McMansion

Suburbia: some people love it, some people hate it. As for us, as the CEO of a residential homebuilding company...we love it. Suburbia and the McMansions it entails are our bread and butter. We build those bad boys thirty at a time, put the same particle board cabinets and cheap granite in all of them, and then sell them for a mint.

Wait...back up. “McMansions?” Is that something we can order off the McDonald’s dollar menu?

No, but that is where they got their name. McMansions are suburban homes that are typically large, typically located in master-planned communities with a bunch of other McMansions, and typically constructed in a very fast and occasionally shoddy manner. You know those neighborhoods where all the houses seem to pop up overnight, and they’re all nice houses, but they all kind of look the same? Yeah, those are McMansions.

Not that there’s anything wrong with them. By and large, they’re perfectly lovely places to live. But those who don’t love them have valid criticisms: since McMansions do tend to be on the bigger side, and since they tend to be located in nicer neighborhoods with HOAs, they’re not exactly cheap to own. And since an entire neighborhood is often built all at once by the same developer, there’s not a lot of variation between the houses. But what they lack in charm and character they often make up for in closet space and indoor-outdoor living areas. And they tend to look pretty impressive from the outside.