Heart rending photos of cute little houses being demolished and replaced with generic monster boxes. What kind of creep enjoys living in these giant houses? I sure don't want to know them. I did't really mean this. I know a lot of very nice people who live in McMansions. — Read the rest

Christopher Belter, now 20, raped several younger teens and was convicted in 2018. This week Niagara County Judge Matthew Murphy, sympathising with his plight from the bench, told him he would not be going to jail.

"It seems to me that a sentence that involves incarceration or partial incarceration isn't appropriate, so I am going to sentence you to probation."

The sellers of a Colorado Springs McMansion have addressed some real "customer pain points" in a full page ad in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle real estate section, including "ultra liberal views." Do you suppose their talking about the actual scenery? — Read the rest

On Sunday, June 29, 2020, a crazed St. Louis couple quickly became a viral shame-sation for waving guns at protestors outside of their McMansion (in violation of every standard best practice of gun ownership; seriously, if either one of them had actually pulled the trigger, they would have ended up with a black eye and a friendly fire injury). — Read the rest

Hudson Yards is a notorious (and spectacularly badly timed) new "luxury housing development" in New York City: a massive, gated, privatized "neighborhood" in Manhattan, a city that has been literally hollowed out by runaway luxury real-estate speculation, to the exclusion of working people and mere millionaires alike.

The overwhelming clatter and presence of restaurant noise is thanks to the fashionable minimalism of modern decor. Kate Wagner (of McMansion Hell fame) writes that if you want a peaceful meal out, go somewhere with carpet and soft fittings. — Read the rest

Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner continues her unbroken streak of excellent and incisive architectural criticism with a new piece that riffs on Stewart Brand's classic "How Buildings Learn" to discuss how McMansions have gone awry: they represent a break from the tradition of designing stuff to fit in spaces, and instead, they are spaces designed for status-displaying stuff.

Doug Ford, AKA Laughable Bumblefuck II, won the Ontario provincial elections with a cowardly, trumpian campaign that kicked off with a bitter leadership race within his own party, whose top spot was up for grabs because the previous leader was accused of getting young party activists drunk and then having sex with them.

The Wall Street Journal profiles rich "train buffs" who buy vintage Gilded Age railcars and refurbish them, then pay to have them hitched to Amtrak trains and pulled between their city houses and their country places.

McMansion Hell (previously at BB) was a hilarious, incisive and explosively popular blog detailing and mocking America's dreadful suburban architecture. Zillow is a real estate site that exists to profit from it. Zillow used a grossly bogus legal threat to get McMansion Hell shut down, and everyone within sniffing distance of the law or media freedom is mad. — Read the rest

More news on the Chinese crackdown on money-laundering and its impact on the global property bubble: the controls the Chinese government has put on "capital outflows" (taking money out of China) are actually working, and there's been a mass exodus of Chinese property buyers from the market, with many abandoning six-figure down payments because they can't smuggle enough money out of the country to make the installment payments.

A new law passed by the LA city council prohibits homeless people from owning more belongings than can fit in a 60-gallon trashcan with the lid on, and allows police to summarily confiscate any tents that are still standing on public property during daylight hours.

NASA scientists, at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, revealed images from space of humanity—and our wonderful cultural behaviors.

How do you imbue an empty mansion with the indefinable "energy" that comes from daily habitation? Find distressed rich people with nice furniture and precarious jobs at McDonald's to move in.

Thomas Frank is scorching on the subject of university tuition hikes and the complicity of the press in blaming everything except for bulging administrations and cuts to state universities for the 30-year spiral of super-inflationary price-hikes from America's post-secondary sector. Where he really nails it, though, is about two thirds of the way through, when he discusses the mental shift that allowed all this to happen: once universities started advertising themselves as paths to individual high-earnings (instead of seats of learning and forces for national prosperity), there was no reason for anyone to want to see them as subsidized, universal, accessible institutions:

The widow of a man who built a bamboo treehouse in Venice, CA says her complaint about the proliferation of "McMansions" in her neighborhood led to an order from the City of LA to demolish the beloved structure.

The treehouse serves as the favorite hangout spot of his grandchildren and neighborhood kids.

I want my own office,” Lena said. “My own space to work from.” Social Services paused for a while to think. Lena knew that it was thinking, because the woman in the magic mirror kept animating her eyes this way and that behind cat-eye horn-rims. She did so in perfect meter, making her look like one of those old clocks where the cat wagged its tail and looked to and fro, to and fro, all day and all night, forever and ever. Lena had only ever seen those clocks in media, so she had no idea if they really ticked. But she imagined they ticked terribly. The real function of clocks, it seemed to her, was not to tell time but to mark its passage. Ticktickticktick. Byebyebyebye.

Lloyd Kahn is the editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications. His latest book is Tiny Homes: Scaling Back in the 21st Century.

Avi Solomon: What do you see in your childhood that pointed you onto the path that your life took? — Read the rest

Christopher Maag wrote a fascinating piece for Credit.com about the little-known legal claim called "adverse possession" that allows people to take possession of abandoned property.

Here's the basic version of how it works:

1) Someone owns a property, whether it's a house, a condo or just a strip of ground.

A canny gentleman has taken adverse possession of a $300K McMansion in Flower Mound, TX. The house had been in foreclosure and the mortgage company that held its paper had gone under, so Kenneth Robinson spent $16 filing adverse possession paperwork with the county courthouse. — Read the rest