quarters in the history of our company.” The delinquency rate on subprime mortgages rose from 12 percent to 14 percent. Troublesome as they were, these signs of housing strain did nothing to stop the mortgage-based CDO machine.

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Most of the world didn’t have much money. They loved cheap. “Shanzhai” was their word for it. To copy. Counterfeit, without shame. It was not just to replicate products. It was to replicate a notion of living, influenced heavily by the West. I saw entire suburban tract mansion suburbs pop up in months. McMansions. Children on bicycles. Everything but the milkman and Girl Scouts at the corner selling lemonade. I remember coming back from Ningbo, across Jiaozhou Bay. Halfway across the world’s longest bridge, out of the fog rose a tower known as Haitian Yizhou, “the land between the sea and the sky.” The tower was shaped like an eagle.

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

When the job market dried up overnight in 2007, the number of evictions and foreclosures looked pretty gloomy down here too. Higher cost of living played a role, but so did the phenomenon of lifestyle creep: the tendency to scale up small, everyday purchasing decisions in proportion to one’s income. For Silicon Valley techies, it usually wasn’t the Lamborghini or the McMansion that did them in. It was the hundreds of small purchases where they reached for the upper shelf in the grocery store, indulged in geeky hobbies, and upgraded their phones and laptops every year. The fall from grace proved to be very sudden too. The unemployment benefits might’ve been just enough to pay the bills of a frugal low-income family, but fell well short of the mortgage payments on a mid-range San Francisco Bay Area home.

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

As Juliet Schor has documented in The Overspent American, nobody actually compares themselves anymore to the Joneses of yesteryear—that is, the next-door neighbor in a similar income group. We are now likely to compare ourselves with "reference groups" who make much more money than we do. If you're rich, you compare yourself to the superrich. You don't want a "McMansion," you want a real mansion—like the one you saw lovingly described in a rerun of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. If you're upper middle class, you compare yourself to the rich. If you're middle class or lower class, you might compare yourself to both the upper middle class and the rich.22 Stroll again into that Banana Republic and look around.

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith

British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, dumpster diving, en.wikipedia.org, Gary Taubes, Haber-Bosch Process, longitudinal study, McMansion, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, out of africa, peak oil, placebo effect, Rosa Parks, the built environment, vertical integration

There needs to be fewer of us. Dramatically fewer of us. And in wealthy countries, we need to consume dramatically less. A truly local economy could make that necessity both plain and possible: not only would it be obvious that logging, mining, agriculture, and other extractive activities were necessary for our McMansions and our computer chips, but when those “resources” ran out, so would the life that is built upon them. But money buys us distance, buffering us from the murder of the world in a sweet dream of abundance. Brian Donahue explores this in his book Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town.

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker

butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Douglas Hofstadter, feminist movement, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, index card, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, language acquisition, lolcat, McMansion, meta-analysis, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, profit maximization, quantitative easing, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, short selling, Steven Pinker, the market place, theory of mind, Turing machine

The new entries in AHD 5 are a showcase for the linguistic exuberance and recent cultural history of the Anglosphere: Abrahamic, air rage, amuse-bouche, backward-compatible, brain freeze, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, camel toe, community policing, crowdsourcing, Disneyfication, dispensationalism, dream catcher, earbud, emo, encephalization, farklempt, fashionista, fast-twitch, Goldilocks zone, grayscale, Grinch, hall of mirrors, hat hair, heterochrony, infographics, interoperable, Islamofascism, jelly sandal, jiggy, judicial activism, ka-ching, kegger, kerfuffle, leet, liminal, lipstick lesbian, manboob, McMansion, metabolic syndrome, nanobot, neuroethics, nonperforming, off the grid, Onesie, overdiagnosis, parkour, patriline, phish, quantum entanglement, queer theory, quilling, race-bait, recursive, rope-a-dope, scattergram, semifreddo, sexting, tag-team, time-suck, tranche, ubuntu, unfunny, universal Turing machine, vacuum energy, velociraptor, vocal percussion, waterboard, webmistress, wetware, Xanax, xenoestrogen, x-ray fish, yadda yadda yadda, yellow dog, yutz, Zelig, zettabyte, zipline If I were allowed to take just one book to the proverbial desert island, it might be a dictionary.

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

You can see a close-up of some of that futility in the new book Design Like You Give a Damn from the nonprofit Architecture for Humanity,3 a book that is lovely in every sense of the word. The group started by sponsoring a competition for new shelters for refugees, and the range of replacements that people thought up for canvas tents makes clear just how much talent is currently going to waste designing McMansions. There are inflatable hemp bubbles and cardboard outhouses and dozens of other designs and prototypes for the world’s poorest people and biggest disasters. As time went on, the group also collected photos and plans for attractive buildings around the world: health clinics that generate their own power, schools cheap enough for communities to construct.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

The 22100s are some of the most expensive zip codes in America. Eventually, browsing on Craigslist, I found a room that was surprisingly within my budget, in a house surprisingly near—less than fifteen minutes from—CIA headquarters. I went to check it out, expecting a cruddy bachelor pad pigsty. Instead, I pulled up in front of a large glass-fronted McMansion, immaculately maintained with a topiary lawn that was seasonally decorated. I’m being completely serious when I say that as I approached the place, the smell of pumpkin spice got stronger. A guy named Gary answered the door. He was older, which I expected from the “Dear Edward” tone of his email, but I hadn’t expected him to be so well dressed.

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

But now the exurban populations had reached critical mass (Delaware County alone had grown by almost one-third since the 2000 election), and Republicans were building their own kind of quiet but ruthlessly efficient turnout machine . . . But with so many white, conservative and religious voters now living in the brand-new town houses and McMansions in Ohio’s growing ring counties, Republicans were able to mobilize a stunning turnout in areas where their support was more concentrated than it was in the past. Bush’s operatives did precisely what they told me seven months ago they would do in these communities: they tapped into a volunteer network using local party organizations, union rolls, gun clubs and churches.

Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge by Ted Conover

autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fixed income, gentrification, George Floyd, McMansion, off grid, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, place-making, social distancing, supervolcano

These included Terry’s dentures, which had been resting in their case atop the stove’s exhaust hood; a Western Airlines ticket folder from 1974 (Denver to Phoenix round-trip); a 2012 notice from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office (“deputy attempted to contact you”); a couple of sheets of S&H Green Stamps; practice targets for marksmanship, including one that pictured a bad guy holding a knife to a woman’s neck; a paperback book from 1966 called Flying Saucers—Serious Business; bumper stickers that read, “you’re a great cure for happiness” and “steal here die here”; and business cards and installation invoices from Terry’s carpet service. The calendar from 2013, the year Terry had moved in, had pictures of classic cars in front of McMansions and scantily clad women. It also had notations on various days that I realized were not to-do’s but, rather, accomplishments. For example, April 2013 included: “Put large heater in. Removed propane heater from liv rm, cut a little wood, cut firewood all day, hauled water, Went p.o. and bought food.

Moon Coastal Oregon by Judy Jewell, W. C. McRae

centre right, crowdsourcing, McMansion, place-making, Ted Nelson, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

The south end of the drive runs through the northern portion of Bandon State Natural Area, providing parking, beach access, and picnic tables. The once-bucolic drive along the Beach Loop has changed a bit—trophy homes form pretty much the only view you have for the first mile or two. Still, there are state park parking areas that let you put the McMansions to your back and allow a look at the dramatic ocean views or a trek down the bluff to a gorgeous beach. Along this fine stretch of beach are rock formations with such evocative names as Table Rock, Elephant Rock, Garden of the Gods, and Cat and Kittens Rocks. The whole grouping of sea stacks (rocks eroded away from their original cliffs by the sea), included within the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, looks like a surrealist chess set cast upon the waters.

Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis

airport security, McMansion, Norman Mailer, PalmPilot, Ronald Reagan

The sectional couch, the Le Corbusier chairs and the Eames tables had been rearranged for the party, yet this new setup now seemed weirdly familiar to me. I wanted to figure out why, but the sound of the vacuum merging with Victor’s barking forced the ghost to move quickly toward the kitchen. The house had been referred to as a McMansion in the Talk article: nine thousand square feet and situated in a fast-growing and wealthy suburb, and 307 Elsinore Lane wasn’t even the grandest in the community—it merely reflected the routine affluence of the neighborhood. It was, according to a spread in Elle Decor, “minimalist global eclectic with an emphasis on Spanish revival” but with “elements of midcentury French chateau and a touch of sixties Palm Springs modernism” (imagine that if you can; it was not a design concept everyone grasped).

Faster, Higher, Farther: How One of the World's Largest Automakers Committed a Massive and Stunning Fraud by Jack Ewing

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 1960s counterculture, Asilomar, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, business logic, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, crossover SUV, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, McMansion, military-industrial complex, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis

Humstone had spent essentially her entire career involved in environmental and planning issues. She boasted that she came from a family that was recycling trash in the 1950s, and she had a master’s degree in city planning from Harvard University. Later she was executive director of the Vermont Forum on Sprawl, which tried to keep the state’s open spaces from being covered by McMansions. When Humstone began shopping for a new car in 2010, she thought first of a Prius, the Toyota hybrid that pioneered the idea of a car that was less harmful to the planet. The Prius was the default choice for any people who considered themselves environmentalists. “All my work was related to being environmentally responsible,” Humstone recalled later.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

I try to explain the site’s significance, but the context is only interesting in my head: At a stretch of ten whole years, from 1844 to 1854, the North American Phalanx was the single longest of thirty attempts to build a Fourierist phalanx in the United States. The other phalanxes lasted for a year at most, and some only a couple of months. Lina and I drive for a long time around the swampy rural marshland thickets, past old farmhouses and huge bright orange-and-pink McMansions with lion statues and half-moon driveways. Finally, out on the little county thoroughfare named Phalanx Road, as we are heading toward the parkway, we spot it nearly engulfed in the trees and with no pull-out, no way to safely sidle up and squint and say, “Honey, what is a ‘phalanx’?” Lost in the grass is one of those little standard-issue blue-and-yellow New York State historical markers: North American Phalanx.

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle

augmented reality, clean water, climate anxiety, climate change refugee, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, decarbonisation, digital map, Donald Trump, energy transition, four colour theorem, gentrification, Google Earth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, longitudinal study, McMansion, off-the-grid, oil shock, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, smart cities, tail risk, Tipper Gore, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, Yom Kippur War, young professional

They purchased several hundred tons of dirt, hauled the dirt over to the side of the creek, and dumped it on the ground, raising the ground level in the neighborhood just a few inches above the hundred-year floodplain threshold. The developers then wrote a letter to FEMA asking the agency to grant a “letter of map revision”—in other words, to gerrymander the maps—so that they could build on the site. The dirt wasn’t enough to stop Harvey, though, and after the storm, residents returned to find their McMansions filled with brown water. Then there were the neighborhoods that sat outside any kind of floodplain and away from any major bayou, those places where the issue was not riverine flooding but rainfall drainage. Houston’s drainage grid was ancient and inadequate. The sidewalk drains and storm grates were far too narrow to accommodate a massive rainfall event like Harvey, and indeed they had failed several times in the past during lesser storms; many portholes had filled up with leaves and debris over the years, and the city had fallen behind on servicing them, especially in low-income neighborhoods close to the city center.

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, business cycle, clean water, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, full employment, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, global village, haute couture, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market clearing, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Pareto efficiency, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Whereas only 18 percent of new homes built in 1986 were 2,400 square feet or larger, a decade later 30 percent were.47 Scottsdale, Arizona, builder Larry Kush notes that the largest houses in his developments now measure 6,000 square feet, up from 4,000 in 1993.48 Of the huge, mass-produced houses built in popular new luxury subdivisions springing up in the suburbs of New York, Alexander Garvin, professor of architecture and planning at Yale, said, “They call them McMansions.”49 Existing data categories conceal the explosive growth in the construction of so-called trophy homes—mansions with more than 10,000 square feet of living space. In Beverly Hills, for example, 17 such houses were sold in 1997, up from only 9 in 1994.50 Along one short stretch of the Florida coast near Palm Beach, 19 private residences ranging from 23,000 to 64,000 square feet have been built in the last several years; and in 1996 alone, 22 houses in the area exchanged hands in the market for prices above $10 million.51 Indeed, many of the mansions constructed in recent years, although smaller than the 1895 Biltmore Estate, threaten to alter the current threshold for what counts as a trophy home.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

But in the liberal deep story, an alarming event occurs; marauders invade the public square, recklessly dismantle it, and selfishly steal away bricks and concrete chunks from the public buildings at its center. Seeing insult added to injury, those guarding the public square watch helplessly as those who’ve dismantled it construct private McMansions with the same bricks and pieces of concrete, privatizing the public realm. That’s the gist of the liberal deep story, and the right can’t understand the deep pride liberals take in their creatively designed, hard-won public sphere as a powerful integrative force in American life. Ironically, you may have more in common with the left than you imagine, for many on the left feel like strangers in their own land too.

Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry by Steven Rattner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, business cycle, Carl Icahn, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Ford Model T, friendly fire, hiring and firing, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, too big to fail

In its glory days, armed with a strong credit rating, it had fallen into the same bad habits as other elite financial outfits, such as GE Capital and AIG. Like an occasional smoker who gradually acquires a three-pack-a-day habit, GMAC began to abuse its cheap capital, branching out aggressively into other kinds of lending—in particular, residential real estate at the height of the housing bubble. For a while this led to McMansion-size profits for GMAC's residential capital unit, ResCap, but by the end of 2007 it was gushing red ink. GMAC had already lost its investment-grade rating and now had to pour in billions to keep ResCap afloat, weakening its ability to make car loans. Things only got worse. By autumn 2008 GMAC's own survival was in doubt, and it came running to Washington for help.

In-N-Out Burger by Stacy Perman

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, British Empire, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Golden arches theory, Haight Ashbury, Maui Hawaii, McJob, McMansion, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

Martinez worked for In-N-Out dealing with the chain’s cookout trailers, and the two were introduced when they were partnered to learn and perform dance routines at the annual In-N-Out associates’ picnic. The couple later moved into a custom-built $1.21 million four-bedroom house on Valiant Street* in a McMansion-filled cul-de-sac in Glendora. Fronted by perfectly manicured lawns and flanked by nine graceful palm trees, the cream-colored house with a gray slate tile roof and paned windows was situated among the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. The house, just minutes away from Esther’s, had a swimming pool and spa, a detached guesthouse, and a three-car garage.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Her how-to guide, the Sprawl Repair Manual, offers some wildly ambitious prescriptions: Business parks can be fixed by inserting streets and shops onto their tarmacs. Urban highways can be morphed into main streets by putting them on diets and slowing them down with narrower lanes, streetlights, and crosswalks. Disconnected tangles of cul-de-sac can be made walkable by strategic grafting of new roads and lanes between them. Huge, unaffordable McMansions can be divided into apartments. Gas stations can be humanized by wrapping their parking lots in new street-front businesses. Parts of the Sprawl Repair Manual read like a blueprint for a fantasy urban universe; anything is possible on paper. But some of Tachieva’s prescriptions have already come to life in pockets across the continent.

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

“Many were unwilling to put public money on the line to prevent additional foreclosures, because any such program would inevitably involve a bailout of some “irresponsible” homeowners. Put more cynically, spending public money on foreclosure avoidance would be asking responsible taxpayers to subsidize people living in McMansions they could not afford, with flat-screen televisions paid for out of their home equity line of credit.” Ibid. 27. John Tamny, “The Ongoing and Hideous Lie about ‘Victimized’ Mortgage Holders,” Forbes, March 2013, accessed March 17, 2015, www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2013/03/05/the-ongoing-and-hideous-lie-about-victimized-mortgage-walkers/. 28.

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

‘But in life you have to take risks.’58 What Frederic Cilins had not known when he sat down with Mamadie Touré in April 2013 to try to persuade her to destroy the contracts promising her cash and shares for helping BSGR and to catch a plane out of the United States was that the FBI was listening in. When she arrived in Florida following Lansana Conté’s death, the dictator’s widow had bought what Americans disparagingly call a ‘McMansion’, a luxurious residence built with more grandeur than taste.59 Once Alpha Condé took power, the investigation he launched into how BSGR had won its rights followed the trail to her doorstep. The investigators whom Guinea’s new government had hired to conduct the probe shared what they had discovered with US prosecutors, who in early 2013 convened a grand jury and pressed ahead with their own investigation.

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

We already know what the solution is: the end of anonymity. The end of anonymous cash purchases, of anonymous shell purchases, of anonymous purchases made via American attorneys who hide the identities of their clients behind attorney-client privilege. Time and again—in skyscrapers and condos, in McMansions and steel mills, in tired factories and entire cities—that anonymity in American real estate has fired the motors of global kleptocracy. For decades, American real estate has provided anonymity for anyone who wants it, for anyone looking to transform their dirty money into legitimate assets. It’s a reality that has lined the pockets of the broader real estate industry—and has had devastating effects on sagging downtowns and local communities in the U.S., and on entire nation-states abroad watching their treasuries and banks looted and laundered via American real estate.

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, centre right, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, fulfillment center, invisible hand, labor-force participation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, single-payer health, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

It would be three more years before another federal agency would put his mother’s suggestions into practice. PART THREE “A Broken System” George’s Chicken, Edinburg, Virginia Note from Tess Henry, Roanoke, Virginia Chapter Nine Whac-A-Mole By 2014, the suburban heroin-dealing scene had become entrenched in Roanoke’s McMansion subdivisions and poor neighborhoods alike. But the largest dealers weren’t twice-convicted felons like Ronnie Jones with elaborate dope-cutting schemes, multiple cars, and hired mules. They were local users, many of them female, dispatched to buy the heroin from a bulk dealer out of state, in exchange for a cut.

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

1960s counterculture, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, British Empire, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, do what you love, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, obamacare, pill mill, TED Talk, zero-sum game

New York retirees, in turn, flooded the town and Charlotte learned what a bagel was. Six other Fortune 500 companies appeared, as did NBA and NFL franchises, and a silver skyline. Charlotte’s metro area includes almost fifty golf and country clubs. The town’s southern end absorbed the better-off newcomers, who transformed it from cow pastures to a sprawl of McMansions and shopping malls in less than a generation. Latino immigrants came for the jobs, too. Attracted to the state by agriculture and pork slaughterhouse work, they filled in fading North Carolina rural towns, then moved to the more stable work in Charlotte. The city’s Latino population grew faster than any in the country.

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

Second, I noticed the absence of something even more important: homeless people. I didn’t see a single homeless person, shanty, or slum. No trashed neighborhoods. No piles of garbage in the neighborhoods deemed unimportant by municipal officials. The homes we passed were modest compared to U.S. McMansions but were in good shape and well maintained. I asked my guide, local waste expert Alan Watson, where the poor people lived, and he looked at me quizzically. “We have a strong social safety net here, so we don’t have a lot of poor people like you do.” Finally, in a far-off field, I saw a bunch of small structures that looked almost like shanties from a distance.

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

Some years before, he had knocked down his family’s old bungalow and replaced it with a garish skyscraper named Kingfisher Tower. This was partly a commercial venture, with apartments for sale in the lower levels. But perched at the top on a slab of white concrete was a 40,000-square-foot “sky bungalow” for Mallya’s own use, said to be worth $20 million. India’s most conspicuous McMansion looked vaguely like the White House, albeit 400 feet further up in the air. Given his refugee status, it was unclear whether its owner would ever actually get to live in it.6 “It’s not going to happen for a few generations. I mean, it’s a very deep-rooted system of corruption,” he went on, his shoulders hunched, talking about faltering government attempts to cut graft.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

Just as the Great Depression of the 1930s led to the rise of the suburbs, and the great malaise of the 1970s led to the rise of the sun belt, the crash of 2007–08 will hasten the rise of high-density cities. “Every phase or epoch of capitalism has its own distinct geography,” he argues, “and the next phase will have the geography of the inner city.” The housing crash will persuade people to stop driving themselves into debt to buy McMansions and the SUVs that go with them; instead they will start renting lofts and getting on their bicycles, helping to produce a general civilizational shift of shrinking suburbs and expanding urban cores. But what exactly does creativity mean? Why do some people have it and others not? How can you encourage people to be more creative, and how can you build creativity into the DNA of your company?

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, back-to-the-land, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, meta-analysis, neurotypical, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, selection bias, statistical model, theory of mind, Winter of Discontent

I was eventually cured of my maladjustment—not by therapy, but by a family coup that resulted in my grandfather’s being relieved of the farm he’d inherited from his mother. That happened to be the land on which I’d built my home, and so I was evicted, my cabin eventually bulldozed and the land converted to McMansions, and it became necessary for me to earn a living. Of the many adjustments I have had to make, diagnosing people in order to secure an income was one of the strangest—not only because the DSM’s labels seemed so insufficient, its criteria so deracinated, the whole procedure so banal in comparison with the rich and disturbing and ultimately inexhaustible conversation that was occurring in my office, but also, and much more important, because of the bad faith involved.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

All you need to do to generate a bitcoin wallet is to generate a large random number, and pretty much anything can do that.” Right now you are probably wondering why we’d give a machine such rights. Because we could program it to provide the cheapest and most efficient service possible, Hearn’s car would be focused on maximizing productivity and surviving, not building up a fat pile of retained earnings to spend on McMansions and trips to the Bahamas. It could keep its profit margins superthin and its prices low. That said, if it brought in more revenue than expenses, the car could be programmed to “have children,” as Hearn puts it, investing its excess bitcoins in new driverless cars that would “inherit” a clone of its software program.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration