Tinotopia

The Washington Post has, in its editorial and news writing, what you might call a generally ‘anti-sprawl’ position. The paper reflects the values of its culture, and its culture is that of downtown Washington, where it’s based.

So when it comes to urban planning, the Post favors the It’s-The-Greedy-Developers school of thought on what causes sprawl. The argument goes something like this: Housing developers, many of which are organized as limited-liability corporations, want to make as much money as possible. Therefore, it’s in their interest to build each house using as much land and as many materials as possible.

This is insane, of course: the general idea is to build things as cheaply as possible, and then sell them for what the market will bear. Specifically, you want to build condos or townhouses, because those actually produce the greatest return on investment.

The Post doesn’t see it that way, though, and they seem to willfully ignore, most of the time, the simple fact that county zoning boards more or less require developers to build sprawl. The counties like residential sprawl because it allows them to spend a hell of a lot of money per pupil on schools, which in turn makes their statistics look good. It’s a lot easier to spend a lot of money per pupil when you don’t have all that many pupils, and when those you do have all live in million-dollar houses which are generating quite a bit of property tax per family. So the counties essentially ban the construction of anything but million-dollar houses (or ‘active adult communities’, which they love because they produce tax revenue but don’t generate any kids for the schools) and then complain that the huge demand for housing for all the teachers they’ve hired isn’t being met because of… wait for it… greedy developers.

Anyway, so you would think that a developer buying up shoddily-built houses that straddle two lots each, in a neighborhood without sidewalks, and replacing each one with two houses would be something that would meet with the approval of the Washington Post, or that would at least merit a straight story without any moralizing.

But, of course, you would be wrong. The Post, like almost all of American society, utterly lacks any vision when it comes to the human habitat, and so it prefers stasis above all. That the status quo here embodies precisely that which the Post doesn’t like in other places is unimportant.

For $700,000 cash, a corporation named Hall Hollin LLC is offering to purchase Mark and Nancy Welch’s brick Cape Cod, built after World War II in one of Fairfax County’s oldest neighborhoods. No contingencies, no inspection, immediate closing. As is, because the house would be knocked right down.

In its place would rise not just one four-bedroom manse with granite countertops, ceramic tile, hardwood floors and a two-car garage, but two — towering 3 1/2 stories on the 13,000-square-foot lot and selling for $1.4 million apiece.

Four bedrooms! Ceramic tile! Wood floors! A two-car garage! What sybarites these mansion-dwellers must be! When they move in to the neighborhood, surely everyone will crowd around to see whether they’re made of gold, or rubies, or some kind of platinum-iridium alloy: because certainly people made of flesh could have no possible use for such luxuries.

The houses will tower 35 feet above grade! Such height! Perhaps God will confound the language of the builders, so the houses won’t get built.

Here’s a picture of Tino Manor (Mid)West:

Counting the porch and the terrace in the front yard, it ‘towers’ over 35 feet above the sidewalk. It ‘looms’, even, no? No? Huh. How about that.

The term ‘McMansion’ has officially been devalued. The Post applies it twice in this article, outside of quotes, to four-bedroom houses with two-car garages on 1/3-acre lots.

If we examine the article a little more, some clues emerge:

A red Hummer rumbles behind Mount Vernon Parkway, a showy hulk charging through humble rows of Cape Cods and ramblers.

Debbie Goram slides out of the driver’s seat, a real estate agent clutching a potential windfall for an unsuspecting homeowner. She crosses the modest front yard at 8036 Washington Rd. and shoves six pages under the front door.

[...] A dozen houses on double lots have sold so far, and developers are eyeing about 40 more — a bonanza for builders meeting buyers’ demands to live close in.

[...] They’re fighting the two-for-one plans every way they can: with protests, community meetings and glares at the neighbors who’ve sold. Like many residents watching old suburban values clash with new real estate values, they feel helpless.

To the Post, this is all about ‘values’, and it goes without saying that the ‘values’ of the people who live in the neighborhood and who don’t want to sell are inherently superior to the values of the people who have sold, the values of the developers, and the values of the people who will buy the new houses. The people living in the old houses are modest and humble; the real-estate agent working for the developers drives — no, charges around in — a Hummer, and a showy hulk of one at that. The Post doesn’t see fit to mention the cars that the residents drive, presumably because it’s irrelevant to the story. That didn’t keep them from using the agent’s car as the lead, though.

It’s interesting that the Post didn’t seem to illustrate this story — which appears on page B1, the front of the Metro section — with a single photograph of any of the houses in question. I found a picture of one under construction here, in a story about the redevelopment in a local newspaper:

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your McMansion: a two car garage and four windows and a door across in front. Not a particularly big house these days: but, to paraphrase Jimmy Carter, it’s big in his heart. It’s uppity, in short. It puts on airs.

And the Washington Post doesn’t like that.