Image from a great article that assesses how the Cheasepeake Bay lives up to its vision set 20 years ago.
Anyone who's driven through post-war neighborhoods (Levittown, USA-types) and gawked at the McMansions on little lots, I thought this NYTimes article nicely outlined how the current economic environment encourages out-of-scale home improvements. This situation implies that people aren't just buying up land willy-nilly (they are in fact conscientious about preserving open space and farmland) but they ARE ignoring the fact that their 3-car garages containing 3 cars are burdening the very environment that they hope to save.
1.31.2005
Why houses get bigger
Posted by Shin-pei at 10:26 AM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Hard as it is to believe, using "Levittown" and "McMansions" in the same sentence is actually an insult to Levittown. As Ken Jackson wrote in Crabgrass Frontier (and I cited it in my own book), the Levitts built houses that were the size of small apartments -- 750 square feet, on 6,000 square foot lots. By comparison, along New Canaan, Connecticut's, McMansion Row (Oenoke Ridge Road), the new houses themselves are 9,000 square feet and the lots are two or three acres.
www.thissphere.blogspot.com
Undoubtedly, we are gobbling more land than ever before. but I thought the story was about people attempting to stay in their own neighborhoods, though they were hoping to add 1 to 2 more stories and build the house out. Same lot, much bigger house. The collective sense of scale has shifted dramatically, I think.
Yes, of course. I wasn't commenting on the article per se, but rather on the reference to Levittown. If sense of scale and efficiency of land use are important, Levittown is probably better than McMansions. And of course Levittown houses themselves have been considerably altered and enlarged, changing whatever sense of scale the Levitts imposed and making original, unaltered Levittown houses rare.
Having grown up on Staten Island, by the way, and having seen it change in character from a series of discrete small "towns" to one large sprawling suburb after the opening of the Verrazano Bridge, it's hard for me to get too worked up about houses being expanded there. It's already too awful for words.
Yes, definitely, Levittowns are better than McMansions. You're right - so few of the original houses are intact. Even in beautiful Santa Monica, Arts and Crafts houses (which are a "tiny" 2,500 sq ft) are being torn down now for bigger houses (9,000 sq ft). It was hard for me to understand why people need so much space, and at what I consider, such a high expense. But I've always lived in apartments.
Post a Comment