McMansion Mania

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These policies, in effect, have made affordable housing obsolete. Demolition, gentrification, and sprawl reduced the number of affordable, low-cost unsubsidized housing units available by 19 percent between 1996 and 1998. Subsidized housing suffered a similar fate. In 1998 alone, 13,000 subsidized units were lost as private landlords quit the project-based Section 8 program in search of higher, market-rate rents. As a result, waiting lists for subsidized housing increased by as much as 25 percent between 1998 and 1999. Today, more than 2 million families wait an average of two and a half years for subsidized housing--seven to ten years in major cities such as New York, Houston, and Los Angeles.

The detrimental effect megahouses have on affordable housing is symptomatic of larger problems of livability in suburbia. If suburban zoning codes encourage megahouses, they also encourage auto-based sprawl and decimation of green space by restricting pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use development. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), a San Franciscoñbased organization that pushes for changes in development policy, puts it this way: "Disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society's built heritage [are] one interrelated community-building challenge."

In the past decade, the relationship between community and public space has become a recurring theme in architecture and urban planning. There is no "third place" in contemporary American life, wrote critic Ray Oldenberg 10 years ago, "no public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work." So sterile is the contemporary subdivision, he wrote, that it "cries out for something as modest as a central mail drop or a little coffee counter at which those in the area might discover one another.

For the rest of this article, read the September-October 1999 issue of Utne Reader.

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