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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

This is not only "first world problems", but 1% first world problems. Well, maybe 5%: given

> For their retirement in a suburb of Asheville, N.C., Ben and Valentina Bethell spent about $3.5 million in 2009 to build their dream home: a roughly 7,500-square-foot, European-style house with a commanding view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Put $3.5m into https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-sta... and you find that they are at least in the 96.5 percentile. (They are unlikely to have mortgaged it, as most lenders won't lend past retirement for obvious reasons)

The house is 700 (seven hundred) square meters. By comparison, London is banning the construction of "mega homes" over 150m2 in an attempt to prevent hypergentrification by oligarchs. These people in the article are the wealthy who haven't noticed that the ladder has fallen away behind them leaving nobody to buy their mansion.

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I don't get why you'd want to build an enormous house for your retirement? If anything, I long for the day my kids leave and I can move to a "simpler" place where I don't need to worry about, or pay for, maintainnig a detatched house.

What does a rich older couple do in 7500sq ft/700sq m? I'd run out of ideas for rooms after about 200 sq m, and then I'm left to clean the remaining 500 sq m. anyway...

Servants...

What does a rich older couple do in 7500sq ft/700sq m

Tools

I like your style!

So much making could be done. I'm in a ~4000sqft home right now and all I really want is a workshop with and office. I'd downsize to almost nothing if I could detach from the house and do stuff and thing.

How do you not have space for a workshop and an office in 4000 sqft?

Well you can't expect someone to displace the third dining room with a workshop can you?

A house won’t support the weight of a 2 ton milling machine. Need a detached building with concrete pad.

My grandmother is living alone at the moment in a house where she and her husband raised 4 boys, each with their room and a bathroom for the children at the first floor and a bedroom, an office, a kitchen and a living room at floor level. There's also a basement with a parking space for the car and three rooms and a laundry room. And it's surrounded by a 0.35 acres garden.

Yet, it's cheaper to live in the empty house than renting something smaller or getting into a elder facility care house.

Staying in the home you own and have raised your family in makes sense (my own grandmother is in the same situation). The article is not about that, it's about people who decide to move to gigantic "dream homes" as they reach retirement age, and apparently we're supposed to feel bad that they have a hard time selling them for more than they built them.

It's about being stuck with something inadequate.

My last kid is leaving for college in less than 2 months, and I'm right there with you. I need a place big enough for me, and for the visit of kids. (And hopefully, grandkids?) But that's nowhere near 700 sq m.

To be honest, I didn't even need 700 sq m to raise kids in. Some people are just so rich that enormous homes like that make sense to them. But then they are so out of touch that they don't realize that very few people even want lives like that.

For the imperial folks, 700 sq m is about 7500 sq ft. That's big.

It's tough for me to imagine using that much space, it's just going to accumulate dust. But then again, the people building houses that big probably just hire someone to dust it for them.

Right there with you. We sold our 1800sqft single-family for a 1500sqft townhome shortly after the kid flew the nest. And we still have two bedrooms that are seldom used (one is a guest room, used 3-4x/year, the other is an office used never, except by the dog).

My wife and I have a 2k square foot, 3 bedroom house, along with a kid (11 years) and a dog. (We recently moved there from the city) We're trying to figure out what we're going to do with all that space when kiddo is gone. Even though that's a way off, the likely plan is to downsize to a 2 bed in the city.

We looked at condos. But the monthly fees in our area were high enough to make the economics unfavorable.

By all means, downsize. Every older person I see who doesn't, ends up living in a borderline hoarder situation.

It's easier for some people to blame others and hold on to nostalgic knick-knacks, then maintain good relationships.

awww.. what kind of job does the dog have?

Hard to tell given the number of industries that allow Woof From Home these days.

CFO.

Since he works in an office, I'm assuming the job is white collar.

I'm not saying it's reasonable, but I think these people are designing their house for peak capacity, not average. people with these kinds of houses might fly their entire extended family out for holidays (or several of their friend's families). they don't necessarily care that the place is empty most of the year; it's probably not their only house anyway.

obviously they hire people to maintain the place.

The couple in the Asheville home said their only son visits once a year. They aren't flying anyone out.

1. As an investment to pass down

2. As a status symbol

3. If you have kids (and grand kids), you want a place to host them all at the same time (and this location happens to be popular with the kids...)

They eventually came to the realization that they want a smaller place though...

Exactly! The goal would be to find a newish small house that you could buy. I would not want to clean/maintain a house that big when I am retired and should be working on my relaxation techniques.

If you can afford to have staff, you get to live in what amounts to be your own private world, completely disconnected. This is the end result of the dream of an individualistic society. Alternately, you can afford to have basically all your personal "village" living in the same spot with you - close friends, family, etc. This usually works out mainly if all your income is passive.

For the families in the story, the problem is they can't get rid of homes that are uncomfortably big. Definitely a 1%-ish problem (hell, a .1% problem. I would have plenty of use for more space but I simply can't afford it in London).

However, there's another problem here, one for the rest of us — The site used for a single-family 700sqm home could've been used for something denser, that would've lowered housing costs for everybody else.

> However, there's another problem here, one for the rest of us — The site used for a single-family 700sqm home could've been used for something denser, that would've lowered housing costs for everybody else.

That's not really relevant in this case. All of the neighborhoods mentioned are low density distant suburbia. There are few jobs nearby and little incentive for growth there for working people. Housing costs are already pretty low for normal-sized houses in this area.

The US is huge and most of it has very low density. Unfortunately, with the transition to a service economy, automated agriculture, and the outsourcing of most manufacturing, fewer and fewer jobs exist outside of urban centers.

So you get insane housing costs in the increasingly few areas where there are lots of jobs, meanwhile other areas just languish. For the price I paid for my small Cape Cod house here in Seattle, in the small town I grew up in, I could buy a 4,500 square foot 5 bedroom / 5 bathroom mansion on a lake with a pool, two kitchens, study, game room, theater, etc. I just couldn't find a job there that would let me afford it.

Same. I'm looking at buying here in ~2021, and I'm looking at houses that are ~half the size of the one I grew up in on ~half the land for 2x the price. Shortly after I moved here I rented a 450 square foot condo that sold last fall for around the current value of the house I grew up in (2800 square feet, 1 acre, creek out back).

That said, those exurb mcmansions (particularly those featured in the OP) do push the boundaries of the wildland urban interface, and while their lack of density might not have the same impact on housing prices that you see in urban areas, they more or less have the same environmental impact.

While 700 square meters is indeed absurd for any family, 150 square meters seems a bit limiting. There are reasonable use-cases for houses larger than that. A living room, a kitchen, three bedrooms and an office will be hard to eke out of that much space.

The justification is pretty idiotic: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/13/mega-homes-banne...

50% higher than the average? OK, but what if you have above average needs? (Four kids, live in grandparents, etc.) There are plenty of "real people" who derive legitimate benefit from more than 150 square meters.

Ah well. My city has its share of idiot housing policies, but at least this isn't one of them. We are buying a 300 square meter house in a few days, and it feels like it'll be just about right for our needs.

Yeah, it would be better to only give zoning approval to projects that can meet certain density requirements.

I would hardly call a 150m2 home a "mega home", even in London.

Apparently, the average home in the jurisdiction of Westminster council is 100m²: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/13/mega-homes-banne...

There's also the issue that house prices are insane:

> Earlier this year, the council banned a 1,590 square metre, £40m, mega-home

1600m^2 is ~17,000ft^2. That's...huge.

> They are unlikely to have mortgaged it, as most lenders won't lend past retirement for obvious reasons

You can't deny a loan due to age in the U.S. It's specifically forbidden by federal law.

you can deny a loan due to the applicant not being employed though, right?

Last time I bought a house, being an employee was a requirement (in the US, post 2008). I had a good job and plenty of income for the loan, but since my job at the time was as a contractor they wouldn't lend me anything unless I'd been a contractor for at least several (5 IIRC) years.

No need to deny it. Just make the terms and conditions unreasonable.

Yes, but you can deny a loan for not having steady source of income. That's what retirement usually means. It refers to whether you are working, not how old you are.

It's also not true. Lenders don't give a shit who they lend to so long as the loan qualifies for insurance by the government or can be sold to a GSE.

I mean, not really. I knew plenty of people buying new mcmansions on credit when their household income wasn’t above 80k. Many many Americans over leveraged themselves by buying up huge properties with no down payment.

> McMansion is a pejorative term for a large "mass-produced" dwelling

The subjects of the article:

> Ben and Valentina Bethell spent about $3.5 million in 2009 to build their dream home: a roughly 7,500-square-foot, European-style house with a commanding view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

> Robin and David Saltman moved from New Jersey to Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., where they spent more than a year custom-building their dream house with a pool on the ocean.

> George and Diana Hambleton […] selected the materials for the roughly 4,200-square-foot house, including reclaimed barn wood and Wisconsin flagstone.

The title of the article is literally: "A Growing Problem in Real Estate: Too Many Too Big Houses."

Since mcmansions are large (as you said), I think they are relevant to the discussion.

Masklinn kind of has a point. Clearly, the subjects of this article are not "mcmansion" people.

The McMansion isn't mass produced just ugly.

They're talking about multi-million dollar homes in the article. Even at the absolute height of the housing bubble craziness in 2007-2008 nobody was getting approved for a $3.5M house on an $80k salary.

People use two different definitions of "McMansion", to mean wildly different things.

To some people, a "McMansion" is any single family house they happen to dislike. Those are the kind of things working-class people buy on credit. (Homes in the 1200sqft to 2400sqft range). These are basically cheap disposable housing, they are popular because all people have to have somewhere to live, and this is usually the cheapest possible housing available that's still slightly comfortable to inhabit.

This article is not talking about those. This article is talking about actual McMansions or just real Mansions, homes in the 5000sqft to 8000sqft+ range. They're like 2x to 4x bigger than a typical house (even when using American sizes for 'typical house'). No regular person owns these, you have to be entirely in the "wealthy" category to even begin to look at them.

And done the right way (self build) that sort of high quality home can be more cost-effective (depends how much you do your self)

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