Check out this article Deconstruct McMansions

How’s about a stimulus-started plan to buy up the nation’s foreclosed and empty McMansions and hire out-of-work construction workers to deconstruct them? It’s an idea that could keep giving and giving. Aside from the obvious benefits of employment as the deconstruction took place, de-developers could offset costs by selling used housing materials (recycle!) or donating us able building materials to low-income- housing renovation projects (help the poor!).

De-developers could then restore the housing lot to the area’s original native-growth environment (employ out- of- work landscapers, help the native critters!), have it designated as a conservation easement, and donate it to, say, the Nature Conservancy. Or perhaps the local community could take the lot over for the construction of playgrounds or the planting of victory gardens.

Sure, this is unlikely to be a money-making venture, but benefits would be reaped in multiple other ways: people would be employed; de-developers would get tax breaks (available through 2009, thanks to provisions in the 2008 Farm Bill); neighborhood property values would increase; and, because McMansions constitute one of the most energy-inefficient housing designs, energy usage and greenhouse-gas emissions would decrease.

According to a U.S. Census report, homes with seven or more rooms had the most vacancies between 2004 and 2008, as well as the greatest increase in vacancy rates. And newer homes had the highest vacancy rate of all housing – a rate that has been steadily increasing as the years pass. (As for foreclosure rates, in Virginia, for example, 8.1 percent of foreclosed homes were priced at more than $300,000.) Isn’t it time to erase the blight of abandoned homeownership dreams?

Imagine sitting on your porch to watch the sun set across the wide, impossibly green field that abuts your home, instead of through the plaster-cast Corinthian columns of the empty McMansion next door.