Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
If you lived in this house, you’d probably feel pretty safe in criticizing those who live in McMansions.
How big is too big?
That is a question people love to weigh in on when the subject is houses. Or so I have found.
When I first wrote about what was going to be the biggest house in Yellowstone County, which is being built just outside the Ironwood subdivision, readers flooded the Last Best News Facebook page with spirited comments on the subject.
Ed Kemmick
The debate went on at other people’s Facebook pages, after they linked to the story, and then on the Billings Gazette website and Facebook page, when that newspaper did its own version of the story. The debate was renewed when I wrote an update on the big house last week.
Some commenters have been neutral, merely expressing wonderment that anyone would undertake to build a house with more than a half-acre of floor space under one roof. Many others were appalled, some even outraged, that a private residence that large was being built in this day and age.
This day and age being one in which a large carbon footprint is seen as a waste of scarce resources and a needless contributor to climate change. In a similar vein, some people thought it was a sign of hideous excess in a world with so many desperately poor people, or an indication that the 1 percenters were thumbing their noses at the rest of us.
In the third group of commenters were those just as appalled, even outraged, that anyone should dare criticize how other people spend their money. They pointed out that those who live in such houses will get soaked by the tax man, and that all sorts of jobs will be created to build and maintain such a manse.
As usual, I’m of two minds on the question. Thanks to a long career in the newspaper biz, and probably also to a Catholic upbringing, I hesitate to judge, at least rashly.
For one thing, we don’t know anything about the people who will live in the castle-like house, with its battlements, drawbridge, gun room and bowling alley. Maybe it’s some philanthropist who has already spent hundreds of millions on good deeds and finally feels like spending something on himself, or herself.
Maybe the owners have an enormous family, or maybe they’re planning to take in a few dozen needy relatives. We just don’t know.
I also hesitate to judge things based on what I prefer, as if that were any kind of standard. I have often thought that great wealth — or perhaps the single-minded pursuit of great wealth — warps people’s esthetic sensibilities, so that good taste goes out the window, or into the moat. This makes me suspicious: Do I want to feel superior to those whose incomes I secretly envy?
I feel much more kinship with Kate Morris, settling down in that idyllic grain bin house of hers on the prairie, or with Randy and Janna Hafer, who are constructing a relatively small off-the-grid house near downtown Billings. But because I like their houses more than the leviathan of Ironwood, does that make their houses better, on some objective scale? Probably not.
That Catholic upbringing I mentioned might also account for a feeling of guilt that makes it hard for me to condemn others. A beam in my own eye and all that.
If the house at Ironwood is too large in a world of suffering and poverty, how small must a house be before we are allowed to feel self-righteous? Does my 1,200-square-foot apartment for two (and the occasional boomerang daughter) qualify me to polish my badge of honor?
Or in this world of hurt should all of us live in one of those tiny houses they’re building nowadays, with 100 or 200 square feet per person, and no room for anything but a handful of essential possessions? Does it matter that my favorite possessions are old books? Wouldn’t it be better to let some poor family feed them into a stove?
Wait, you say. More than half an acre. A seven-car garage. A drawbridge, for God’s sake. This ought to be a simple one. I should feel no qualms about riding my high horse past their property and sticking out my tongue at these shameless latter-day barons.
But my apartment, as I have said before, happens to be in an area where it is not uncommon to see people huddled in doorways, trying to sleep even in the coldest weather. If the Ironwood monster is 25 times larger than my place, my place is infinitely larger than the houses not inhabited by the homeless.
To put it another way, can we admire Abe Lincoln because he was born in a log cabin, but also admire Thomas Jefferson because he built Monticello?
I don’t think Jefferson had a bowling alley, but he probably had a gun room. He definitely had a lot of old books.
