It's odd how the complaints are never about actual mansions. No, it's only when the middle-class gets bigger houses do we have journalists handwringing endlessly about gauche they are.
McMansions are a perfect expression of this: trying to look bigger and fancier than they are while being extremely cheap in every way that matters, and getting every "fanciness" signal all wrong. They're a common target because plainly-inept pretentiousness is very funny—it's a staple trope in comedy for a reason.
It's not the size of the house per se that draws comment on McMansions. It's the intense and desperate but hopelessly misguided social signaling in their styling.
That's definitely not text-book middle class - which would be closer to the median house - which is less than half that price.
There's not many places you're getting a 4 bedroom clown-house with a clown pool and 5 clown-y bathrooms and a 3-car clown garage for your 3 clown cars for $450k. And if you are, there's very few places this is a new-ish build.
Most of the places you're getting something like this - it's like a 20+ year-old home in Montgomery Alabama or Akron Ohio or something... And usually this was once a nice house that someone renovated in the style of a clown for the McMansion buyer...
You're either considering the average suburban home a McMansion or you think the top 10% is middle class.
In fairness, both of these are common conceptions - but I think they're both worth critiquing.
If wealth were normally distributed, then the top 10% definitely wouldn't be the middle class. However, the way wealth is distributed, the average earner in the top 10% makes about $173K in 2020 dollars. Which is a lot in Louisiana, but not so much in SF or New York.
https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increa...
In New York or LA or The Bay, you're not getting a McMansion for less than $2.5M.
In Louisiana, you're not getting it for less than $800k.
If anything - I think this pushes out who's buying a "real" McMansion probably closer to the top 5%.
It's less affordable given where people live and how much more they cost where people make more money.
Unless we're calling ugly 1800 sqft 3-bedroom suburban development houses "McMansions" - middle class people aren't buying them.
Yeah, I think you're right. I don't think America even has a middle class any more. The insanity of the housing market has really put that in stark contrast.
The same style problems are heavily present in houses down to the high-$300k range around here. Straight-up visual gibberish, and not in the name of some kind of practical improvements as a trade-off—the contrary, if anything.
Best I can tell, this has happened because complex façades and rooflines make a house look bigger. I've done a lot of house shopping over the years, and find that if I apply a McMansion-style-tuned eye to classically-styled houses, my guesstimate of square footage is consistently something like 30-40% low. Houses with a balanced and regular appearance and without a bunch of shit jutting out everywhere for no reason look smaller—by a lot—than a same-size McMansion.
The demographics of people who enjoy writings like McMansion Hell skew much richer than the people living in that style of home. A McMansion style home in the burbs can cost about the same as a mediocre 1-2 bed / 1.5 bath in NYC.
But that said I think there is a valid critique of modern builders and homeowners in 2023. A family member's old home in a neighborhood they have lived in forever had a bunch of new people move in during 2021 and 2022 when interest rates were low. They brought giant lifted trucks that block sidewalks, put trailers and RVs and giant boats all over, tore down old trees to make way for chicken shacks and trampolines and plastic sheds. All of this violated the HOA contract but they know the HOA has a few hundred dollars to its name so they gave it the middle finger. Builders built new houses on odd empty lots that tore up landscape to add long driveways to get behind houses and now giant out-of-place houses overlook the backyards of old 100 year old houses.
Builders don't care. That's why mcmansions exist in the first place. The homeowners don't care either. It's all perfectly legal but something still isn't right.