McMansion Mania

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At the far end of the megahouse spectrum are the mansions that rival the temples to commerce built for '20s-era business barons: Bill Gates' $50 million, 40,000-square-foot palace, for example, or Amway distributor Terry McEwen's 25,000-square-foot estate. "There's more wealth in big cities today than there has been since the turn of the century," says Pat Ritz, president of Oregon Title Company, who also helps write quarterly reports on housing trends. "People don't want to just get in the bathtub with it. They want new homes, country estates with whips and spurs. That's what megahouses are all about.

Bill Schweinfurth, chief operating officer of Vedder Community Management, a mobile-home-park management company based in Burbank, California, and his wife, Maggie, are a typical megahouse family. After moving to Portland from Los Angeles two years ago, the Schweinfurths built a 4,200-square-foot home on their 2-acre lot off Skyline Boulevard. Admitting that they hardly ever use the living and dining rooms, Maggie Schweinfurth says owning a four-bedroom, five-bathroom home is about the little luxuries space affords. Big closets mean she never has to put away off-season clothes; a second laundry room makes washing a breeze. And the bathrooms? "One for the kids, one for the master bedroom, a powder bath for entertaining, and one for the guest room." The only superfluous not-quite-bathroom, she muses, is off the mud room--the area leading to the backyard. The shower for the dog, she adds, was her husband's idea.

This unabashed materialism makes large homes an easy target for class grievance. The size of the megahouse is especially difficult to stomach given that average U.S. family size continues to decline. Yet a far more complex issue is the relationship between the rise of the megahouse and the decline of affordable housing--dual trends set in motion by gentrification, inequitable housing subsidies, and exclusionary zoning laws. "The people willing to spend the kind of money these mansions cost inflate land values," says Tasha Harmon, an affordable-housing advocate and member of the steering committee of the Coalition for a Livable Future in Oregon. "The people who want to do the right thing--build smaller, more affordable homes--can't afford the price of land."

Consider the striking disparity between housing subsidies for wealthy and low-income households. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an estimated 18 percent of this fiscal year's total housing subsidies will go to households with an average annual income of just under $9,000. By contrast, an estimated 63 percent of total housing subsidies will go to households with an average income of $123,000 or more. Many suburban municipalities also favor large homes; zoning codes in most wealthy suburban neighborhoods establish minimum lot sizes with two-car garages and limit or outlaw smaller houses and multifamily dwellings.

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