Let them eat McMansions! The 1 percent, income inequality, and new-fashioned American excess

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/13/let_them_eat_mcmansions_the_1_percent_income_inequality_and_new_fashioned_american_exess/



Let them eat McMansions! The 1 percent, income inequality, and new-fashioned American excess
Thomas Frank
Sunday, Apr 13, 2014 07:00 AM EST

My first memorable encounter with what we now call the McMansion came about 1985. I was reclining comfortably under a concrete bridge on what were then the fringes of the Kansas City metro area, drinking beer with alienated friends and (if memory serves) listening to Husker Du’s “Zen Arcade” on a boombox. In the twilight distance, we could see a housing development going up—by which I mean a development of enormous piles, dozens of houses that were all far larger than the postwar ranches and split levels that were then so familiar to us.

Kansas City has always been a significant locale in the history of suburbia, thanks to the heroic labors of a few local developers, and as the ’80s passed I became fascinated with the grandiose turn that sprawl was taking. I drove around, photographing and even walking through the yawning new homes on open-house days. What intrigued me then was the undisguised pretentiousness that accompanied the whole gaudy business. I visited a neighborhood called “Patrician Woods.” I took pictures of houses that seemed to have been designed by Stanford White after a debilitating brain injury. In 1990 I illustrated the second issue of my magazine, The Baffler, with preposterous home designs clipped from a local realtor’s catalog. Har har har.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that these new ostentatious developments were a product not of some epidemic of vulgarity but of the larger economic changes in the world. By this I do not mean that Americans were being swept up in a wave of extraordinary affluence beginning in the 1980s, but rather that one class of Americans was essentially taking its leave of the rest of us. 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 harmonically together. This form of development wants nothing to do with the superficial community-mindedness of the postwar suburb, and the reason the giant house looks the way it does is to inform you of this. Have the security guard slam the gates, please, and the rest of the world be damned.