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 ...
I live here. My wife and I just went out to dinner tonight, driving by the McMansions on rt. 7, laughing our heads off. They are simply ridiculous and atrocious in appearance. And that double-gable look, with the HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE white deck running the length of the back of the house is gonna look REAL dated in about an hour and a half from now. When you look at the stately and gorgeous all brick federals built here in the 20 and 30 sitting on an acre or more of land, which could be had for less than half what a mcmansion goes for, well... There’s a sucker born every minute.
they demonstrate the classic syndrome of “champagne taste on a beer income.”
Part out the fancy plumbing and countertops to sell in India and Eastern Europe? Burn the wood in a regen plant?
I’m always afraid, when dealing with this subject, of sounding like a little liberal maggot — staring down his nose at “Americans in their materialistic society, and their conspicuous consumption” (just think of that HORRIBLE 60s song “Pleasant Valley Sunday”), but here in richville USA, Loudoun County, I see thousands and thousands of people who believe it is a felony to drive something other than a $60,000 suv, a BMW, or a Mercedes, they must have a boat and they must have a real ugly McMansion. It’s a tad revolting.
"And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same".
It’s just the culture of the area. It’ll change.
Developers are really in a race to the bottom on street names. ;)
The house next door to me was foreclosed, and sitting empty for 3 years. The original asking price was $350,000, it sold for half of that.
New owners just moved in. I haven’t met them yet, all I know is they have a pit bull bitch and 7 puppies.
I almost wonder if that’s a misprint — it’s REALLY horrible as a name, unless it’s the name of a race horse, perhaps. That’s exactly what it sounds like, anyway.
I suspect a goodly number of the McMansions in trouble are owned by “liberal maggots,” don’t you??
God, I hope so.
It is named after the Kentucky Derby-winning horse - it’s just profoundly stupid. ;)
“a pit bull bitch and 7 puppies.”
Oh, dear.
I am going to wear my arm out patting myself on the back for that one! I KNEW it sounded like a race horse!
This is a funny, yet sad, thread.
Make them into poor houses and debtor's prisons.
If people were free to conduct business enterprise, they'd for sure go to some great uses. But expensive and cumbersome regulation makes perfectly lovely business enterprise opportunities rot like unpicked fruit. Disgusting.
I live in an area with multi-million dollar "McMansions," and I often walk in the nice gated neighborhoods. Most of them are very custom and lived in, though there's a good amount that look unoccupied, and these places are VAST. I can easily imagine these enormous, ridiculous homes 40 years into the future, sitting empty or run-down. I like to fantasize that a wonderful wild sense of commerce is unleashed because the places have such great potential for all kinds of enterpising things. Bed & Breakfast places, homey pet-sitting services, boarding houses, small personalized rest and care facilities for old folks -- they could be so many great things if the government would STAND ASIDE.
This article is rather deceitful. (But it’s Reuters, so you don’t expect much.)
In Loudon County the vast majority of homes going into foreclosure are those that were overcrowded dorm homes for illegal aliens. Period.
What you are seeing is a common deception increasingly being used by the MSM and the Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street Journal as a way of deflecting attention away from the crux of he mortgage problem, subprime loans in vast numbers to the millions of illegal aliens (30-40 million is the real count) whose invasion over a few years made a lucrative demand for housing.
The McMansion foreclosures are insignificant and are in the same proportion of defaults or sluggish sales of these expensive homes as in past recessions. Many of these homes, contrary to the tone of this article, are NOT into foreclosure - they are homes that were too expensive and never sold as rich or proto-rich customers faded away with the slowing economy.
I found a house in Clarke Co (on Mount Weather) that I REALLY wanted. First one I had seen that would get me to sell this dump in Falls Church.
The CC place was a 200 year old stone farmehouse, on 100 acres.
They were asking 1.4M for it though, so I walked away.
Sigh.
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