Trend in housing: McMansions vs Inner City living. Plus, bus tours to repo houses in DC 'burbs

[Stinky The Clown]

I heard two real estate stories on the local allnewz radidio today.

In the DC suburbs, one can take a bus tour of prepossessed McMansions. It is being operated by some financial/real estate service company I never heard of. (A good name of them would be Blooduckers'R'Us)

The other one is an emerging trend. Aging Boomers are opting to sell the house in the 'burbs in favor of a close in urban house (Eastern, urban row houses are a hot item). McMansions, on the other hand, are a glut on the market. Boomers are the ones who can afford them, but who don't want them. The prediction is the McMansions, by 2020, will have been sold to investors and converted to multifamily housing.

[Selatius]

1. I think the future trend is for suburbs to wilt due to increasingly high energy costs.

People will either live in the countryside close to work and where the living costs are low, or they will try to live close to their city jobs in order to ease off on losses incurred by gas prices and try to avoid the unpleasant gridlock. It's all speculative on my part, I admit, but it seems the current situation cannot be long sustained with extremely high energy prices in terms of not just long drives to your place of work but also in terms of heating or cooling your home, especially if the home is relatively large and expansive.

[Stinky The Clown]

4. They cited energy costs as one reason (of many) for the return to the city.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

2. Really just another reliving of the Gilded Age

When those monstrous Victorian houses were built because it was good to flaunt your wealth with conspicuous consumption.
Then those houses became too large and too expensive to run for most people and they were divided into apartments.

No reason why the same thing shouldn't happen with McMansions. There will be the first zoning variance requests which will be met with outrage and denials, and then, eventually it will happen. Probably, the owners will begin designing "in-law" suites which will effectively be income apartments.

[dragonlady]

3. Interview with a speaker on this subject, Monday

Monday, March 3, 10 a.m. (Central), repeated at 10 p.m. on Wisconsin Public Radio
Listen live: http://wpr.org/webcasting/live.cfm (Ideas Network)

According to Kathleen Dunn’s guest, after ten, the sub-prime crisis
is just the tip of the economic iceberg. He says fundamental changes
in American life may turn today’s suburban McMansions into tomorrow’s
tenements.Guest: Christopher B. Leinberger, Visiting Fellow, the
Brookings Institution. Professor, Urban Planning, the University of
Michigan. Author, “The Next Slum?” (March issue, The Atlantic
Monthly)

[Stinky The Clown]

5. Wow, that sounds as if it could be the basis of the radidio story.