Thomas Frank drops a tremendous essay on the McMansion:

Inequality is the point of the McMansion, and the McMansion is also, to a certain degree, the point of inequality; it’s the pot of pyrite at the end of the rainbow of shit that we have chosen as a nation to follow. As you enter its soaring narthex of an entrance, keep this in mind: Before you, in the skim-coated drywall greatroom and the monster granite kitchen with its multiplicity of faucets and its Viking stove–this is what it is all about. This is the reward of thirty-odd years of economic policy.
There’s many great things about the United States.
McMansions are not one of them.