I remember back in the 80’s, when new houses were still modest compared to the McMansions of the 90’s and 00’s, a girlfriend looked at a subdivision under construction and asked “Are those houses or shopping malls?”.
Then it occured to me: these homes are designed for people who dream of living in a shopping mall!
Look at the way they are built – downstairs a home furnishing, electronics and appliance showroom, with an upstairs gallery featuring the contents of several shoe stores, a clothing/sporting goods store, and a toy store.
Not to mention the auto showroom out in front of the house…

Posted by: ralphieboy | Apr 9 2008 14:36 utc | 4

Great discussion, how the commercial strip style matches new houses. Another slant–How long do the houses last? It just has to make it to the flip. A few years ago, you could rely on a flip after five years. Those days are over. Two technical changes facilitated the style.
One was truss construction (with truss plates, introduced in the late 70s). Traditional roof framing required deep dry framing lumber, and considerable carpentry skill. The guy who taught me to use a framing square said he once used it to predict Halley’s comet. With trusses, practically any span could be roofed using fast-growing 2x4s, the truss shop did all the design, and the only skill required was preventing a progressive truss collapse before the sheathing is put on. Developers like “cut-up” roofs, and despise the look of post-war simple roofs. A hundred years ago, a complex roof system, with dormers and varying cornices, meant there was a variety of living conditions beneath. Now the complexity of the roof is independent of uses below—it all starts at the top plate. The attic is a useless forest of web members.
The other was OSB (Oriented Strand Board, but nothing’s oriented), introduced in the late 80s. The wood industry argues that the veneer-quality trees for making plywood are going fast. I’ve also heard that the plywood shops were union, the OSB plants are not, can’t verify that. It is of varying quality: some recently shipped to Iraq had fist-sized holes in it and would break in two if picked up by one person. OSB is manufactured under high temperature and pressure, so it must, of necessity, relax over time. Before OSB, a building could be made, in theory at least, to last indefinitely. With OSB it cannot, it will naturally degrade to mush even with the best design and upkeep, we just don’t know when. It is much more sensitive to moisture than plywood. Once it begins to relax and fluff, the loss of structural properties accelerates quickly. The results of fire tests are not encouraging, either. In a way, the US went off the gold standard onto the petroleum standard, and if the basket-of-currencies movement kicks in, it’ll be on the OSB standard. That’s pretty dumb.
Normally, you’d think a decline in skill and quality basic products for frame construction would lead to a tightening of the market. But the “advances” fed dreams of bigger houses. The same thing occurred when mortgage discounts began to be offered for homes that were rated as energy conserving. Prospective homeowners took advantage of those discounts by buying larger properties. Now our local energy utility is starting an Energy Portfolio project, in which a surcharge will be added to all payments, and reimbursements will be offered for proof of purchase of insulation and other energy-saving commodities. As if we could consume our way to conservation. Like Orwell saying Consumption is Conservation.
If the flip days are over, and house values are still trying to find the floor, perhaps that’s not all bad. Its value as shelter might begin to peek through. What to do about all the people who hold on to these houses, or barely hold on, or those who lose them to foreclosure? Eliot Spitzer pointed out last Valentine’s day that Bush ordered the OCC to preempt all existing state predatory lending laws. I doubt that troubled homeowners will view Bush, as Spitzer did, as predatory lending’s Partner in Crime. Speaking from inside the construction industry, it’s too easy to blame Bush and the mortgage bankers. We let this crap slide. Dang.

Posted by: Browning | Apr 9 2008 14:56 utc | 6

@Browning, fascinating post. I am not a builder and don’t know the jargon, but I recognise all the attributes you describe — the attic space that is a useless forest of 2x4s not even available for storage (yet more conspicuous wastage), the pressboard (OSB) being used more and more for wall sheathing (wrapped in Tyvek or similar for “moisture proofing”, hollow laughter).
I lived for over 20 years in a nearly 100-y-o house made of sawmill redwood, milled when 2x6s and 2x8s were really 2×6 and 2×8. It lived through several earthquakes. Termites lunched happily off the soft pine cosmetic sheathing and trim, but they didn’t care for the old, hard, dense heart redwood of the core structure. It creaked in storm winds and was not “up to code” but if prudently maintained it should stand another 100 years. However its most probable fate is to be bulldozed so that a pressboard mini-trophy-home can be built on the tiny lot.
It’s generally recognised throughout the boatbuilding world that good wood is a vanishing resource and most of what is on offer at the lumber yards is trash wood. “You just can’t get the wood anymore” is a doleful chorus wherever sparmakers, riggers, wooden boat repair artists congregate. And there’s a kind of simmering rage among these artisans when they mutter that much of that fine old-growth wood was made into chipboard and newspapers. The situation is exactly analogous to — no, it’s the same process as the fisheries collapse. I have said before at MoA and elsewhere that people are eating fish today that my Granddad would have used for bait; the “high value” fish have been decimated, driven to the point of rarity and/or extinction (“commercial extinction” as the industry calls it with inadvertent truthfulness), and all that is left are “trash fish” (by earlier standards — human adaptability means that they are now considered normal eating). Same is true in the world of food production generally: capitalism has focussed on enormous quantity and maximal profit squeezing (i.e. deskilling and labour shedding) while liquidating high-value resources, so that huge numbers of people are eating, basically, industrial waste, byproducts of slaughterhouse, mill, and cannery, food-like substances as devoid of human skill and care as they are of nutritional value.
The end result is a kind of hollowness all around: “food” that is not really food, “wood” that is not really wood, houses that are not really houses… all this bankruptcy masquerading as wealth, under a thin skin of brightly coloured plastic.
In areas more heavily inhabited for more millennia than the temperate North, this liquidation proceeded to its end equilibrial state and left the kind of Asian feudalism we know from literature, cultural osmosis, history: a biome reduced for the most part to fast-growing weedy species and human food crops, a small number of aristos enjoying the very scarce high-value, durable resources remaining (good wood, animal protein, open spaces etc) and a large population of peasants creatively using low-value, quick-growing, weedy biota for housing and food. We seem to be headed there.
But the spooky thing about the capitalist version of feudalism is that even the “trash” materials foisted off on the peasants are unsustainable and fossil-intensive (like factory-caught and -farmed trash fish, like cruddy pressboard made from — and doesn’t this make your hair stand on end — old-growth hard and softwood looted from the S Hemi, like trash oils and carbs from the massively overcapitalised food processing sector). So even the peasants are deprived of creativity or self sufficiency and become clients of the vastly wasteful fossil-fueled liquidation machinery instead of gleaners or repurposers working outside it…
It all makes my head hurt. And my heart.

Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 9 2008 16:56 utc | 8

We are all Mad Maxes now.
I lived in a brick house in Brooklyn, built in 1929 as part of an attached four-house development.
This type of house is common on the East Coast; long and narrow from the front with a tiny garden and stoop, living room, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor, with two bedrooms and bath up.
Over the course of 10 years we had the entire ground floor walls and recessed ceiling replastered (!) and removed, stripped and re-installed all the doors, sash windows and hardware, had the oak floors (hand-nailed with beautiful dark inlay patterns in every corner) redone, changed the oil burner and tank to natural gas, redid the flat roof (3 men, 3 days at 90-100 degrees!), rebuilt the kitchen from scratch (stripping and refinishing the original cabinets, adding new shaker-style maple cabinet doors), replaced the upstairs plaster with new drywall, and finished the basement including washer and dryer.
Much of this work we did ourselves with the guidance of a relative who had spent his life building houses and upgrading and repairing homes of the same vintage.
During this time the contents of the garage in back ebbed and flowed with materials, tools and trim.
The neighborhood, originally a Scandinavian working-class area known variously as Sunset Park, 8th Avenue and Labskaus Boulevard had fallen into disrepair by the 1990s.
During the decade I lived there it grew vital again as Chinese vegetable stores, butchers and fish markets, then restaurants, cell phone stores and tea shops replaced the original taverns, shops and restaurants that once served the carpenters and tradesmen and their families.
The Chinese were drawn by the inexpensive buildings and, of course, the fact that the Avenue was named with the lucky number 8! Apparently they formed clubs or associations that pooled income until a business could be purchased, then the proceeds went back to the fund until another member could be set up in turn. This system works like gangbusters, and boy can they build!
First a groundfloor business would be stripped out and used to sell vegetables and other simple goods, then an upgrade to a dry-goods store or restaurant, while the family lived upstairs. Within the span of a few years the entire neighborhood for twenty blocks or more was completely revitalized.
All well and good except that the commercialization killed my immediate neighborhood near the subway station with overwhelming pedestrian and automobile traffic arriving each day for fresh (live) fish and produce delivered at the crack of dawn by noisy trucks, not to mention the nightly round of clanging garbage trucks picking up offal and other food waste.
So the affordable “fixer-upper” was a lovely place to live for a while, with off-street parking and a twenty-minute commute to the City.
Alongside the gentrification, house prices quadrupled over the same period of time. The final straw was when the owner house at the other end of the row passed away and her family sold it to a developer who extended it out to the street and turned it into a doctor’s office, complete with a lighted sign advertising bus trips to Atlantic City.
The houses stood on 12-foot lots so the commercialization encroached from the avenue to about 36 feet from my front door. Today the second house is now a restaurant, with another restaurant next door on the other side.
As it turns out zoning laws which in NYC keep businesses on the avenue and away from the residential streets are fungible, with the certification left to the engineer who signs off on the construction plan, not properly regulated by the city.
Yes, I did enjoy living in this vibrant mixed-use community, but the noise and smells, not to mention the continous torment of shoppers who double-parked their cars in our driveway combined to force us out. Please note that it was not ethnicity, simply the tremendous density that was the issue. Think of a four-lane avenue literally choked with traffic, exhaust and car horns, while the ten-foot wide sidewalks are filled within a few feet of the curb with boxes of produce and buckets of live fish, with a crowd of pedestrians rivalling Disneyland passing through to shop. Fine for them, a trip to the market, but I was living there!
The inflated value of our house was reflected in the nearby boroughs and we could not afford to move locally, so eventually my wife and I sold out and came to Canada.
Ironically the house did not sell until the very last bit was complete, a bathroom renovation. So we lived in the fully-complete house for only about two weeks before moving away!
My original intent was to describe the durability and practicality of the old square brick houses of Brooklyn. Built to last with handcrafted details throughout, and able to be restored decades later.

Posted by: jonku | Apr 9 2008 18:59 utc | 10

Nothing enduring; nothing substantial. Just a show for a snapshot. Architecture for the age of house-of-cards leverage and investment bubbles. I call the style Plastic Ozymandias. It says “look on my line of credit and despair.”

Posted by: rjj | Apr 9 2008 20:24 utc | 12

I’m still trying to figure out the cultural underpinnings of US wood frame house construction. The technical side is pretty easy and may be a sufficient determinant—got wood, at least early on.
A few years ago I read Jim Webb’s book on the Scots-Irish, who began leaving northern Ireland in 1700. They arrived in the only port that would accept them, Philadelphia, surrounded by British brick manor-style construction. They moved westward through the German stone farmhouse area, then to western Pennsylvania on the west side of the Appalachians. Webb says the Scots used wood construction in Scotland, always on the move from British forays. My Scottish friends don’t buy that. Anyhow…
Once they became established in western PA, they migrated south along the ridges and hollers, carrying only a rifle and a Bible. They became the buffers between plantation settlers and the Indians. They were the backbone of the Confederate army, willing to shoot anything blue, because someone told them that blue guys were bad. This culture became the NASCAR culture. DuPont supports the NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon because its marketing people determined that there is no group on earth with stronger brand loyalty than the NASCAR culture.
There is a lot of culture signifying in sprawl housing: density of houses on land, cottage-industry production, itinerant builders, pickup trucks, radio on, ready to replace materials with cheaper stuff, thinking of code officials as the enemy (I worked on crews that would pull out the powder-actuated tool, Ramset, and drive fasteners into concrete with a .22 gauge load, whenever the inspector would come around, just for fun), the country gingham look to interior wallpaper and drapes, anti-urban exteriors. SUVs. The housing culture all seems so NASCAR, so Appalachian, a hideout and refuge against the money crowd on one side and some perceived wild savages on the other.
There’s a lot more to it, and the discussion here is so helpful, you can’t imagine.

Posted by: Browning | Apr 9 2008 20:52 utc | 14