Urban-pundit Witold Rybczynski predicts that when housing construction gets out of its three-year dumps, which it’s just starting to do these days, the homes that will be built will include far fewer “McMansions,” those suburban and exurban monuments to mass-produced exceptionalism and excess.

One reason housing may rebound more slowly than the rest of the economy, Rybczynski notes: A lot of recession-struck households are “doubling up,” with two or even three whole families, or one extended family including adult children, in one house.

Wait a minute: That’s just the sort of household structure that McMansions are actually good for. (Well, that and art communes.)

But there are already more than enough foreclosed or never-occupied McMansions for these uses.

Meanwhile, local urban-development pundit Dan Bertolet (at his own CityTank.org) sings to the apparent end of sprawl and the rise of urban-density development, even in the ‘burbs.