Green Building | February 16, 2012 |
Big Mac Mansion: Worst of the Worst Mega Mansions Revealed
by Ziggy
For some reason, having an utterly bloated, massive “home” still appeals to some class of individuals. Mansions, they may call them, but they look and sound more like hugely oversized hotels and fortresses than anything else.
The Wall Street Journal has a feature on some of the latest mega mansions built by the armies of the ultra-wealthy. Now that you’ve seen beautiful, personal, and ecological tiny houses, feast your eyes on the exact extreme opposite: the massive, 25-50,000 square foot funnels of energy and resources that they call mansions of the modern day.
Hedge-fund manager Cliff Asness is building a 25,900-square-foot, Colonial-style home with an indoor swimming pool and tennis court in Greenwich, Conn., according to permits and other town records. Nearby, a 31,500-square-foot mansion is being built for Lee Weinstein, founder of data-center concern Xand, with 15 bathrooms (plus additional powder rooms), a 2,500-square-foot master suite and a basement with a theater, wine cellar, juice bar, dance studio and sauna, records show. Twenty miles away, in Westport, Conn., Melissa and Doug Bernstein, whose Melissa & Doug company makes educational children’s toys, are creating a compound of more than 30,000 square feet with a stand-alone ice-cream parlor, plans show. The main house alone is 29,500 square feet and includes a gym partially covered by glass; there’s also a guest cottage, pool cabana and rec-room-and-garage building.
It’s hard to know what to say about all of this, other than: wow. What a phenomenal waste of resources and energy (not to mention, money). It’s actually embarrassing just to know that stuff like this exists in the world.
Need I mention all of the energy needed to maintain, heat, and cool a structure such as this, in addition to all of the other resources that get sucked up in the process?
And by the way, I doubt there is anything home-like about these 30,000+ square foot buildings! Sustainable, this is not.
Reprinted with permission from Sustainablog
Reddit
Digg
Stumble
ShareThis
Comments By Readers
I also want to thank you for going through the tolubre and posting this.I personally see this data and draw a different conclusion than you yes, there are wider swings in the price per square foot in the first 3 months of 2009 vs 2006, but I *do* believe that the average is significant.To me, the measure of a good tool is whether it seems to validate the best of your personal experiences. Price per square foot, while as you say, is imperfect, is the the most *single* metric that can be used objectively.As you pointed out, there are lots of subjective things which make homes different but they are not good for *objective* statements. So the best thing, as a researcher you can do, is try to find the most useful *objective* measurements and then compare them to your *subjective* reality and see if they are good predictors.Looking back over the history of sales by square foot by zipcode, so you are roughly comparing comparable neighborhoods vs. a diverse area like Pasadena, you can see that the trends of price per square foot correlate quite strongly in terms of peaks and valleys to the actual prices that the *same* house sold for.I use propertyshark.com to do my analysis of that it has price per square foot by zipcode going back to the 1980s and it's very useful for tracking where we are, time-wise, in terms of housing prices.As someone who has time and patience, I believe it is possible, and wise, for me to attempt to purchase near the 2-3 year time period where housing prices per square foot hit bottom in my desired zipcodes. Given that most housing cycles have a period of about 20 years (10 years top to bottom), I think being within 2-3 years is acceptable error . By my calculations looking at price per square foot, we have just passed the maximum value of housing by about 2 years. Using history as a guide, we're about 8 years away from the bottom.But I'm not content just hiding away for 8 years and hoping my analysis is correct I like to keep tabs on the market and make sure that it's still trending the way I predicted, and so far, $ per square foot within a zipcode has proven to be quite accurate.I know you're a busy guy, but perhaps you can do that same analysis but restrict it just to 91104, but widen the time period from 3 months to 6 months. I think perhaps you'll see less variation in the average price per square foot.
Post Your Comment