Posted on 04/06/2008 6:50:49 PM PDT by Santa Fe_Conservative
LEESBURG, Virginia (Reuters) - Million-dollar fixer-upper for sale: five bedrooms, four baths, three-car garage, cavernous living room. Big holes above fireplace where flat-screen TV used to hang.
The U.S. housing crisis has come to McMansion country.
Just as the foreclosure crisis has hollowed out poorer neighborhoods, "for sale" signs are sprouting in upscale developments so new they don't show up on GPS navigation screens.
Poor people weren't the only ones who took out risky, high-interest loans during the housing boom. The sharp increase in housing costs -- and the desire to live in brand-new, spacious houses with modern features -- led many affluent buyers to take out loans they couldn't afford.
"People had in their head, 'I need a mud room, I need giant columns, I need a media room, and I'm going to do anything to get it,"' said Robert Lang, co-director of Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute, a research organization that focuses on real estate and development.
The crisis has hit especially hard here in Loudoun County, Virginia, where upscale
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
de rigeur in real mansions.
I see them as overgrown tract shacks. Many went up so fast they cannot possibly be well built. These people are probably lucky to get out before their house falls down around their ears.
Other than nuclear anihilation, I don’t know when Man will be leaving earth anytime soon...
I have to say though, it wasn’t until I did some historic-house restoration, and then I visited Switzerland and Germany—countries with very strict building codes—that I realized how very cheap our modern residential construction is. Sometime in the 1970s I think builders started to get away with building trash in the USA.
In Germany, and especially Switzerland, the houses you see being put up are MORE solidly built than they were 200 years ago. Extremely sturdy houses, with solid wood walls, red concrete-tile roofs large beams—all the kinds of things one rarely finds even in custom homes in America today.
Clearly builders in the USA figured out that Americans are constantly on the move, so just slap up houses that will keep people happy for 5 years or so, and, by then they’re long gone. A typical freshly built Swiss or German house will definitely be here in 200 years, when their American counterparts will be long ago condemned and bulldozed.
Well . . . you're partly right. There are fewer and fewer redneck areas in Loudoun these days, since so many ramblers (as we call them around here) have been bought up and bulldozed for the big tasteless McMansions. Some still exist, certainly, but the rising cost of real estate has lured some crappy-rambler to sell up and move, while high real estate taxes have driven more owners out.
If people truely have money, are successful, or tasteful they usally live closer to or within DC.
Mmm, there I'd have to differ with you. The only people who have to live closer to DC are those who are unfortunate enough to have to commute to work there. If you're really successful and have money, you don't do the commuting thing. You live in the quiet corners of Fauquier, Rappahannock, and Clarke County. You might live in The Plains, or in the parts of Middleburg that are within Loudoun, or in Upperville, Millwood, Delaplane, Little Washington, Flint Hill, Sperryville. You might even buy down in Orange, Culpeper, or Charlottesville. You abhor the crowding and tackiness of the close-in suburbs with their traffic jams full of BMWs. And you want to be close to a good hunt. So no, you don't live close in if you have real money.
I watched an old Italian craftsman put one down once. A really amazing piece of work. It ain’t like laying carpet!
As far as McMansions go, I could not live in one of those subdivision and housing associations that take away freedoms. I prefer a smaller place and more land.
But, who is going to buy it, and for what price?
Those on rt. 7 are exactly and precisely the ones the wife and I were laughing at tonight.
I saw it happen in the mid-eighties when there was a credit crunching downturn in RE.
I agree - it's borrowing what you want and pretending that you actually own it that is rather irksome. ;)
West of Leesburg now? Man. I lived up in Nova twenty years ago for a couple years (Fairfax proper, then Vienna, then Herndon, finally Oakton) and back then, Leesburg was the edge of the universe for all the city types. You might as well have printed Loudoun County street maps with “HERE BE DRAGONS” on the western half and just have 7 end at its intersection with US 15. To them, western Loudoun was the home of the Great Unwashed. The extension on 267 west of Dulles didn’t exist, and Sterling was the “hot” place to live.
I remember the first time I ever drove through Franklin Farms in Fairfax County. It was nothing but four-bedroom McMiniMansions on half-acre postage-stamp lots. THOUSANDS of them, it seemed like, and no trees to break the view of endless crap houses to the horizon. As somebody who grew up on 75 acres of woods and fields in rural Virginia, to see an endless expanse of sterile suburbia like that just felt...well, weird and wrong, actually. But this was the late ‘80s, where developers in Fairfax and Loudoun never saw a hillside they didn’t want to strip, grade off, and plant a bunch of townhouses on.
}:-)4
lots of good comments here
Yep.
I drive past these houses every day on my way to work from West Virginia, where I have a beautiful home that would cost $300,000 if it were in Loudon county. Sad thing is: these people weren’t just living beyond their means with expensive houses. They have a Hummer and a Jag and some other SUV in the driveway, incredible landscaping . . . but inside . . . no furniture. They only cared what things looked like from the outside. I have little sympathy for them.
Liberal moonbat speculators who don’t believe in Actual Work spent the better part of the last 10 years ginning up a housing bubble. Now we all have to deal with the runinous consequences.
It’s amazing how many ways these scumbags have found ways to undermine this country and its economy (global warming myth, wealth redistribution, etc.) It’s more evidence, as if it were needed, that “liberalism” and “criminality” are different words for the same phenomenon.
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