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PLANNING WATCH - My Planning Watch columns at CityWatchLA began with a critical series about McMansions in my LA neighborhood, Beverly Grove. Years later, mansionization is still rampant, with at least four under construction at any given moment.
To research these columns, I learned that mansionization is happening over the entire United States. LA is hardly unique, even though the city’s Department of Building and Safety rarely clamps down on houses that are too large, too tall, or which reduce grade by excavating several feet of dirt.
McMansions are also shoddily built and use an enormous amount of energy. To squeeze such a large house and front-facing garage and driveway onto existing lots, McMansions sacrifice open space, landscaping, boulevard trees, and on-street parking. This is why super-sized houses undermine local efforts to address climate change, homelessness, overcrowding, and urban design. Most cities, like Los Angeles, ignore these outcomes because McMansions are so highly profitable. They typically net $500,000 for the investors who finance them and the contractors who build them.
The number of McMansions in Los Angeles is hard to determine because the Department of Building and Safety does not compile mansionization statistics. But there is open data on house demolitions, and my estimate is that around 40,000 older, smaller LA homes have been levelled and replaced by McMansions since the year 2000.
What is happening in LA is occurring in the rest of the United States. Bottom of Form
The end of eviction protections, rising economic inequality and housing prices, high interest rates, and the termination of public housing programs have created overcrowding and homelessness. The widespread demolition of older, smaller houses is an additional factor. Real estate speculators replace them with McMansions, typically three times the size and price of the former homes.
The small percentage of Americans with high incomes have no problem renting luxury apartments or buying these McMansions. In addition, the municipal ordinances to stop mansionization, such as LA’s Baseline Mansionization Ordinance/R-1 variation zones, are filled with loopholes and poorly enforced.
Why is mansionization still happening? Real estate investors and contractors maximize their profits by building, renting, and selling luxury apartments and McMansions to a small, but highly affluent economic strata. This also accounts for new up-zoning laws, such as California’s Senate Bill 9. This legislation allows investors to demolish single-family houses and replace them with two duplexes. Instead real estate speculators opt for more profitable and hassle-free McMansions. They sell them to quick buck artists, who either unload them in two years for tax advantages or rent them to tourists despite LA’s short-term rental ordinance. But there are also other mansionization problems:
- McMansions replace lower-priced homes with expensive housing.
- McMansions do not change population density, only building intensity (building mass per lot). They require enormous amounts of construction materials and energy materials to build and operate. This is why heavily mansionized neighborhoods in Los Angeles have frequent electrical blackouts.
- McMansions become larger because lots zoned for duplexes produce super-sized houses.
- Since McMansions include large, front garages, they encourage Greenhouse Gas-spewing automobile use.
- McMansions are energy hogs. They feature whole house vacuum systems, 24/7 heating and air conditioning, pools, spas, and restaurant-style appliances.
- McMansions pull up housing costs in surrounding areas, pricing existing residents out of housing
How can mansionization be stopped?
Step 1 is better mansionization data. Since nearly all demolished single-family homes are replaced with McMansions, these data are essential. We need long-term citywide data beginning with the year 2000, when LA’s mansionization era began.
Step 2 is new land use regulations and better enforcement, based on LA’s adopted Community Plans, which contain this or similar policies.
“Protect existing stable single family and low density residential neighborhoods from encroachment by higher density residential uses and other uses that are incompatible as to scale, character, or would otherwise diminish quality of life.”
Step 3 is plugging loopholes in existing anti-mansionization ordinances.
Step 4 is copying other cities’ effective anti-mansionization ordinances. For example Beverly Hills has mandatory design review for all proposed homes, including McMansions.
In Los Angeles, for these changes to appear there must be enormous pressure from below on Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council.
(Dick Platkin is a retired LA city planner. He reports on local planning issues for CityWatchLA. He is a board member of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA). Previous columns are available at the CityWatchLA archives. Please send questions to [email protected].)
