One thing that has always puzzled me is the cheap materials thing. My parent's house, though not a McMansion, is in a neighborhood full of them and made of the same materials.

It's held up perfectly for ~10 years and plenty of hurricanes (some that happened while it was in the middle of being built!). What's the problem with the current materials?

The problem may be that you think 10 years is a long time for a house.

The materials with a MTBF of 10 years and those with a MTBF of 50 years may look about the same to the untrained eye, but a subdivision builder can grab a bit more in profit by choosing to use the former.

The homeowner then has to pay elevated maintenance and repair costs after the builder sells their last lot and packs up to go subdivide the next parcel.

The houses don't suddenly collapse, per se, they just start to experience annoying problems. Screws pop out of the drywall. Door frames get skewed. AC units freeze over thanks to coolant leaks. Paint peels off of metal flashing. Mold grows on inferior siding, just on the north side of all the houses in the neighborhood. Garage door frames bend away from brick lintels as the electric openers open and close the doors. Cooling costs for the whole neighborhood are through the roof, literally, because the builder used the bare minimum of blow-in insulation. The flush levers on all the toilets break, because they're made of plastic. Buried drainage pipes in the backyard collapse, leaving a potentially leg-breaking hole in the ground. Weeds grow up through the patios that never had proper barriers under their foundations.

The materials aren't bad. They just don't last. People end up paying the same price for a house that won't last 25 years as they might for one which would last another 100, because you can't see the difference at the point of sale.

Your mention of hurricanes, and parents who might be safely assumed to be retired, makes me think Florida. With that big bag of assumptions (throw out what follows if those are wrong), I'll remind folks that anything built in the last ten years is going to be very much regulated on how it's built. It'll be made of reinforced concrete block and the roof will be firmly tied to the rest of the house. The builder has no say in this. I'm not saying that given the choice the builder would choose the cheaper route, but a Florida house that laughs at a hurricane is due to government regulation more than the builder's choice of materials.

That, and Florida hasn't really had a decent hurricane in the last ten years.

Not so close but an interesting answer. My parents live in South East Texas (south East of Houston!) and not retired. I'll admit that the last big hurricane we had was that I remember was in 2008~ish.

The point is that you could have a good but affordable fireplace that looks good in its own right, rather than a cheap imitation of something pricey that you can't afford.

Cheap imitations are old as time. You ever watch antiques roadshow? Every episode there's at least one knockoff. And even those can be 100+ years old and still worth money.a knockoff just means people like the design.

I do appreciate that perspective, but I'd like to see "here's a 3,000 sqft house built for the same price, that's tasteful and has a consistent style" as a counterexample.

> What is the alternative for someone who wants to build a house for a large family while spending 6 (or low 7) figures

Don't buy in a "prestigious" zip code, build with a simple design. My parents live in Great Falls, an area that's an hour commute into D.C. and full of McMansions that run $1.5 million for cheaply-built crap. If you buy some land an hour in the other direction from D.C. (toward rural Maryland), you can build a tasteful 5,000 square foot house for $1 million including land. People by and large don't do it, because they might meet a Trump voter and thereby have a stroke.

If you want to do that you had better hurry up, the Odenton-Annapolis corridor is starting to get discovered and is building out new track developments very quickly.

Look at Europe. Large families there too, but nothing like the McMansion jungle in the United States. I suppose it comes down to priorities.

That's true but Europe is full of large houses that are hundreds of years old, so there isn't as much need for new building. Plus if you look at neighborhoods in say, Belgium or the Netherlands, people value (ahem) architectural conformity quite a bit more, as opposed to individual taste.

There's a ton of space in the US between the coasts[1], so people have become accustomed to large houses that they can make "their own", so to speak. It's just a different culture.

[1] A lot of it is still unused! My hometown in Texas has actually "grown" in the past ten years towards unused land to build new neighborhoods and schools. I can't imagine that there's large amounts of land in Europe to build entire new communities, right?

Are you trying to claim that Europe doesn't have suburbs? Because, uh, they do: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/05/end-of-the-good-l...

Look at that picture. It's full of McMansions, and it's a photo of suburban London.