Tag Archives: single-family homes

How much of their home do residents use?

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An op-ed opposing Los Angeles mansionization suggests owners of large homes don’t regularly use all that space:

In “Life at Home in the 21st Century,” UCLA researchers tracked 32 middle-class Angelenos, trying to measure and analyze how we live today. One family in particular they followed intimately, tracking how they moved around the house during the mornings, evenings, and weekends — when they were all home. The results were amazing: the family huddled around the kitchen and family room nearly all the time, leaving the living room, porch, and more than 50% of the rest of the first floor communal spaces almost entirely empty. The habit of gathering around the kitchen to eat, or huddling in front of the TV to watch, hasn’t changed much since the 1950s, but the average home size has — from 983 square feet in 1950 to more than 2,660 square feet today. Meanwhile, the average family size has shrunk and so has the average number of people living under one roof, from 3.3 in 1960 to 2.54 today.

See more about the book here. While the book appears to detail the heights of American consumerism (see this interview with one of the authors), it is interesting to consider how often rooms in a house are used. Are they really like office or store parking lots that tend to get used during certain work hours each day and then sit empty for more than half the day? Bedrooms operate that way during sleeping hours while gathering spaces – kitchens and family rooms – attract users in the evenings. Those hobby or storage rooms that are popular now – ranging from the man cave to a large closets – rarely see human activity. Could homes be made significantly smaller if the uses were combined or square footage was changed to reflect usage patterns? Or, should homes be built in a hub and spoke model around these key social spaces? On the other hand, American homes seem to privilege maintaining private spaces even if they aren’t used very much. The formal living room may be out but some homeowners seem to want private retreats (at least on TV, particularly in their bathrooms).

All of this gets back to you what homes are for in the first place. From decades ago to today, American homes often represent an escape from the outside world. A place to escape to with your family. A space where outsiders and the government cannot tread. Making such homes more communal is an interesting challenge when the homeowners need to be protected from forces outside the home.

Postwar suburban houses reviewed

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A review of two new books on postwar suburban homes points out some of the idiosyncrasies of the houses:

The one-story ranch loosened its belt and spread out, and the Split Level, that most American hippogriff of house hybrids, took flight. The origins of the split level are murky: it originally offered a small footprint and a means to make better use of sloped northeastern sites. But it soon spread to locations where neither item was a real concern. It was an easy means to reintroduce functional separations that residents soon realized were valuable: locating bedrooms a stairway away from living rooms wasn’t merely Victorian prudishness—it made good sense. Split levels also fueled the rise of that most suburban setting, the rec room, which was usually located in basements or lower levels and almost invariably a more informal children-oriented social space, frequently enabling the relative re-formalization of the main living room.That suburban building sited homes on big lots is not news, but what is worth noting, as Lane points out, is how the houses were designed in relation to those lots. The formal and inward-oriented facades of pre-war homes gave way to houses whose facades were dominated by the living room picture window, affording a glimpse not merely of one’s own yard but those of your neighbors. As Lane comments, “The windows looked out on the new landscapes that formed around them and also enhanced the perception of spaciousness so much desired by this generation.” The scenography was often repetitive, but it was open: As John Updike commented in Rabbit Redux, “now the view from any window is as into a fragmented mirror, of houses like this, telephone wires and television aerials showing where the glass cracked.”…

Distinctive design was rarest from the larger builders, but similar trends characterized a very wide swath of construction, despite an often complicated level of agency. Jacobs cites a National Association of Home Builders study in 1959 indicating that 38.3 percent of builders designed their own homes, 34 percent used a contract or in-house architect, 12 percent hired a designer of some sort, and 6 percent purchased blueprints through a commercial service. Countless independent and uncoordinated actors who end up producing a similar monotony is unfortunately often the story of America.

And my favorite part of this review:

Suburban building has long been reviled by sociologists and ignored by architects. As Lane comments, “scholarship has been delayed and disturbed by decades of neglect and dislike.” Some of that neglect and dislike is warranted: it’s hard to find all that much architectural distinction in the vast majority of suburban homes. Their general interchangeability discourages the kind of design interest that has given us many monographs on vernacular rowhouses and bungalows and only a handful on the ranch home. There are countless books on a dozen homes in New Canaan, Connecticut, but almost no books on the remaining thousands of homes there; that balance is mainly right—and yet.

Simply the sheer number of homes built in the decades after World War II meant that these design choices would be influential. With a massive housing shortage building up through the Great Depression and World War II, homes were needed quickly and the existing economic, political, social, and design forces led to these particular kinds of homes.

But, as a suburban scholar I agree that such homes have either gotten little attention or have been reviled. These homes were incredibly influential, even if they weren’t true Modernist structures or deviated too much from existing vernacular designs or weren’t designed by architects but rather were mass-produced. Much of the scholarship and commentary on these postwar homes is done from a critical, after-the-fact angle and with an implicit alternative vision of how an urbanized America might have turned out. There is some truth in all of these critiques: these suburban communities were racist (in that non-whites were typically not welcome), initially had particular visions of gender roles and family life, promoted consumerism and driving, and took up a lot of land without much thought of the consequences. At the same time, millions of Americans enjoyed their new homes and the opportunities that came with them.

A gallery of “spite houses”

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Curbed provides a look at the rare residences intended to spite someone else:

What’s not to love about a building called a “spite house?” In an essay in the New York Times, writer Kate Bolick discusses her dream of owning the Plum Island Pink House, a forlorn, decaying structure in Newbury, Massachusetts set in the middle of a salt marsh. The romantic, reclusive home stands alone for a reason; built by a recently divorced husband for his ex-wife as a condition of their separation, it’s an exact duplicate of their shared home, just uncomfortably moored in the middle of remote wetlands and constructed without any running fresh water. The square loner is part of a small but ignoble tradition of spite houses, buildings created for malice instead of comfort meant to irritate or enrage neighbors, or occasionally piss off anyone unfortunate enough to be dwelling inside. Normally built to block a neighbor’s light or access, they can be found as early at the 18th century. Here are some examples of homes or apartment that were built, or painted, out of anger.

Given the amount of work it can take to construct a home, these people must have had some serious spite. But, how exactly the spite translated into the form of a home took on some different patterns (based on the examples offered by Curbed): using particular pieces of land in unique ways (particularly small lots), exterior decorating that transforms what might be a normal home into what the neighbors would consider an eyesore, and then homes with specific architectural features (such as being overly large or emphasizing particular elements).

Two quick things I would want to know in these cases:

  1. Did building the spite house pay off? In other words, did constructing the home as a symbol help the aggrieved person feel better?
  2. How does the quality or longevity of these homes compare to typical residences? If constructed in haste or if more concerned about spite than construction, perhaps they wouldn’t stand the test of time.

Buying some of the oldest homes on the Chicago area market

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It is rare to find real estate listings for Chicago area homes built in the 1840s:

A couple of weeks ago, a really lovely historic home on a large lot in Lincoln Square listed. The house not only pre-dates the Great Chicago Fire, but it turns out that the house may actually be one of the oldest in Chicago. According to Crain’s, the original tax records show that a house on the property was built in 1849. It’s not exactly certain if the same house that hit the market two weeks ago is the same house, but either way, the home that does stand today was completed in the 1850s at the latest. However, out in the suburbs, there is one house that is also 166 years old and also on the market. The house at 2330 Coach Road in Long Grove, IL is one of the oldest houses in the Chicagoland area that is on the market. It’s also available to rent as well — for $2,200 per month. While its exterior certainly looks to be of very old construction, the interior has been completely renovated over the decades. While it may be common to find mid-19th century homes in cities on the East Coast, these houses in the Chicago area are about as old as they get out here.

This is about as old as it gets in the Chicago market. The northern parts of Illinois were not really settled until the 1830s. Illinois was declared a state in 1818 but a majority of the population lived in the central and southern parts as new residents came from the east via routes like the Ohio River. It wasn’t until the United States government got involved in planning and eventually constructing a canal in the northeastern part of the state to connect the Chicago River to the Des Plaines River (making a path from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River) that settlers started arriving in larger numbers. Of course, once people started coming, things started changing: the Illinois & Michigan Canal opened in 1848, the first railroad in and out of Chicago opened in 1848, and Chicago started growing quickly (growing over 500% from 1840 to 1850, 274% from 1850 to 1860, and 167% from 1860 to 1870).

Offset House on display in Chicago peels layers of balloon frame homes

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One of the featured designs in the Chicago Architecture Biennial involves a large home taken down to the timbers:

The droll Offset House by Otherothers in Sydney addresses lot-hogging McMansions by tucking smaller homes into the flabby frames of McMansions that have been stripped to the studs to serve as balconies and porches.

And a further description from the American Institute of Architects:

One of the most striking examples here is the Offset House from the Australian firm otherothers, which tears away the derivative façades of typical suburban housing to reveal simple stick-framed structural grace. The balloon frame was developed in Chicago, and otherothers uses it to create semi-public open-air verandas.

This is the best image I could find with some further description:

Using the Sydney suburb of Kellyville as its prototype, Otherothers suggests the adaptive reuse of timber-framed suburban homes by stripping off the outer cladding (often brick), exposing the outer frame, and creating a verandah in the space between the outer and interior frames. They claim there is beauty to be found in the exposed frames. They also propose that since the verandah would now define the home’s outer border, fences would no longer be necessary and spaces between houses could become shared common areas for gardening and communing.

The design seems to shrink the interior square footage (a waste to many McMansions critics) as well as alter the private nature of single-family homes (another critique of McMansions and suburban homes). The design also seems similar to some of the buildings in the post-World War II era that flaunted their essential infrastructure rather than cover it up. The retrofitted home still takes up the same footprint and the exterior balloon frame still requires maintenance. Yet, some of the critiqued aspects of the McMansion are softened and social life might improve. I’d be interested to see this in action across a whole neighborhood…

American homes grow in size yet lots shrink

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Zillow finds that American homes continue to grow larger even as their lots shrink:

Nationally, the median size of a new house is now 2,600 feet, a full 500 square feet (or almost 25 percent) more than it was just 15 years ago.

Yet the median lot size is now 8,600 square feet, down 1,000 square feet (or about 10 percent) over the same period:

Zillow continues to find interesting patterns in real estate data. So what could be behind this trend? Both the land and the home (materials, labor) cost developers and builders money. Thus, smaller lots with bigger houses can reduce land costs even as the home price might stay similar or increase because the home is growing. Or, perhaps this is also the result of land regulations from municipalities. Small lots could be preferred by some places because subdivisions and residential properties then take up less space.

One of the common complaints about McMansions is that the big house are on small lots. Yet, this may be necessary for some housing in order to (1) make housing more affordable (lower the costs for land) and (2) to limit damage to the environment (use less land and open land for more green space or open space).

The “Reincarnated McMansion Project” taking on big issues

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The Reincarnated McMansion Project of an Australian artist keeps developing:

His plan is simple enough: buy one giant, carbon-hungry McMansion on more than 800 square metres of land and carefully demolish the brick veneer home to rebuild four sustainable, affordable and architecturally designed townhouses for $450,000 each – less than half Sydney’s $1 million median house price…

Gallois’ dream is to create a company or strata-titled commune where like-minded “model citizens” embrace sustainable living rather than climbing the profit-centric property ladder…

The community-funded project has attracted sponsors and some of Australia’s best environmental architects – including Tone Wheeler, who designed the eco house on reality TV show Big Brother – which is why the price tag is so reasonable.

“We have raised half the money and we want one or two more families with like-minded values to register their interest,” Gallois said.

The price tag could be even cheaper if there was a family currently living in a McMansion who wanted to join the project and downsize into one of the eco-townhouses, which feature greywater treatment, a shared laundry and “features that save space and are good for the environment”.

Gallois is taking aim at several issues at once: the growing size of Australian homes, limiting the carbon footprint and energy use for single-family units, avoiding the “profit-centric property ladder,” and finding alternative funding to make this possible. It will likely take some time to do all of this; the third and fourth ones seem more difficult to me while the first two are already prompting a number of people in the United States and Australia to consider other options. The market for smaller homes may be growing as people consume differently and both retiring residents and younger people want some smaller options. Being more energy-efficient is more attractive with rising energy bills and it isn’t too hard to do some simple things in newer homes that could have positive long-term consequences. But, how do you get buyers to see their homes differently such as moving away from “the most bang for your buck” and having lots of extra space for things that owners might need? Or to find large enough funding sources to do this on a bigger scale when it may be more profitable to develop, build, and sell McMansions?

See an earlier June 2015 post on the project here.

Maybe the American lawn is dead

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Get through the history of the lawn and recent reactions to drought in California (see here, here, and here) and read one conclusion about the fate of the American lawn:

Maybe we really are in a new era. Maybe it will signal the end of our love affair with lawns. Maybe the new national landscape—a shared vision that inspires and enforces collective responsibility for a shared world—will take on a new kind of wildness. Maybe, as the billboards dotting California’s highways cheerily insist, “Brown Is the New Green.” Maybe the yard of the future will feature wildflowers and native grasses and succulent greenery, all jumbled together in assuring asymmetry. Maybe we will come to find all that chaos beautiful. Maybe we will come to shape our little slices of land, if we’re lucky enough to have them, in a way that pays tribute to the America that once was, rather than the one we once willed.

Here are four reasons why I think this will take some time – if indeed a majority of Americans do get rid of their lawns in the next few decades:

  1. What California has experienced hasn’t hit many other states. For much of the country, this drought is still an abstraction.
  2. Americans associate their green lawn with their single-family home with kids and all the success that the lawn and home symbolize. This is a simplification with some validity: the green lawn = the American Dream. This is why so many neighborhoods and communities fuss about and fine lawns that don’t look good.
  3. The lawn industry will fight back. Yes, the lawn industry has a lot invested in this and could develop varieties of lawn that need less water as well as champion alternatives that they can sell.
  4. A return to “nature” in our yards isn’t exactly real nature. It is another human modified version. Some replacements for lawn could take less work than the perfect grass lawn – but others will still require a good amount of maintenance. And I’m not sure how many homeowners really want truly untended yards.

“The Architecture of American Houses” in one poster

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A new poster covers over 400 years of residential architecture in the United States:

https://i0.wp.com/mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/p-americanhouses_fpo1.png

In all, the new poster features 121 hand-drawn American homes divided up into seven primary categories—Colonial, Folk/Vernacular, Romantic, Victorian, Eclectic, Modern, Neo-Eclectic—and 40 subdivisions, such as Italian Renaissance Revival, Ranch, and the dreaded McMansion.

Just mail me a copy and I will put it on the wall in my office. Three quick thoughts on the styles depicted:

1. I don’t see the split-level. Of course, it could be built in a variety of these styles but it is a unique arrangement that is common in many suburban areas.

2. The McMansion is at the bottom left as a separate category and it looks appropriately large, out of proportion, and multi-gabled. Yet, how different is it from the other “new traditional designs” on the rest of the bottom row? The “new traditionals” depicted here are more architecturally pure but they are similarly large. How much architectural mismash qualifies a house to be a McMansion? And can’t a architecturally accurate yet overly large, particularly if a teardown, still be considered a McMansion?

3. The subdivision grouping idea is an interesting one as it implies certain kinds of homes are found together. This probably is often the case as subdivisions typically have a limited number of designs and are built within a several year stretch. Yet, some places may not match this due to longer development spans (imagine a place with larger lots initially that are later broken up and built on) or denser urban areas where there is more construction and housing turnover.

Only 8% of new American homes under 1,400 square feet

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Even with the rise of tiny houses (with a new push by HGTV), most American new homes are nowhere near this small. According to Census data, only 8% of new homes constructed in 2014 were under 1,400 square feet. And the median square footage for new homes was 2,453 and the average was 2,657.

As noted in earlier posts, the size of the tiny house movement is unclear. They may be popular in particular situations such as cities with affordability issues (like San Francisco or New York City) or dealing with homelessness. This is the case even with a sluggish housing market for starter homes and the burst housing bubble of the late 2000s.

What is the future for tiny houses? I suspect it will continue as a niche movement. Many Americans still like larger homes and their stuff and have a hard time imagining paring down their life that much. Perhaps semi-tiny houses will become popular: the 100-200 square foot homes ask for a big sacrifice but housing units of 700-1,000 square feet are doable (and not already uncommon in denser cities). It might take the efforts of a major city or developer really getting behind smaller homes to convince a larger group of people that this is the way to go. But, outside of specialized uses, it would take a big shift to get many to build and/or buy such small houses.