Grandpa’s Basement House

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&#x27;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&#x27;m sure it was some ordered house put on a basement. It had an outhouse in the 70&#x27;s but indoor plumbing was added. I remember sometime in the 80&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>There was a bit of danger in all this expansion. The look of utter horror on my Dad&#x27;s and Uncle&#x27;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.

&gt; Growing vegetables on what should be a lawn is verboten in many locations, if not by the government than by private association bylaws.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;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 have a friend who lives in a rural area. He&#x27;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).<p>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&#x27;s a lot of profit for a lender to give up - they&#x27;re not exactly going to be jumping at the opportunity to write those loans.

A contradistinction: Traditional Queensland houses are built raised on stumps, first, because of floods and cooling airflow under (sub tropical)<p>When you can afford Air Conditioning, or have too many babies you build under.<p>So our pattern is build high first, fill in later. The one here is &quot;build basement first, digging under the ground with a house on it, is a pain&quot;<p>(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.<p>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.<p>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.

“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.”<p>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.<p>By 1900 1 in 10 Americans lived in just 5 cities (NYC, Chicago, Philly, St Louis &amp; Boston).

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&#x27;s theory was that they did the basement first, then built the rest of the house later. I hadn&#x27;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&#x27;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.

Wow, this was great.<p>Thinking about codes and permits, I think the idea of self-reinforcing change is interesting here. As more people rent or frequently buy&#x2F;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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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&#x27;s obviously a communist!) and this prevents us from discussing many of the things that really matter.<p>--<p>&gt; 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.<p>&gt; 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.”<p>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&#x27;s rural.<p>I&#x27;d actually figured it as someone making the best of what was left after a tornado or other disaster.

See also, Chile&#x27;s half house concept:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.archdaily.com&#x2F;797779&#x2F;half-a-house-builds-a-whole-community-elementals-controversial-social-housing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.archdaily.com&#x2F;797779&#x2F;half-a-house-builds-a-whole...</a>

Reminds me of this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dengarden.com&#x2F;misc&#x2F;The-Pitfalls-of-an-Underground-House" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dengarden.com&#x2F;misc&#x2F;The-Pitfalls-of-an-Underground-Ho...</a>

Fascinating! In many parts of the world, the incremental approach seems alive and well. I&#x27;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.

A basement house featured on Zillow Gone Wild this week [1] . According to the same account it went sale pending after 1 day on the market.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;zillowgonewild&#x2F;status&#x2F;1526625530136694784?s=20&amp;t=jsJ_vUfwbk8v2g9w4460eg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;zillowgonewild&#x2F;status&#x2F;152662553013669478...</a>

Pro tip: don&#x27;t build your house in a swamp. It&#x27;ll sink.

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.<p>On some other streets, people have added a floor to what were originally built as one-level homes.

My parent&#x27;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&#x27;s. It&#x27;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.<p>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.

&gt; Growing vegetables on what should be a lawn is verboten in many locations, if not by the government than by private association bylaws.<p>So again, USA is country with most freedom? Freedom™, but you can&#x27;t grow vegetables on your own property. Or you will be punished for having too long grass. Lmao

&gt; to filter out the riffraff who can’t afford larger homes.<p>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.<p>&#x2F;mockery

<i>&quot;Minimum square footage requirements have been put in place to filter out the riffraff who can’t afford larger homes&quot;</i><p>Disgusting.