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🏡The wild story of McMansions

Americans have HUGE homes compared to other developed countries — you don’t even need to understand the cursed metric system in this tweet below.

The next biggest homes from the EU are in Cyprus, which has an average home that’s only a bit more than HALF the size of an average American home.

Why are Americans’ homes so damn big? A few reasons.

1. Lots of land: because of this, it’s generally been cheaper and easier to build larger homes compared to other countries. On top of that, for Europe, many of their cities were built centuries ago, so they’re limited on space.
   

2. Booming economy: especially post-World War II, the U.S.’s economy was ripping. Plus, we didn’t have to reconstruct our country from war and bombs like France, Germany, and the U.K. Our economy came out swinging and turned us into a superpower.
   

3. Not like us: maybe because Americans spread out so much from the start, our culture tends to value personal space and homeownership as symbols of success and independence.
   
   We also tend to buy a lot more things than other countries, and you have to put that stuff somewhere!
   
   Many other countries in Europe and around the world also tend to emphasize more communal living and less accumulation of things, which you can tell by their smaller spaces.

4. Car Culture vs. Public Transport: fueled by tons of money from the government and the automobile industry, most of America was built for cars. The government still throws tons of subsidies at building, paving, and maintaining our highways and roads for cars. This meant that we could just keep driving farther out from the city to build bigger and bigger homes, with no limitations imposed by close proximity to public transportation.
   
   In most other developed nations, it’s the opposite — living in cities is more practical and common due to extensive public transportation networks and the high cost of owning and operating a car.
   

5. Racist restrictions on what to build and where: believe it or not, but the first zoning laws were passed in the early 1900s in Berkeley, California, and New York City to keep out minorities from living next door to whites. This was, as they argued, to “maintain the character of the neighborhood and protect property values.”
   
   We’ll get into some more details farther below, but the idea was to make sure only single-family homes that look like this could be built and only for white people:

   

   
   They wanted to prohibit most cities from building apartment homes and big multi-family units (like in this photo below) that would keep housing more affordable, meaning minorities could afford to live there:
   
   

   

So NONE of this would have been possible without *drum roll please*

Racism!

White Flight: After the Supreme Court made the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, we finally got rid of the “separate but equal” B.S.

This meant that segregation was (technically) illegal. But not everybody (cough cough lots of white people) liked this.

The end of segregation scared lots of white people. For the first time, they’d have to live next to Blacks and other minorities, have their kids go to the same schools, and ride the same buses.

So, across the country, from California to Pennsylvania, whites packed their bags and moved out of the cities and surrounding neighborhoods to suburbs.

Why didn’t Blacks move out to the suburbs anyways? 

Like we touched on above, local organizing groups like HOAs and city and county governments had found a way to preserve the suburbs for whites by giving out home mortgages like candy to only white people.

So the whole Millenial joke about how “back in the day our grandparents could buy a home for two blueberries” was really only for white people. Millions of Blacks and minorities were left behind from the housing boom.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 helped end this practice a bit, but local governments and groups found many other ways to maintain segregation.

Just look at some of these old racial covenants that explicitly prohibited selling your home to a minority, especially Blacks —

The TLDR; the U.S. government (from the national to local level) incentivized white people to flee to suburbs by subsidizing their ability to buy a single-family home. They were able to keep it mostly racially white AND have more land. As time went on and most Americans built their wealth upon the value of their home increasing, it became a common idea to move out to a suburb and buy a big house to accomplish the American dream, a symbol of success and American culture.

Still curious?

• Check out city planner Nolan Gray’s awesome book on the origins of America’s housing crisis, Arbitrary Lines

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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.