Category Archives: Housing

About those McMansions…

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Credit my cousin, a professor at Boise State, for flagging a website that presents an architectural critique of McMansions (with a touch of humor thrown in for good measure).

“Worst of McMansions” describes itself this way: “If you love to hate the ugly houses that became ubiquitous before (and after) the bubble burst you’ve come to the right place.”

Kahala has more than its fair share of these places, which we’re reminded of every morning as we walk past dozens of out of place McMansions.

Here are the basic McMansions 101 lessons.

McMansions 101

McMansions 101 #1: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture?

McMansions 101 #2: McMansion Front Entries

McMansions 101 #3: Columns

Outside Reading:

Socioeconomic Reasons (Read: Income Inequality): Let Them Eat McMansions

Environment: Big Houses are Not Green

There’s a lot here to read and digest.

And even better, there are plans for more. Here’s a list of planned “future posts” that I found by clicking on the “Archive” link and nosing around. What fun this promises!

Future Posts
I’ve been getting a lot of messages (mostly from anons) about posts I should do, etc.

This is a curated blog, which means that the posts are already planned, and are scheduled for weekly publication. To avoid clogging up my inbox even more (though I do love each and every one of you!), here is a list of upcoming Sunday articles/posts in order:

(Note: Blog Specials are posts that have a similar scale to “McMansions 101: What Makes A McMansion Bad Architecture?)

1.) Mansion vs McMansion: Why All Big Houses Are Not McMansions

Blog Special: A Curated Collection of Big Houses That Don’t Suck
2.) McMansions vs The Environment: A Story of Conspicuous Consumption
3.) Not Just Aesthetics: Why McMansions Are Bad Architecture Remix
4.) McMansions 101: Windows
4.5) McMansions 101: The Roof

Blog Special: McMansion Hell CliffNotes: Anatomy of a McMansion – Exteriors

5.) Of Vaulted Ceilings and Jacuzzi Tubs: a Comprehensive Guide to McMansion Interior Architecture
6.) A Field Guide to the Dated: How You Can Tell a House Was Built & Designed in the 1980s
7.) The Joneses Ruined The Neighborhood: How McMansions Destroy the Continuity of Our Communities

Blog Special: A Brief History of the McMansion

8.) A Machine For Pretending to Live In: McMansions, Speculative Building, and the Great Recession
9.) A Field Guide to the Dated: How You Can Tell a House Was Designed & Built in the 1990s
10.) A Post-Recession Retrospective: McMansions since 2010
11.) Gated Communities: McMansions, the Suburbs, and Discrimination
12.) A Field Guide to the Dated: How You Can Tell a House Was Designed & Built in the 2000s.
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New analysis looks at San Francisco housing costs

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Here’s a great article about a very innovative bit of digging into the causes of high housing prices in San Francisco (“A guy just transcribed 30 years of for-rent ads. Here’s what it taught us about housing prices“).

The article, by Michael Andersen, tries to summarize a detailed analysis in a blog post published over the weekend by Eric Fischer.

Read through Andersen’s summary, then wade through some or all of Fischer’s original.

It’s really very interesting to see the data for housing and rents charted over a long period of time. These data allowed Fischer to calculate how changes in employment or rates of new construction would impact rents in the city.

Here’s Fischer’s own conclusion:

San Francisco is an expensive city because it is an affluent city with a growing population and no easily available land for development. Sonja Trauss is right that building more housing would reduce rents of both high- and low-end apartments. Tim Redmond is right that building enough housing to make much of a dent in prices would change the visual character of most streets, although the result could be more like Barcelona than like the Hong Kong that he fears. The unsettled question is which of these is the higher priority.

Building enough housing to roll back prices to the “good old days” is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.

In the long run, San Francisco’s CPI-adjusted average income is growing by 1.72% per year, and the number of employed people is growing by 0.326% per year, which together (if you believe the first model) will raise CPI-adjusted housing costs by 3.8% per year. Therefore, if price stability is the goal, the city and its citizens should try to increase the housing supply by an average of 1.5% per year (which is about 3.75 times the general rate since 1975, and with the current inventory would mean 5700 units per year). If visual stability is the goal instead, prices will probably continue to rise uncontrollably.

Andersen boils it down to a couple of simple sentences:

For the love of god, keep adding homes. Keep adding homes so things don’t get any worse and you’re not trapped in a lose-lose-lose shitstorm like San Francisco.

You can download Fischer’s data if you want to mess with the numbers yourself.

San Francisco vote puts spotlight on vacation rentals

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Voters in San Francisco will have their say on Proposition F, a ballot issue that would attempt to clamp down on short-term vacation rentals. The public debate over the measure, which is widely known as the “Airbnb Initiative,” mirrors the debates here in Honolulu over transient vacation rentals. Despite the focus on Airbnb, the new restrictions would also hit property owners who rent through VRBO, HomeAaway, and other services.

If approved, the initiative would not established a ban on short-term rentals, but would put a cap of 75 rental days per year for residential properties, and add reporting requirements.

The Los Angeles Times has a good story today reviewing the pros and cons of the initiative (“San Francisco residents to vote on contentious Prop. F targeting Airbnb“).

The argument in favor of Proposition F is grounded in the belief that short-term rentals hurt the city’s already limited housing supply. Rents in San Francisco have already skyrocketed, with the median price of a one-bedroom apartment tipping into $4,000 a month. If homeowners can make more money renting out their units weeks at a time, why bother with long-term tenants?

Opponents say the reporting requirements would be too intrusive, and the 75-day limit would do nothing to address the housing crisis.

Airbnb has reportedly pumped more than $8 million into the campaign against Proposition F, and deployed a high-powered political strategist.

For those of us far from the battleground, the LA Times also provided a concise summary of the issues (“Everything you need to know about San Francisco’s Airbnb ballot measure“).

Whatever the outcome, political lessons learned in this campaign will undoubtedly inform the ongoing political fights over vacation rentals here and across the country.