by Gail Dennehy

Created on: April 16, 2008

In our town, there was a small development of new homes built on the site of one of our last remaining bits of farm land. They are McMansions, large, sometimes very large, homes on a postage size bit of land. I'm quite sure that the developer profited with this construction. Homes like this are running at $750,000. to $1,000,000. in Massachusetts. A lot of money, yes, and somewhere inside these huge homes a small, modern family is bouncing endlessly through the corridors as they try to connect with each other.

We live in a world where people don't talk to each other except by cellphone. No one makes eye contact anymore and even driving a car doesn't necessarily mean that people are paying attention to other people. Do we need to have homes so large that we can go days without talking to our own families? I don't think so.

Open land is precious. Species are going extinct one after the other because of the destruction of natural habitat. This earth is struggling to survive the depredations we have enacted on it. Yet, each time I drive past a place where there was a bit of dry ground, or even sometimes, wetland, I see one of these huge houses going up. The simple waste of materials in these homes is tremendous. Our forests are dying because of clear-cutting and acid rain. We don't have the resources to waste on this type of grandiose exhibitionism.

In the past, large homes were needed for large families. Grandparents, parents, children, their spouses and children, aunts, uncles...who knew who might end up living together. Economic conditions made it necessary for families to stay close to each other. Recent immigrants wanted to retain close contact with the only relatives they might have in this country. Farm life created the need for intensive labor. Large families supplied this needed labor and this, in turn, created the need for more room in their homes.

Today, people marry late and have fewer children. Baby-boomers have started taking themselves to small communities where there are people with similar likes and dislikes. The Sun Belt is growing exponentially as these aging bodies seek warmth through the winter of their lives. Families that do have young children have fewer and they have them later.

It would be healthier for these children to have room to run outside, rather than spend all day within the walls of their very expensive houses in front of huge plasma televisions that show the same shows as the small black and white TVs of our youth.

And finally, there is the economic effect of these places. The housing industry is in crisis. Running on the assumption that bigger is better, prices have soared, leading to larger mortgages. The mortgage industry, in an effort to get more profit, has strangled itself on its own greed.

None of this is necessary. We certainly don't need larger houses anymore, nor can we afford them on so many levels. Time and effort would be better spent creating more efficient housing and more affordable. To purchase a McMansion while the homeless line our streets is very nearly an ethical crime. It's a crime that we had better start policing very soon if we want to survive as a species. We may become extinct, too.

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