McMansions and the New Suburbia

A number of housing trends in Australia and other countries will continue to adversely impact the sustainability of new housing. Perhaps most significant is the trend over the last couple of decades towards significantly larger new homes (a trend which has only just started to reverse, or at least stall, driven by an ageing population and less interest from Generation Y in owning a home according to Cadden, 2011). The average floor area of new homes built in Australia increased by 31 per cent between 1987 and the turn of the century (Brown, 2004). BIS Shrapnel, an economic forecaster, found that the floor space of a ‘typical’ new dwelling in Australia increased from 228 square metres in 1998-99 to 254 square metres in 2003-04. By comparison, during the post-war era, house size was often limited to just 92 square metres (Brown, 2004). This trend is also being observed in the US, where the average new single-family house in the US increased in size from 1,400 square feet to 2,300 square feet between 1970 and 2003 (McGuigan, 2003).

Australia now holds the dubious distinction of having the largest homes in the world on average, with an average floor area of houses and apartments of 214.1 square metres being almost three times the size of those in the UK, 10 per cent bigger than in the US (where average house size has contracted significantly since the global financial crisis) and nine per cent larger than in New Zealand (Cadden, 2011). Australians typically enjoy spacious accommodation, with 87 per cent of lone person households living in a dwelling with two or more bedrooms, and 76 per cent of two-person households having three or more bedrooms, in 2009/10 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012a).

Hawley (2003, para 1) notes that the rationale behind the ‘new suburbia’ is to provide “the biggest house on the smallest block for the lowest price”. Anecdotal evidence also

suggests that developers have sales strategies that persuade people that they will not get a good financial return on a home with less than four bedrooms. Indeed, between 1976 and 2009/10, the proportion of households with four bedrooms increased from 17 per cent to 31 per cent (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012a).

In addition to multiple bedrooms, buyers are also seeking other features which have contributed to the much larger size of houses. As Hawley describes it, they are looking for:

“…four-bedroom, spiral staircase, open-plan kitchen-family-dining-lounge, multiple bathroom, study, games room, rumpus room, big-screen media room, barbecue, spa, multi-garage bigger-is-beautiful-is-better houses” (2003, para 9).

This trend occurs, however, in spite of a national trend for smaller households (that is, a reduced number of house occupants). As illustrated in Figure 4 below, the average Australian household size has been steadily decreasing, from 4.5 persons per household in 1911 to 2.6 persons per household in 2006 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012c), attributed largely to reductions in completed family size and the increase in one person and two person households. In the same period, the number of occupied private dwellings increased from 894,400 to 7.6 million (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012c).

Figure 4 – Average household size, Australia, 1906-2006 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012c)

This trend for large houses with less occupants, coupled with predicted population growth in Australia, particularly in cities, is expected to maintain continued pressure to build new houses. It has been estimated that between 1990 and 2020, the number of occupied residential households will increase by 61 per cent, from six million to almost 10 million, and that total residential floor area will increase by 145 per cent, from 685 million square metres to almost 1,682 million square metres over the same period (Energy Efficient Strategies, 2008). The Australian Bureau of Statistics (2012c) project the number of households will grow to 11.6 million dwellings by 2031, by which time one person

households are projected to comprise 28 per cent of all households, due to the ageing of the population, longer life expectancy of women over men and the delay of marriage.

To cater for the growing demand for more and larger homes, it must be anticipated that urban sprawl, and its associated raft of environmental problems such as dependence on private vehicles and associated air pollution and fossil fuel consumption, will only

continue, unless there is a dramatic shift towards higher density housing and tighter planning controls to prevent this situation. Larger homes require more energy to maintain comfort, particularly given their common tendency to have central heating and cooling and their tendency to have open plan designs, making zoning difficult. Larger areas to light, longer hot water pipes, extensive outdoor lighting and other features all add to their energy use.

It is not just size which is increasing the environmental footprint of the majority of new homes being built. In today’s consumer-oriented society, the home has become a ‘luxury item’, a symbol of status, while the term ‘jewellery’ of the house has also been coined to reflect how homes are now dressed up with the latest ‘mod cons’ such as home theatres and gourmet kitchens (Brown, 2004).

‘McMansions’ (named with reference to the fast food restaurant chain McDonalds, reflecting their mass-produced, almost production-line method of production and the speed with which they are completed), is the nickname often given to these enormous, neo-traditional homes. They are renowned for being extremely large, for typically being built in the newer, outer suburbs of cities (but sometimes replacing older homes in established suburbs), and for featuring a lack of outdoor space and vegetation. Of concern is the fact that, to reduce costs while maintaining size, they have commonly dispensed with features such as eaves, meaning that little shading is provided to the houses and the use of air-conditioners becomes more necessary for the house to be comfortable in the warmer months.

Critics of McMansions are scathing in their descriptions. Tom (2007, para 8) notes that McMansions “have become a shorthand for the evil excesses of consumption”. Few, however, are as evocative as Farrelly (2003), who uses terms such as “heartbreakingly, wrist-slittingly” and “leaden the soul” when writing about these homes. Well-known Australian architect Glenn Murcutt, in describing the north-western sub-divisions of Sydney, referred to “a poverty of spirit and a barrenness of mind” (cited in Smith, 2004).

Nor is criticism confined to aesthetics or the environmental impacts of these homes.

Razer (2005) quotes architecture lecturer Derham Groves’ concern over the potential social consequences of the uniformity of design and its contradiction with the

heterogeneous nature of our culture, saying “It brings to mind images from the movie Edward Scissorhands… Identically flimsy boxes from which people in cars emerge at precisely the same instant.” Such critiques are not new. More than forty years earlier, a similar sentiment (but not about ‘McMansions’, which did not yet exist) was conveyed by Mumford (1961, cited in Short, 1989, p.16), who described:

“A multitude of uniform unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly at uniform

distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, same income, the same age group, witnessing the same

television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mould, manufactured in the central metropolis…a low grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible…an asylum for the preservation of illusion.”