When I hear the term “mansionization“, I immediately think of Persian Jews. They often live several generations to a residence and hence need bigger homes and they don’t have the same aesthetics in most things as the goyim and assimilated Jews. Because they come from material deprivation in Iran, Persians Jews tend to go shopping wild in America, indulging in purchases that most Americans would regard as bad taste.
There’s also a tendency operating here to get everything you can while the getting is good, to quote Steve Sailer, and to ignore the negative consequences to others. WASPs used to have a concept of noblesse oblige — an obligation to act in the best long-term interests of the wider society — that many ethnics have not adopted.
In my experience, about 5% of Jews feel no kinship with non-Jews and feel no concern about the well-being of their host Gentile society. The more traditional the Jew (or any member of a tribe), the more likely he is to be primarily concerned with his own kind and to have fewer relationships with outsiders. Cheating and damaging outsiders is widely considered OK in much of tribal life (Jewish, black, Chinese, latino, etc).
Public shaming used to keep immigrants in check and there were strong social pressures to fit in but now everybody is supposed to celebrate diversity, including the diversity of ugliness.
As Persian Jews often live many to a home, they’re better able than the average goy to afford homes in nice areas, and they’re taking over vast sections of Beverly Hills to benefit from the excellent public education and to be around fellow Persians.
This Los Angeles Times articles does not mention the subtext of Jews vs goyim but you can read it between the lines:
In Hollywood, for example, members of a neighborhood group objected to a spec home exceeding 3,000 square feet, being built on a Stanley Avenue block lined with older, smaller homes — most of them under 2,000 square feet. Aggravated by the “out of place, enormous” residence, Amy Aquino of the Sunset Square Neighborhood Assn. said the group hired a land-use consultant to examine how it was allowed.
“Everything they were doing, hideous as it is, is all completely legal,” Aquino said.
The builder behind the home, Amnon Edri, said that as long as his project meets requirements, it shouldn’t be a problem.
“If the city code allows it, and you want a bigger house, you have the right to a bigger house,” he said. “This is America. It’s a free country.”
Neighbors pushing for stricter rules fear that outsized, out-of-character buildings will drag down their home values. Edri and others maintain that bigger homes boost prices for their neighbors.
The tensions also reflect clashing expectations of Los Angeles living.
For decades there was “kind of a consensus about what a Southern California house should look like” — low, rambling and open to the landscape, cultural historian D.J. Waldie said. That philosophy, along with requirements imposed by builders, gave rise to uniform neighborhoods lined with homes of similar sizes and styles, Waldie said.
I don’t think this is the only example of the Jews challenging the goyim. It’s becoming a theme on my blog. It seems to me that Jews generally win because they have higher group solidarity, fewer compunctions against acting in their own self-interest, higher intelligence, more energy and more intensity.
A typical goyisha protest against these homes is: “It’s the disgusting Persian boxes that go from corner to corner that are ugly.”
I love these stories because they represent a fascinating clash of cultures. On the one hand, traditional Jews do not care about the mores of the goyim and they aggressively pursue what they want. Finally, pushed to the edge, assimilated Jews and goyim try to fight back for traditional civic virtues but are often out-gunned.
Architecture critic Greg Goldin writes for the Los Angeles Times:
Here, in two words, is the architecture that Los Angeles, the city that loves and hates architecture, currently loves to hate: Persian Palace. No other coinage so immediately evinces dismissal and revulsion. It is the ultimate form of “mansionization,” taking a small lot and building the largest possible box on it. A compleat Persian Palace–there are many minor variations and lesser imitations–is distinguished by its exaggerated moldings, numberless layers of cornices, elaborate grillework and columns galore. A Persian Palace brazenly combines motifs and wantonly disregards proportion and scale. A giraffe could glide through the front door without stooping, then turn around and peer out the clerestory window while grazing on a crystal chandelier. In Beverly Hills, where the Persian Palace may have originated and certainly came to prominence, the design is now banned. In Glendale, where steep ravines have been piled high with faux stone and banded entablature, it must abide by strict official architectural guidelines. Elsewhere–as in Valley Glen, where some residents have begun leafletting against encroaching mansionization–it is often unwelcome, a sign that, if nothing else, a neighborhood is in for sniping over the look and size of its homes.
Here is what Beverly Hills officially says about Persian Palaces: “The mansionization of the city’s residential neighborhoods poses a serious danger that such overbuilding will degrade and depreciate the character, image, beauty, and reputation of the city’s residential neighborhoods with adverse consequences for the quality of life of all residents. The bulk and mass of such homes, as well as their general appearances, affect the desirability of the immediate area and neighboring areas for residential purposes.” Builders and remodelers must adhere to the Residential Style Design Catalogue, a pictographic guide to the city’s “architecturally pure residential styles,” most of which, the 123-page brochure avers, “were period revival styles, some inspired by lavish film industry sets.”
Of course, neither the word Persian nor the word Palace appears anywhere in the city’s design grammar. The city planners didn’t bother. It was immediately understood that the April 2004 ordinance was aimed at all those mini-mansions on the streets south of Burton Way and north of Wilshire. What other target could there be?
Hamid Gabbay, who is a Beverly Hills architect and sits on the city’s Design Review Commission, admits as much, emphatically. He detests Persian Palaces, and here’s why: “I came here on December 9, 1978, only a few months before the shah was deposed. I would have thought that the immigrants from Iran would have learned something from the experience there. But they didn’t. They build these extravagant houses. They have no sense of humility, or how to live quietly. It’s as if exactly the opposite of what you expected happened: They exploded with ostentation.”
Gabbay’s allusion conjures an image of Reza Pahlavi garbed in white gabardine, trimmed in epaulettes and bedecked in honorary medals, parading in a horse-drawn cabriolet through the streets of Tehran. In a word, meretricious, like the houses Gabbay dislikes. And the sins of Persian Palaces–from shoddy architecture to shoddy details–are obvious.
But hardly exceptional. Money has always flaunted itself, and if you can’t flash your wad in Beverly Hills, where can you? As John Chase, the urban designer for West Hollywood, says, “If Beverly Hills is not America’s playground for the expressions of the rich, where is? It’s today’s Newport.” Ostentation, from Versailles to Vegas, exerts a powerful hold on the imagination. Visual capriciousness and ornament have always had a place in architecture. All you’ve got to do is take a moment to look at a few Persian Palaces to see that the owners love their outsized houses, with their outsized gewgaws. No one is trying to hide behind blank walls or pruned hedges. A column, a pediment, a curlicued balcony railing are like jewels around Zsa Zsa Gabor’s neck. Even if, to pursue the metaphor, they are paste . . . to have them is the point, the more of them the better.
Good to see the news media coming to our Jewish defense.
Steve Sailer writes:
So, there is a lot of activism right now in areas near the Hollywood Hills to put limits on the size of teardowns. The arguments are framed in terms of aesthetics and neighborhood preservation, but much of the energy comes from unspoken ethnic conflict.
My guess is that the most outspoken of the preservationists tend to be Ashkenazi Jews who grew up in SoCal, while the newcomers building the gaudiest new houses tend to be Oriental Jews, but I don’t have any data on that.
Also, in the San Fernando Valley, there is a growing conflict over a zoning variance between the growing numbers of Ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi black hatters along Chandler Blvd. and the declining numbers of old-fashioned Ashkenazis.
The New York Times reported July 5, 2008:
To the Bukharian Jews of Central Asia, a big house is an essential tradition: a place to shelter multiple generations, to hold large parties, memorials and holiday dinners, to reaffirm a community’s unity.
So wherever they have put down roots, Bukharians — or, as they are sometimes called, Bukharans — have built aggressively, including in central Queens, where tens of thousands have settled since the early 1990s and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Nowhere has their love of big homes been on more opulent display than in a section of Forest Hills known as Cord Meyer, an upper middle class neighborhood long cherished by its residents for its tranquillity and architectural charm.
There, Bukharians have been tearing down the neighborhood’s sedate Tudor, Georgian and Cape Cod-style homes, paving over lawns and erecting white-brick edifices that borrow from old Europe, with sweeping balustrades, stone lions bracketing regal double doorways, chateau-style dormers and pitched roofs, Romanesque and Greek columns and ornate wrought-iron balconies accented with gold leaf that glints in the sun.
But while the Bukharians’ arrival has been a boon for the area’s residential construction industry, it has been a bane for some neighbors. These residents have complained about the Bukharian tendency to build boldly and big, saying that the new houses are destroying their neighborhoods.
“There is a lot of history in the Cord Meyer area and a lot of historical houses that have a specific aesthetic character in that community,” said Melinda R. Katz, a city councilwoman whose district includes Forest Hills. “A lot of the houses that are going up there are just simply too big relative to the other houses that are there and have been there for generations. They are out of character.”
Jeffrey Wendt: Check the different articles down the scroll, and especially the comments.
Steve Sailer wrote in 2008:
American Jews should start thinking of themselves less as oppressed outcasts who need to go for whatever they can get while the getting is good, and start more accurately thinking of themselves as belonging to the best-connected inner circle of the contemporary American Establishment.
Thus, American Jews should realize that, like the Protestant elite of yore, their privileged position as a de facto leadership caste bestows upon themselves corresponding duties to conserve the long-term well-being of the United States—rather than to indulge in personal and ethnic profit and power maximization.
But that’s unlikely to happen until the Jewish elite to begin to tolerate non-Jewish criticism, rather than to continue to try to destroy the careers of critics—or even just honest observers—in what seems to be an instinctive reaction intended to encourage the others.
A group self-image of victimization, combined with a penchant for ideological intensity and powerful ethnocentric lobbies, can lead to bizarre political manifestations—such as the dominant Jewish assumption that proper veneration of their Ellis Island ancestors requires opposition to patriotic immigration reform today.
Dave posts to Sailer’s blog post: “What about funding hospitals and medical research? Wealthy American Jews have endowed a number of hospitals and medical schools, including Cedars-Sinai in Steve’s hometown, Weill Cornell in New York, etc. Or donating to research universities? Bloomberg donated a large sum to his alma mater Johns Hopkins. Those are examples of noblesse oblige.”
Another comment:
I once dated a girl who’s sister was engaged to a jewish guy. (their mother married and converted after a divorce from their biological father)
He and her mother were trying to convince her to convert – and the argument was all material – jews help one another, there are advantages to being Jewish on wall street. The step-father ran a firm that employed all jews and they blatantly favored Jews.
Both complained about ‘anti semitism’ numerous times. and if even so much as hinted that well, gosh maybe we WASPy goy should to the same thing, or that maybe, just maybe they shouldn’t, they both went alan-desherwotiz on me.
That experience was first time I saw what I suspected all along – and Ron Untz Ivy studies confirmed – the Jewish elite is corrupt and self serving and violated the trust they were given. they have no sense of stewardship or custodianship .they are a bad elite, and need to go, because they completely lack any self awareness or self criticism. their whole identity centers around the narrative that they are innocent little lambs in a world of hostile goy
They will never reflect, they will never reform.
Another comment:
I’m definitely envious of Jewish privilege. You get a taboo on mentioning, much less criticizing, your group. You never have to apologize as Jews, individually or as groups. You get to come from the wealthiest, most privileged group, yet see yourselves portrayed as victims and light-bearers. You get to attack anyone you like with impunity. It’s a pretty sweet gig if you can get it; why wouldn’t we envy that?
There are far more similarities in behavior between Jews and blacks than between blacks and white rightists. Jews vote like blacks, spew the same rhetoric, share the same Narrative, push the same agenda, and show almost exactly the same hostile approach to whites and their interests. Exactly the same double-standards, too.
Pretty much everything the Jews do in media & entertainment, and the social sciences redounds to the detriment of Euro-America. Jewish finance ain’t much help, either.
I’m actually grateful for Jews, on a certain level; they’re the model for aggressive, modern ethnic tribalism. It’s good to have the world’s most racist group as the model of wealth and influence, and so admired; it says a lot about racism.
Another comment: “Jews succeed in this country not merely because they are “smart” but it is not because other Jews are doing them favors either. I am Jewish and I can say, Jews will rip each other to shreds. Israel is known for this. But I have noticed that Jews are more ambitious than Gentiles (as a general rule, across a broad population) and are more driven. This cannot be measured on any IQ test. I don’t know of any reason why a trait such as laziness or drive cannot be genetic and inherited.”
