Since the 1980s, the percentage of homes being constructed with four bedrooms has on the whole grown, while the percentage of two-bedroom homes have fallen. In 2022, nearly half of all homes constructed had four bedrooms, compared to two-bedroom homes at 9%.
This trend of larger homes is also shown through the number of bathrooms in new houses, with over a third having three or more baths, slightly more than the percentage of homes with two baths.
If you have more square footage, people might want more of these kinds of rooms. Who wants to share a bathroom? Can’t additional bedrooms be repurposed for other uses like an office or workout space? Haven’t all the shows on HGTV convinced viewers that more bedrooms and bathrooms increase the resale value of a home? Too bad we do not have a measure of the number of open concept living areas. Or, how many square feet are allocated to the kitchen, the space where Americans spend a lot of their time?
One more interesting chart regarding basements:
Basements have also become much less popular over the last five decades— the percentage of new homes with a full or partial basement in 1974 was 45%, compared to just 21% in 2022. Slab and other types of foundations have become the sweeping majority for new homes.
I wonder if this has more to do with more new homes constructed in places, like the South, where basements are less common as opposed to a declining interest in basements. This also suggests newer homes have less space underground and have more of their space above ground.
Are these changes due solely to the spread of McMansions? The headline may invoke McMansions but they were not the only style of larger home constructed in recent decades. As many new homes added square feet, their features shifted. McMansions may have had plenty of bedrooms and bathrooms but so did other new homes.
The last fifty or so years of life in the United States has included numerous NIMBY efforts by residents (see recent examples here, here, and here). One of the reasons for NIMBY activity is to protect property values. Did NIMBY efforts lead to higher property values?
NIMBY efforts could have contributed to this in multiple ways. They may have limited housing supply. One common argument regarding promoting more affordable housing prices is to build more housing units. This will reduce demand for existing units.
Or, NIMBY movements may have limited what communities will build. When they do construct housing, it is of similar or better quality of what is already there so as to not create downward pressure on prices.
These actions led by residents may not be the only reason housing and property prices have soared. Residents are not the only actors with influence in housing markets and communities; certainly the actions of those involved in real estate, local officials, and others contributed to increased property values.
However, taking the long view, if NIMBYs have acted in order to protect property values, does it appear – whether they directly caused it or not – that this was successful?
Meanwhile, researchers at Cornell University estimate that 94% of the nation’s job growth since 2000 happened in urban counties.
Many would not be surprised to hear that cities are job centers. Whether thinking about offices, industry, or service sectors, cities are often viewed as centers of innovation and economic activity.
But, one of the lesser known aspects of suburban growth in the United States is the amount of jobs in the suburbs. As part of a complex suburbia where suburbs are more than bedroom suburbs dependent on urban centers, suburbs are full of work and business activity. When I wrote the Oxford Bibliographies entry on Suburbanism, I made sure to include “Economic Activity in the Suburbs” as one of the sections.
It sounds like this also means that rural areas are not experiencing much job growth. The job growth is not close to the percent of Americans who live in rural areas. Without seeing historical data, it is hard to know whether this is a big change from the past or whether this has been the case for a long time. At the same time, it is hard to imagine that many rural areas can thrive when they experience little new job growth.
The Lake County Division of Transportation (LCDOT) closed Darrell, Neville and Case roads in Wauconda to through traffic for 110 days to construct a roundabout and realign the intersections…
This is the ninth roundabout in the Lake County Division of Transportation system. The $8.1 million project is the first of three roundabouts to be built as part of the Darrell Road corridor improvement.
Suburbanites are used to traffic lights and stop signs. Adding roundabouts or diamond interchanges presents a new dimension to driving. The roundabout offers the possibility of a smoother journey – if there is not too much traffic – but requires a different level of attention as there are multiple yield points.
Suburbanites can come to like roundabouts with experience. But, local drivers will likely need some time to get used to them. I am curious to see how many roundabouts will eventually populate the suburbs. They are likely not possible in many places due to existing land uses. However, if they help move traffic, are safe, and people can drive through them, we will probably see more of them in the Chicago region.
Dominating the New York skyline brought prestige and publicity, but tall towers also resolved a more prosaic problem: As land prices climbed, developers had to build upward to turn a profit, pushing their projects as high as engineering, natural light and, eventually, zoning would allow. “Skyscrapers were a self-fulfilling prophecy of the heated real estate market,” writes Neal Bascomb in his 2003 book Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City. By the 1920s, with Europe in ashes after World War I, these buildings became brash totems of a new world order. Manhattan in particular had become the “harbor of the world, messenger of the new land … of the gold diggers and of world conquest,” wrote the German architect Erich Mendelsohn in his seminal 1926 book Amerika, published the year after New York overtook London as the world’s most populous city.
In a dense space like Manhattan, demand for land pushed prices up. To make more money from the same plot of land, skyscrapers offered more space. The addition of thousands of square feet of office space, even if it could be hard to fill at times, provided profit.
I would be interested to see analysis shows the profits of a skyscraper over a lifetime compared to other options builders, developers, and companies could have pursued. Instead of building up in major cities, here are other options they could have pursued: building underground; building dense and wide buildings (imagine ones that cover several city blocks at a height of ten stories or so); constructing large buildings in other parts of the city and suburbs; and pursuing multiple business districts rather than centralized locations where everyone wants to gather.
Even if there was profit at stake, there is also the matter of the prestige of skyscrapers. Skyscrapers are important symbols in a city skyline. Were skyscrapers both profitable and status-enhancing or did the increased status mean that the absolute numbers did not matter quite as much?
On her latest release, 1989 (Taylor’s Release), Taylor Swift has a new song involving suburban life:
Here are the lyrics from the second time through the chorus:
I didn’t come here to make friends We were born to be suburban legends When you hold me, it holds me together And you kiss me in a way that’s gonna screw me up forever I know that you still remember We were born to be national treasures When you told me we’d get back together And you kissed me in a way that’s gonna screw me up forever
The song describes an ill-fated suburban romance. The main character imagines walking into a high school reunion and surprising former classmates with the person they are with.
What exactly makes the song suburban? This is less clear. A powerful romance that ends in heartbreak and wistfulness could take place in a number of American settings, including suburbs. Is this connected to suburban youth? It is about suburbanites looking back on a more exciting time of life? Does a flashy young romance in a suburb make them suburban legends?
Given that more than 50% of Americans live in suburbs, perhaps there are many people who could identify with these sentiments and certainly plenty of suburbanites who like Taylor Swift.
During the 20th century, Los Angeles home styles were as eclectic as its populace. Wood-shingled Craftsmans mingled with white stucco bungalows. Depending on the neighborhood, you might get an ornate Victorian, chic Midcentury Modern or even a Mayan Revival-style showplace — something that begs you to look at it, admire it. A house that invites an opinion, good or bad.
But although the box houses’ bulk draws attention, its design is basic. They’re like an iPhone: simple and smooth. Clean lines, glass walls, simple shades of white or black. Critics see them as soulless and inert.
Modern homes don’t have time or money for a turret, overhanging eave or stained-glass windows. Sloped ceilings, skylights and other superfluous accents take away from the bottom line — the largest amount of square footage possible for the cheapest possible construction price…
When such homes started popping up in the wake of the housing crash in 2008, some assumed the trend would be temporary. But demand for the style still rages on today…
The “bento boxes of today,” as Parsons calls them, are shiny, sleek and sexy, but he said they’ll be tomorrow’s tear-downs.
The article suggests these architectural styles are cyclical: builders, developers, real estate agents, municipalities, buyers, and others are involved in changing architectural styles. So, then the question here is whether these homes are here to stay or whether another style will emerge and the modern box home will fade?
If I had to guess, I would suggest the modern box home will hang on as a consistent but small presence in the LA housing market for several reasons. They are simple and relatively cheap to build. They offer a lot of space. In uncertain economic times and pricey housing markets, these are hard factors to overlook.
There is also a segment of the market that finds them attractive. The modernist home has been around for decades. Most Americans might not choose it as their preferred style but some would. In a large metropolitan region like Los Angeles, some will prefer this design.
Given the unique housing market of Los Angeles, perhaps the real question is whether modern homes are catching on elsewhere in the United States. When housing costs are not as high, is the modernist house one people want? In my area, several such homes come to mind but they are rare.
So if COVID isn’t to blame for all the shuttered stores, what is? Well, when a landlord doesn’t lower the rent to get a new retail tenant, it’s because that landlord can’t. The market that sets retail rents isn’t only between tenants and landlords. It’s also between landlords and the banks that finance the buildings. And the banks, in many cases, won’t let property owners lower their rents enough to fill their properties. The pandemic may have emptied out America’s storefronts, but it’s banks that are keeping them that way…
So if you’re trying to lower the rent on your retail space, your bank may say no. And even if it says yes, it might demand you pay off a chunk of the mortgage up front, to account for the way you’re lowering the building’s value by lowering its rental income. In short, reducing the rent on your storefront might land you a tenant — but it could cost you big-time with your bank.
Of course, nothing is forcing banks to be all hard-assed about it. They’re free to renegotiate or refinance the terms of mortgages, given the extraordinary downturn facing retail storefronts. In some cases, according to real-estate brokers I spoke with, banks have apparently decided not to stand in the way of landlords in San Francisco who are offering shorter-term leases and lowering retail rents anywhere from 20% to 50%. One popular restaurant space in the city’s tech-heavy South of Market neighborhood that has been dark since 2020 is finally set to reopen this year as a bar and “entertainment concept” — but only because the landlord is offering the new tenant a below-market rate and improvements to the space…
You’d think everyone involved would be motivated to fill an empty storefront — landlords aren’t making money, cities aren’t getting taxes, and the neighborhood has an eyesore. But that eyesore may actually still be profitable to the landlord and the banks. “In SoHo, something vacant isn’t necessarily vacant,” says Ortiz. “Someone’s paying rent there, and the landlord’s perfectly fine with it. It’s a vacancy to the pedestrian, but not to the landlord.”
Vacant properties can create all sorts of problems for communities. The focus on this story is on city properties but vacant properties are issues in suburbs as well. As the story suggests at the end, encouraging properties to be vacant for shorter periods of time and/or for banks to be more flexible might require some creativity.
I wonder if there is more third party actors – not the lender or the current lease holder – could do to provide solutions. Are there certain land uses that could be more temporary but fill vacant spaces? Are there agreements to be made between lenders and a tenant to make something of the property without t being a fully functioning property?
Could communities also more directly pressure lenders about vacant properties? Perhaps this happens more behind the scenes but imagine a community group organizes around asking a specific lender about a particular property in the neighborhood. They make some noise, make the lender public, ask for changes.
Legally Sociable 