Felt like I read a wonderful book in 5 minutes. That was a (to my mind) politically neutral tour de force that captured the last 150 years of housing policy, grounding its thesis with fascinating images and writing.
As incremental construction goes, my grandma's house in North Dakota is a pretty good example. It went from a one story small home to a two story home with a wrap-around deck. I'm sure it was some ordered house put on a basement. It had an outhouse in the 70's but indoor plumbing was added. I remember sometime in the 80's putting in a support beam so they could remove some of the walls and support the second story. It was an all-hands task of the relatives with most of my uncle and aunts. I remember Dad's reaction when Grandma announced she had bought a wood stove to put in the house. That was a fun install requiring the removal of a wall, brick base, and running venting.
There was a bit of danger in all this expansion. The look of utter horror on my Dad's and Uncle's face when we turned off all the breakers and the stove was still on makes me laugh but was deadly serious at the time. Fixing that was a bit of an adventure. Dad and Uncle traced every wire in the damn house and I learned some new insults.
> Growing vegetables on what should be a lawn is verboten in many locations, if not by the government than by private association bylaws.
I'm aware that some HOAs limit (sometimes to what seems like an extreme) what can be done with the yard and lawn, but I wasn't aware of any governments that ban growing vegetables. Is that more common in water-restricted municipalities? (I live in midwestern US, where backyard gardens are very common.)
I know in Florida because of orange canker if one orange tree has it basically all orange trees within a 1-mile radius have to be destroyed. This is state law because of the orange produce farms lobbying.
It’s almost unheard of to see suburban or wild orange trees in south Florida anymore.
This is interesting/ strange to me. I grew up in the Midwest and a modest garden in the backyard was often the case. I’ve never heard of them being banned. I don’t doubt they are some places.
I’m sure some suburban guy decided to plow his front yard and be a corn farmer, but generally I find nobody minds a garden.
> Is that more common in water-restricted municipalities?
Where I live, watering outdoor plants is only allowed 3 days a week, and only before 9AM or after 6PM on those three days. That doesnt mean growing vegetables is specifically illegal, but it does mean starting seedlings requires breaking the law during the warmer months.
I've never heard of anything like that. Outside of HOAs, most regulations we see about the front are length of grass, what can and can't be done at the easement, public health issues, and maybe laws about invasive plant species. My wife used to work at a company that codified these laws, and she didn't know of anything either.
I have a friend who lives in a rural area. He'd like to build a house on some land he owns that is unsuitable for farming (too steep) but he is unable to get a construction loan from the bank as they will not write a loan that is secured only by the property. Incremental construction might be the only way to do it (assuming the county will issue him a building permit that would span 5+ years).
Being debt-free within a few years of the house being completed has a lot to be said for it. But when a loan payment is 80% or more interest at the start, that's a lot of profit for a lender to give up - they're not exactly going to be jumping at the opportunity to write those loans.
Banks don’t Usually hold loans. The loans are typically packages and sold as bundles to institutional investors and banks get a cut of the deal with minimal risk. But to do that banks have to follow rules on what the packages look like so only certain products get loans and everything else isn’t worth dealing with
He should check this lender https://www.umpquabank.com/ I have been watching some videos from a local builder and he says they will do off-grid construction loans.
A contradistinction: Traditional Queensland houses are built raised on stumps, first, because of floods and cooling airflow under (sub tropical)
When you can afford Air Conditioning, or have too many babies you build under.
So our pattern is build high first, fill in later. The one here is "build basement first, digging under the ground with a house on it, is a pain"
(also raised because termites: gumtree hard stumps treated with CCA can survive them, siding and framing wood less so. Modern build tends to be either a slab of concrete and single storey, or a mcMansion, or units)
This style of incremental building seems to be still in existence in Southern Europe.
It‘s not uncommon to see unfinished concrete structures. Basically the raw skeleton often with exposed rebar at the top or sides, indicating future work.
They may stay in this state for years. As apparently everything is paid in cash and so building only advances whenever the owners have enough at hand.
In Spain it also related to planning permission. Once the building work has finished, you need to have the planning permission paper work in order. Therefore they often leave one small room unfinished (exposed on the outside wall) to claim work is still in progress.
I saw a good documentary on shell construction in South America as a means to improve access to home ownership, as well as to allow homeowners to significantly customize the homes over time. We don’t see this much in the US but it makes sense to me.
I once stayed in an AirBNB in Crete where the lower floors of the building were occupied and the upper floors hadn't been built. If you carried on up the stairs past our apartment, you ended up at what looked like an building site with concrete floors and exposed steel beams. I didn't see any building work happening while I was there.
“I asked why and was told that by the 1950s it was clear that the national economy had re-centered away from agriculture and small farm towns to a handful of big cities.”
You were told wrong by more than 30 years. The US was officially more urban than rural by the 1920 census but the demographic trend had been going on for 50 years before that.
By 1900 1 in 10 Americans lived in just 5 cities (NYC, Chicago, Philly, St Louis & Boston).
They aren't wrong, and neither are you. Population growth was large in the cities due to immigration. And if you had many children on a farm, you couldn't divide the land for the next generation and still be profitable, so they had to move to cities. What happened from the 50s-80s were small farms being given up because they weren't economical.
The machinery during the 50s-60s eliminated a lot of agricultural jobs, and drive down prices. Not just for farmers, but also in processing agricultural products.
Note that, the census considers many “small farm towns” to be “urban areas.” For example, Sibley, Iowa, where my wife grew up. It qualifies because it’s population is 3,000 people (over the 2,500 limit the census bureau uses). But it’s not what most people would consider to be an “urban area.”
The farm my father bought in rural Ohio for his retirement had a house that started life as a basement house. It was built in the 50s, and the basement had a kitchen, full bath, a very nice fireplace, and a few other rooms. Plus the garage. The ground floor basically re-did it all. My father's theory was that they did the basement first, then built the rest of the house later. I hadn't realized such a thing was common.
There was one of these basement houses in my neighborhood (mostly built in the 40s) until a few months ago when it was flipped and they built a top floor on it making it look like a completely different (and unremarkable) house.
My wife and I have talked about building something incrementally recently. Looking at what we could afford, we can't purchase an actual house, but we could get some land for a reasonable price. So, we were thinking of getting an airstream, buying some land, and then building a set of smaller buildings like this around the property as we got the funds. However, there can be lot of pushback on this from what I read.
Thinking about codes and permits, I think the idea of self-reinforcing change is interesting here. As more people rent or frequently buy/sell, it makes more and more sense to have strict safety codes and permitting rules because the people building and making money off the structure don't bear the safety risks of bad construction. But as this raises costs and places barriers, it makes renting more common, etc.
I think the last two paragraphs, which I quoted below, sum up exactly something that has been on my mind for a while now.
Somehow, while we were all busy debating for or against this or that political view, we, common people, lost control of more and more of our existence.
We lost control of the food we eat, the kind of houses we live in (as this article explains), the way we invest our money, our work schedules, our means of production, our means of transportation (and more).
Saying this, immediately triggers alarm bells (ah! He is saying that buildings should not be regulated, he must be a libertarian right winger! Oh! He says we need to own the means of production? He's obviously a communist!) and this prevents us from discussing many of the things that really matter.
--
> I want you, dear reader, to set aside all the squirrelly feelings you may have about the political Left or Right. Perhaps you hate the evils of Big Government or the evils of Corporate Capitalism. Maybe you like cities. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like the kinds of people who live in them. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like places that are a bit messy. Maybe you need a place that’s orderly and tidy. That’s not the point I’m making here.
> Look at these images of the Summerlin West development on the far edge of Las Vegas. The scale is massive and the same dynamics are at work. Everything about this place is enormous and predicated on vast amounts of institutional complexity and debt. Somehow, as a society, we’ve drifted from ordinary people being able to build their own homes on a cash basis in an interactive iterative way, to these immense hyper elaborate habitats. You may not aspire to live in a small underground home that takes years to complete. The Summerlin West homes may be better in many ways. But there are trade offs involved. Both individuals and the larger society have agreed to a set of interlocking delicate systems that are simultaneously highly effective and spectacularly vulnerable to disruption. That’s my point.
“One by one the old parking lots, gas stations, and muffler shops are being transformed into new structures and uses.”
Not if the SF Board of Supervisors has anything to say about it. They’ve actively blocked the transformation of parking lots into dense house as recently as this year. SF is anti housing somehow wrapped in a veneer of progressivism.
My wife recently pointed out a real estate listing for a basement home very like the flat roof variant in the first part of the article. Not sure where she saw it, while in the same state it's rural.
I'd actually figured it as someone making the best of what was left after a tornado or other disaster.
Fascinating! In many parts of the world, the incremental approach seems alive and well. I'm sure many have had the experience of traveling in a developing country and wondering why it seems that all the buildings are unfinished. Rebar sticking out everywhere! It actually makes a lot of sense, when one does not have access to credit or even a safe place to save money. You build your house as you can afford each component, storing the value that way - take any surplus cash, buy some more bricks, and add them to the house.
This is quite a tangent (it's a novel, not some non-fiction deep-dive) but A House for Mr Biswas (VS Naipaul) is a great book that I'd recommend, your comment just reminded me of it.
I live in one of the earliest post-WW2 planned suburbs (in Maryland). Many of the houses here are two-storey and were built as such, but with the second floor unfinished (in other words just an attic with no interior walls, decoration, etc) until the owners needed the space and had the money.
On some other streets, people have added a floor to what were originally built as one-level homes.
My parent's house was built like this! The previous owners built a single story basement house into a hill, and then added the main story later in the 60's. It's a cute little ranch now, but sort of weird in that the basement now has all the hook ups needed for a kitchen.
The idea of HOAs having any kind of say feels so undemocratic, but not in a standard way. We should not tolerate purely popular democracies. We allow representative democracies, and part of that public contract is for our leaders to represent all those in their constituency, not just those who voted for them.
That means those in the minority. The crazy guy growing gourds instead of a lawn. The loon with the purple house. The impoverished who can’t paint their house every other year. Those kinds of folk need representation the most.
When I bought my first house, I purposefully avoided any neighborhood with an HOA because of all the internet scare mongering I had heard over the years.
After ten years of one neighbor parking cars on their lawn, another growing more weeds than blades of grass, and another with 8 vehicles parked along the street I was done.
When I bought my second house I specifically wanted an HOA. After another 6 years, I couldn’t be happier. Yes the HOA prevents me from doing a handful of things, things that aren’t really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. While the HOA keeps the entire neighborhood looking nice and slaps people on the wrist when they need it.
I suspect HOAs are even less democratic than you describe. My wife was president of a small HOA for the last 5 years or so. Most of the community wasn't involved at all. My wife's main job was to work with the management company to keep things sane and the few other people who were involved in check and preventing overreach. At the same time it's hard to change the existing HOA rules. I don't even know where the HOA comes from. It predates almost everyone who still lives here. I suspect the developers put it in place. So likely none of the current residents had any input in the rules and bylaws. At one point someone pushed for dissolving the HOA. That was quickly abandoned one the management company laid out the legal process which was overwhelming and didn't seem worth it to anyone
This is just the eternal conflict between people's freedoms.
Negative liberties ("freedom from") are limited and relatively easy to regulate. If you ban people from killing each other and stealing their property, almost everyone agrees it's not a huge burden. While these liberties sometimes come into conflict, such situations tend to be rare.
In practice, people care more about positive liberties ("freedom to"). In particular, they want the freedom to live a good life. Unfortunately people have different ideas of a good life, and those ideas usually require other people living their lives in a certain way and providing various services. If you try regulating this, you start quickly making choices who is allowed to live a good life.
Because laws are insufficient for a good life, people make voluntary agreements to ensure it. If certain kinds of agreements (such as HOAs) become popular, they can effectively prevent some minorities from living their idea of a good life. But the agreements are only a symptom, not the cause. The real cause are other people. Without HOAs, the same people would try getting actual governments regulate the same behavior. And failing to do so, they would often feel that the society prevents them from living a good life.
> We should not tolerate purely popular democracies.
Open town meetings, which are pure democracies, have been working pretty well in New England for quite a long time now, with the biggest issues in modern times being low attendence and committee overstep.
How is it undemocratic? They agreed to the terms of the HOA when they bought the place... They move to some place and then are upset when people don't like them doing certain things? This is a weirdly entitled view.
I was an HOA board member in Las Vegas for a while. I was absolutely voted into the position and had to stand for reelection every year. The board voted on enforcement actions, and based on public requests and debate occasionally drew up amendments to the regulations (usually clarifications and closing loopholes) for popular ⅔ majority ratification.
> Those kinds of folk need representation the most.
An understandable sentiment. How much are you willing to pay for it? If you have a $1.5 million mortgage and that loon shows up next door and paints their house purple, your house might lose $300,000 in value. Same with the other neighbors, who also pay mortgages but aren’t as compassionate as you.
What happens when your spouse gets a sudden offer to relocate and you can’t make your money back on the house?
> Growing vegetables on what should be a lawn is verboten in many locations, if not by the government than by private association bylaws.
So again, USA is country with most freedom? Freedom™, but you can't grow vegetables on your own property. Or you will be punished for having too long grass. Lmao
What the author is describing are rules of homeowner's associations and other similar organizations.
Individuals freely enter agreements with homeowner's associations which dictate land use. One is also free to choose to live in a place not governed by these rules. But, they are not the law of the land and they do not implicate a lack of freedom in the U.S. relative to other countries. Its quite silly to suggest as much.
I specifically chose my neighborhood based on the HOA. I like that every yard has a lawn and that I don’t have to listen to neighbors chickens. I like knowing no one is allowed to paint giant murals on the siding or drill for oil on their front lawn.
The only way to guarantee things like this don’t happen is with some sort of rules in place.
That rule about vegetables I've only ever heard applied to front yards which on American front yards looks pretty weird anyways. Most of our homes have backyards where it makes a lot more sense to put vegetables.
There are plenty of rural areas of the US where there are little to no building codes. Cities and municipalities of course do, but if freedom to build what you want, how you want is desired, you can find those areas easily.
Residential zoning is just so wrong. It’s trendy on the left to say it’s “racist” and it is that, but it’s also classist and elitist and WASP supremacist (e.g. banning multigenerational families, which are common among both Hispanics and lower-tier whites).
I live in a pre-zoning code suburb in Maryland. The current minimum lot size is 20,000 square feet. Our house and most of the neighboring houses are on 2,900 square foot lots. At least on this side of the neighborhood, nobody tattles on each other for doing unpermitted work. The result is real diversity and a tightly packed community. (Though as housing prices increase, our neighborhood, being so close to DC, is under threat from PMCs.)
tomcam|3 years ago
jimmydddd|3 years ago
protomyth|3 years ago
There was a bit of danger in all this expansion. The look of utter horror on my Dad's and Uncle's face when we turned off all the breakers and the stove was still on makes me laugh but was deadly serious at the time. Fixing that was a bit of an adventure. Dad and Uncle traced every wire in the damn house and I learned some new insults.
geoffeg|3 years ago
I'm aware that some HOAs limit (sometimes to what seems like an extreme) what can be done with the yard and lawn, but I wasn't aware of any governments that ban growing vegetables. Is that more common in water-restricted municipalities? (I live in midwestern US, where backyard gardens are very common.)
yardie|3 years ago
It’s almost unheard of to see suburban or wild orange trees in south Florida anymore.
fsagx|3 years ago
Dear Modern Farmer: Can I Legally Grow Food in My Front Yard?
https://modernfarmer.com/2013/06/dear-modern-farmer-can-i-le...
oak park hates veggies- trying to make sense of oak park's war on vegetables:
https://oakparkhatesveggies.wordpress.com/about/
Homeowners Across the Country Face Citations for Illegal Gardening:
https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/right-to-g...
duxup|3 years ago
I’m sure some suburban guy decided to plow his front yard and be a corn farmer, but generally I find nobody minds a garden.
ac29|3 years ago
Where I live, watering outdoor plants is only allowed 3 days a week, and only before 9AM or after 6PM on those three days. That doesnt mean growing vegetables is specifically illegal, but it does mean starting seedlings requires breaking the law during the warmer months.
bin_bash|3 years ago
iratewizard|3 years ago
cheriot|3 years ago
chiph|3 years ago
Being debt-free within a few years of the house being completed has a lot to be said for it. But when a loan payment is 80% or more interest at the start, that's a lot of profit for a lender to give up - they're not exactly going to be jumping at the opportunity to write those loans.
rdtwo|3 years ago
bombcar|3 years ago
Then with that in place you modify it toward a house.
Or drag a mobile home onto the lot for temporary.
gscott|3 years ago
ggm|3 years ago
When you can afford Air Conditioning, or have too many babies you build under.
So our pattern is build high first, fill in later. The one here is "build basement first, digging under the ground with a house on it, is a pain"
(also raised because termites: gumtree hard stumps treated with CCA can survive them, siding and framing wood less so. Modern build tends to be either a slab of concrete and single storey, or a mcMansion, or units)
pintxo|3 years ago
It‘s not uncommon to see unfinished concrete structures. Basically the raw skeleton often with exposed rebar at the top or sides, indicating future work.
They may stay in this state for years. As apparently everything is paid in cash and so building only advances whenever the owners have enough at hand.
oxfordmale|3 years ago
gkop|3 years ago
Veen|3 years ago
bombcar|3 years ago
kasey_junk|3 years ago
You were told wrong by more than 30 years. The US was officially more urban than rural by the 1920 census but the demographic trend had been going on for 50 years before that.
By 1900 1 in 10 Americans lived in just 5 cities (NYC, Chicago, Philly, St Louis & Boston).
giantg2|3 years ago
The machinery during the 50s-60s eliminated a lot of agricultural jobs, and drive down prices. Not just for farmers, but also in processing agricultural products.
rayiner|3 years ago
drewg123|3 years ago
armadsen|3 years ago
sheepybloke|3 years ago
bo1024|3 years ago
Thinking about codes and permits, I think the idea of self-reinforcing change is interesting here. As more people rent or frequently buy/sell, it makes more and more sense to have strict safety codes and permitting rules because the people building and making money off the structure don't bear the safety risks of bad construction. But as this raises costs and places barriers, it makes renting more common, etc.
mastazi|3 years ago
Somehow, while we were all busy debating for or against this or that political view, we, common people, lost control of more and more of our existence.
We lost control of the food we eat, the kind of houses we live in (as this article explains), the way we invest our money, our work schedules, our means of production, our means of transportation (and more).
Saying this, immediately triggers alarm bells (ah! He is saying that buildings should not be regulated, he must be a libertarian right winger! Oh! He says we need to own the means of production? He's obviously a communist!) and this prevents us from discussing many of the things that really matter.
--
> I want you, dear reader, to set aside all the squirrelly feelings you may have about the political Left or Right. Perhaps you hate the evils of Big Government or the evils of Corporate Capitalism. Maybe you like cities. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like the kinds of people who live in them. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like places that are a bit messy. Maybe you need a place that’s orderly and tidy. That’s not the point I’m making here.
> Look at these images of the Summerlin West development on the far edge of Las Vegas. The scale is massive and the same dynamics are at work. Everything about this place is enormous and predicated on vast amounts of institutional complexity and debt. Somehow, as a society, we’ve drifted from ordinary people being able to build their own homes on a cash basis in an interactive iterative way, to these immense hyper elaborate habitats. You may not aspire to live in a small underground home that takes years to complete. The Summerlin West homes may be better in many ways. But there are trade offs involved. Both individuals and the larger society have agreed to a set of interlocking delicate systems that are simultaneously highly effective and spectacularly vulnerable to disruption. That’s my point.
wordnerd2022|3 years ago
Not if the SF Board of Supervisors has anything to say about it. They’ve actively blocked the transformation of parking lots into dense house as recently as this year. SF is anti housing somehow wrapped in a veneer of progressivism.
fencepost|3 years ago
I'd actually figured it as someone making the best of what was left after a tornado or other disaster.
ZeroGravitas|3 years ago
https://www.archdaily.com/797779/half-a-house-builds-a-whole...
waiseristy|3 years ago
thenoblesunfish|3 years ago
OJFord|3 years ago
ddoran|3 years ago
[1] - https://twitter.com/zillowgonewild/status/152662553013669478...
WalterBright|3 years ago
anonymouse008|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
Ichthypresbyter|3 years ago
On some other streets, people have added a floor to what were originally built as one-level homes.
sheepybloke|3 years ago
gorgoiler|3 years ago
That means those in the minority. The crazy guy growing gourds instead of a lawn. The loon with the purple house. The impoverished who can’t paint their house every other year. Those kinds of folk need representation the most.
mmh0000|3 years ago
After ten years of one neighbor parking cars on their lawn, another growing more weeds than blades of grass, and another with 8 vehicles parked along the street I was done.
When I bought my second house I specifically wanted an HOA. After another 6 years, I couldn’t be happier. Yes the HOA prevents me from doing a handful of things, things that aren’t really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. While the HOA keeps the entire neighborhood looking nice and slaps people on the wrist when they need it.
ajmurmann|3 years ago
jltsiren|3 years ago
Negative liberties ("freedom from") are limited and relatively easy to regulate. If you ban people from killing each other and stealing their property, almost everyone agrees it's not a huge burden. While these liberties sometimes come into conflict, such situations tend to be rare.
In practice, people care more about positive liberties ("freedom to"). In particular, they want the freedom to live a good life. Unfortunately people have different ideas of a good life, and those ideas usually require other people living their lives in a certain way and providing various services. If you try regulating this, you start quickly making choices who is allowed to live a good life.
Because laws are insufficient for a good life, people make voluntary agreements to ensure it. If certain kinds of agreements (such as HOAs) become popular, they can effectively prevent some minorities from living their idea of a good life. But the agreements are only a symptom, not the cause. The real cause are other people. Without HOAs, the same people would try getting actual governments regulate the same behavior. And failing to do so, they would often feel that the society prevents them from living a good life.
technothrasher|3 years ago
Open town meetings, which are pure democracies, have been working pretty well in New England for quite a long time now, with the biggest issues in modern times being low attendence and committee overstep.
guerrilla|3 years ago
giantg2|3 years ago
That's the statement, but it's never worked that way. Of course minority groups have been steamrolled
webmaven|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
tomcam|3 years ago
An understandable sentiment. How much are you willing to pay for it? If you have a $1.5 million mortgage and that loon shows up next door and paints their house purple, your house might lose $300,000 in value. Same with the other neighbors, who also pay mortgages but aren’t as compassionate as you.
What happens when your spouse gets a sudden offer to relocate and you can’t make your money back on the house?
djvdq|3 years ago
So again, USA is country with most freedom? Freedom™, but you can't grow vegetables on your own property. Or you will be punished for having too long grass. Lmao
next_xibalba|3 years ago
Individuals freely enter agreements with homeowner's associations which dictate land use. One is also free to choose to live in a place not governed by these rules. But, they are not the law of the land and they do not implicate a lack of freedom in the U.S. relative to other countries. Its quite silly to suggest as much.
nsxwolf|3 years ago
The only way to guarantee things like this don’t happen is with some sort of rules in place.
If that means I hate freedom, oh well.
bin_bash|3 years ago
If you look at this article about it I think you can see why it would be banned: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/illegal-kitchen-garden_n_1687...
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
Maursault|3 years ago
When I was poor, I just wanted a home I could afford in a safe neighborhood. Now that I have money, I just want poor people to be homeless.
/mockery
rayiner|3 years ago
I live in a pre-zoning code suburb in Maryland. The current minimum lot size is 20,000 square feet. Our house and most of the neighboring houses are on 2,900 square foot lots. At least on this side of the neighborhood, nobody tattles on each other for doing unpermitted work. The result is real diversity and a tightly packed community. (Though as housing prices increase, our neighborhood, being so close to DC, is under threat from PMCs.)
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
k__|3 years ago
Disgusting.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]