dollar fixer-upper for sale: five bedrooms, four baths, three-car garage, cavernous living room. Big holes above fireplace where flat-screen TV used to hang. The US housing crisis has come to McMansion country. Just as the foreclosure crisis has hollowed out poorer neighborhoods, “for sale” signs are sprouting in upscale developments so new they don't show up on GPS navigation screens. Poor people weren't the only ones who took out risky, high-interest loans during the housing boom. The sharp increase in housing costs – and the desire to live in brand-new, spacious houses with modern features -- led many affluent buyers to take out loans they couldn't afford. “People had in their head, ‘I need a mud room, I need giant columns, I need a media room, and I'm going to do anything to get it,'” said Robert Lang, co-director of Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute, a research organization that focuses on real estate and development. The crisis has hit especially hard here in Loudoun County, Virginia, where upscale developments have supplanted horse farms over the past fifteen years. About an hour's drive from Washington, Loudoun is one of the nation's most affluent counties, with a median household income of $98,000, more than double the national figure. The county has also ranked as one of the nation's fastest growing in recent years as developers built thousands of super-sized, amenity-laden houses to keep pace with the booming high-tech economy. These houses are sometimes nicknamed “McMansions,” disparaging both their extravagance and their look of mass production – like hamburgers from a McDonald's restaurant. Between 1990 and 2005, the county's population tripled to 272,000. Many of those moving here relied on risky, high-interest loans to buy the house of their dreams. __
