Big,characterless boxy rooms with furnishings from Bob's Discount Furniture more often than not.

It's as though the people who buy them do so to impress the neighbors but have nothing left over to make them actual homes.

the first one on our street was at least built on a large lot and sits back from the road. I know the people who live there and have been inside many times. It's nicely done except for one space. The master bath. It's like they had leftover space so they just made the whole thing a bathroom. It's got his & hers closets. Separate vanities and showers, etc. And then this great big lounge space with a huge picture window tub on one side that they admit they will never use. It's this space I can't figure out. There's a couch and chair but most of it is like a hotel lobby, just an expanse of space. So weird.

The one next door was built on an odd shaped lot and looms over the street like a Hollywood set. In Your Face. It's not nicely decorated but I guess that's a matter of taste. I haven't heard anyone say it's nice. It's more like, Oh what an interesting house.

The living room is usually nicely done. The family room is an oversized space with kitchen designed for photographs but not for the delight and convenience of the cook, some sort of dining area, and a huge space with either a grotesquely over or under sized fireplace that makes furniture placement challenging, if not impossible. Furniture is usually family castoffs or big box store flat pack stuff. If you ever get upstairs, you'll notice a lot of mattresses and box springs on the floor and cheap resin lawn furniture filling things out.

People obviously got talked into these yuppie barns as "the house for your whole lifetime" and are seriously house poor paying for it and likely to remain so in our era of stagnant or actively falling wages. I suppose they think all the rooms will have furniture in them by the time they die of overwork.

They do LOVE them some tacky, cheap McMansions. . . .

They continued in the 2000s, to be sure. But starter castles were already being mocked widely by 2005.

She has an M.A. in International Relations with a concentration in International Economics and China Studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a B.A. from Northwestern University. Ana worked and studied in China for eight years between 2004 and 2013.

BA's in cultural anthropology.

Looks like she missed the '90s. Indeed, much of the '00s, as well.

Starter castles are still geographically restricted, and in areas where people want to buy. Even them.

(In Houston we've seen increases in housing prices, but mostly at the higher end and in higher-status communities.)