One of the nation’s largest developers is gobbling up our precious open spaces and spitting them back out in drastically altered pieces. Unfortunately, the McMansions Toll Brothers is planting on former farmland throughout Bucks County, Pennsylvania will only yield poor attempts to satisfy families’ hunger for the American Dream.
Bucks County, Pennsylvania – known for rolling hills, quaint riverside towns, open spaces and working farms. Well, it used to be that way at least. Toll Brothers is now offering “luxury living you can’t afford to miss!” on what used to be farmland next to my home. The necessary luxury they offer comes in the shape of 6,000 square foot luxury estate homes “exceptionally priced from the low- 800’s” – 
well, more on the order of $1.6 million according to the saleslady I spoke with.
My moderately-sized house used to lie wedged in between, and across the street from, hundreds of acres of working farmland. Throughout my childhood, we had the suggestion of neighbors with a few scattered homes down the road.
As I grew up, however, I watched the farmland in our county be devoured by developers eager to capitalize on the landscape and location. Estate homes, villas, age-restricted housing, gated communities, luxury single-family homes, McMansions – these words entered into my vocabulary as a very young adult. I used to lie awake and wonder when we would get word that the farmland next to us would be turned into such a place.
The day of reckoning has come for the surrounding farmland. “The Highlands at Chapman’s Corner” is here, and it is impossible not to take note. Besides the seemingly endless road construction, approximately 20 single-family luxury homes now blight the landscape. They are oddly smushed together and seemingly self-conscious without any trees to soften their exposed edges. The houses come in a variety of flavors: colonial, federal, collegial, columnar, tudor, idiotic, and ugly. “The Highlands of Chapman’s Corner” represents conspicuous consumption at its finest.
I explored the model home the other day; read on to hear more and view what I saw, and get a sense of what the carbon footprint of this single-family home looks like…
The model home boasts six bathrooms, a gigantic master bedroom suite (see photo), three staircases, a three-car garage, thirty-foot ceilings, sunporches, offices, parlors, more closets than I could count on two hands, and the list goes on. The house literally screams quantity not quality as its poorly insulated windows climb the walls to the vaulted ceilings. The only part that appealed to me in the slightest was the wine cellar (and maybe the foozeball table). Perhaps the MOST ridiculous thing I spotted was this note on a coffee table! (If you can’t read it, it says: “I am sitting in my beautiful sunroom, built by Toll Brothers, enjoying my serenity.”) 
The conversion of working farmland into roughly 20 single-family homes is an act of violence against our land. Giant dirt-movers arrived and systematically shifted every ounce of soil, re-organized and molded the landscape of the suburban American Dream. They formed artificial rifts and valleys without consulting the natural contours of the land or the flow of water after a fierce rainfall.
Such homes are also a slap in the face to millions of people in our own country struggling to house their families. Such a monstrosity could easily house more than twenty people.
Regarding the carbon footprint, it’d be a little challenging to get an exact number. A professor that Jesse Jenkins is working with provided an offhand estimate of what the energy consumption would look like. His estimate is that this McMansion would consume five to eight times more energy than a typical single-family home in the region, just for heat! It would likely consume 25,000-40,000 kWh over the annual heating season. With energy at about 10 cents/kWH, total cost would reach $2,500-$4,000 just to the heat the house over the winter. If they heat with natural gas, it would probably be more.
These McMansions are not my dream with their insultingly large footprints, intercom systems, shoddy construction, and thoughtless placement. These houses breed discontent while promoting our endless cycle of consumer want.
When wealthy Americans travel the roads of more leads to more, they may find themselves at the door of Toll Brothers. I just hope they have the sense to turn around before they invest their money in cardboard dreams.
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Not only do these oversized houses waste a lot of materials and energy, they are shoddy as you point out and won’t last. They’ll soon need major repairs, or be tomorrows slums or tear-downs. No matter how many “green” counertop materials or energy saving lighting packages builders include, a house is never “green” until it is built to last. Most new homes today will not last. Too many shortcuts and too many junky materials. The money is put into frills and the builders’ pockets. Builders made record profits during the housing bubble but it sure didn’t take long in the bust years for them to start going under. Bad business practices, no planning for down times, (which are common in real estate), overbuilding, and a lot of outright fraud created the housing bubble in the first place. The toxic loans were sold as “investments” and the house of cards came predictably down. Toll is just one player in this tragic comedy. If these big houses manage to last long enough, they will probably end up as multi family housing. Few can afford to maintain and heat such behemoths, and since many bought them with builder’s in-house lenders’ toxic loans, some are going back to the banks, (if they can figure out who even owns the loan at this point).
Serenity is right… if you could live in one of these homes you would love it. I just moved into a Berger development and I love it. I don’t know why you have to be so against people who build these houses. You work for a living I guess and so do they. They too have to make a living doing something… they choose providing well built housing. If Toll Brothers went under thousands of people would lose their jobs, and with an economy like the one we have now job loss is inevitable. Building houses is about the only job that can’t be outsourced to China. Think about it…
I see Toll Brothers as nothing more than a greedy entity, one that has senselessly destroyed farmland in the name of extremely (deceptively) well-marketed, mass produced, luxury estates made out of little more than cardboard. So, we may not find much common ground! And I don’t really understand your strong defense of Toll Brothers’ practices in the first place. The job loss, sure, but their craftsmanship? One thing you should check out, though:
An interesting article about Toll Brothers and the economic slump here. Toll Brothers invented the idea of mass-produced luxury living, and as the article suggests: “stoked America’s demand for cathedral ceilings, Roman tubs, and four-car garages.” The fact that they are hurting right now makes sense, I do not pity the company itself, and I would challenge you to reflect on whether they ought to consider building more appropriately sized houses given our economic situation, and adopt more sensible land-use practices.
I also would NOT agree it’s “well built housing” My dad used to hammer in extra nails into our old house when it was being built by a large construction company like Toll Brothers. As evidenced by a “field trip” over to this development, the houses are not excellently crafted by talented carpenters (although the price suggests they may be!).
I completely disagree with the houses not being well built. Our house has a 10 year limited warranty and the developer wouldn’t offer that if they didn’t stand behind their work. The only things gone wrong with our house were manufacture error and the problems had nothing to do with the installation (which was done by the developer).