McMANSIONS ARE DEAD! YAYYYYYY!

Living in Huntsville, Alabama, all you see are McMansions. When you are
first surrounded by them, after living in Ventura, California, the land of
the 1500 square foot homes, you think, "Wow, look at all these beautiful
homes! There's places for kids to play. This is paradise!"

But if you've ever lived in a 2000 plus square foot home you start to
realize, YOU'VE GOT A LOT OF SPACE TO FILL!

I went into several McMansions in the South and noticed...people fill them
up with crap! Superfluous stuff. At some point you can't hold on to junk,
that's what they invented garage sales for. Oh, and that's another thing:
nobody has garage sales! Saturday mornings people are squeezing in that
extra visit to their favorite mega-church.

The real estate site Trulia and several developers across the nation say
that the era of the McMansion is over. I can't believe that in the 1960's
the average home size was 1200 square feet, in the 1980's it was 1710 square
feet, and by the 2000's it was 2330 square feet!

No wonder we are getting so heavy as a nation, we've had room to grow!

So now people are scaling back. Square footage is going back down under
2000. People need to downsize and hopefully this will continue so we stop
being so wasteful. We Americans have a natural tendency to be wasteful.
Actually, it's more of a human trait. You go to countries that don't
monitor this stuff and it's shocking what they waste, what goes into their
water systems, what goes into their air. I live in a town now where you
have 3 trash cans: one that goes to the landfill and the other 2 go to
recycling and green waste. AND THEY CLOSELY MONITOR IT! If you mess up and
put green waste in the recycling can you get fined at least 80 bucks! But
that's the kind of self-monitoring we need to do. Mother Nature doesn't
take too kindly to wasteful humans. She'll shake us off like a dog after a
bath.

Relocating from Alabama to Alameda (county) I have seen a lot of differences
that make sense to me now, and I'm glad for one that the McMansions are
disappearing. Next blog I'll tell you more about the trip my wife and I
made cross-country in her car as we moved to Alabama almost three years ago.