“American culture, to begin with, is unusually spacious, in the sense that people think of space as part of American culture,” Sonia A. Hirt, a professor of landscape architecture and planning, told The Atlantic in 2019. “This is partially part of the American promise—that you can have more room.”1

But in the age of COVID-19, witnessing celebrities cloister inside their obscenely large houses and pander with “Imagine” sing-alongs can provide new reasons to scoff at their out-of-touch lifestyles. “Seeing celebrity homes [in 2020] took on new meaning in a potentially negative way,” said Andrea McDonnell, co-author of Celebrity: A History of Fame. “The pleasure of voyeurism was overshadowed by those feelings of resentment by regular people who are going through a really difficult time and are also confined to the home a lot more.”

There’s a distinct schadenfreude when things fall apart within celebrities’ mansions, even to an innocuous degree.2

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• 1. But over the last decade, lawmakers have been combatting the escalating big-box mansion trend that they say has negatively impacted the amount of affordable housing available to Angelenos. Previous ordinances allowed homes to occupy up to 70 percent of an individual lot, but over the last 10 years, the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance has gradually decreased the maximum home size allowed down to 45 percent of a lot’s total area. “There’s too many opportunities for developers to build these giant, blocky McMansions,” Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz, who supported the tightening restrictions, told the Los Angeles Times. “There’s a profit motive to destroy neighborhoods.” (While usually not as large as megamansions, mass-produced McMansions stand out by being architecturally hideous and cheaply made.)
• 2. When a recent screenshot from a Kylie Jenner Instagram video appeared to show an enormous marble bathroom inside her 15,000 square foot Holmby Hills mansion, it quickly received more than 1.5 million likes on Twitter when someone shared it with the caption, “Kylie Jenner lives in a $35m mansion, and this is the water pressure…” in jest of the pitiful stream dribbling from the showerhead. Jenner later clarified the video was actually of a shower at her office and shared a new video of an even more spacious shower with stronger water pressure inside her $36.5 million home.