The Rise And Fall Of The McMansion: An American Story

The McMansion was never a failure of taste. It was a receipt. This is the story of how America built the oversized suburban house by the millions between 1985 and 2006, who paid for it, and why the whole thing collapsed. From Levittown to the 2005 building peak, through the exurban foreclosure crash, into the strange years when houses got bigger after the recession, and finally to the behavioral economics of why a status signal stops working the moment it becomes affordable. A tax code, a zoning map, a roof truss, and four hundred years of conspicuous consumption, all pointing at the same driveway.