The view that US houses are cardboard-quality is a very simplistic view.
There is nothing inherently wrong with stick built houses using drywall.
There is nothing inherently wrong with stick built houses using drywall.
I would also argue that old houses are not built better. The materials that you consider "better" where cheaper back when it was built. So it's not like someone back then sat around and said, like some people like to imagine, "I could use cheaper material but I like to do things right. Let's spend twice as much as we need to and future generations will thank us."
Old houses have problems as people have pointed out. Have you seen the windows on a 100 year old house, the insulation, the wiring, plumbing. I think there's also a lot of survivorship bias. You know what kind of house makes it 100 years? One that had a certain construction. What happened to all the crappy houses? They were razed or they fell apart. I also see people looking at what was a mansion, probably owned by some turn of the century robber Barron, and is now just some quirky fixer upper and saying, "They just don't build them like they used to" but that would be like moving into Jeff Bezos's mansion in 100 years and saying, "wow they just don't build them like they used it". They never built them like that. You're just looking at what's left or was worth saving.
this is critical to keep in mind every time somebody is wanking about how old things are better.
you only see the old things that happened to make it. the cast iron pan that happened not to have any voids near the surface, the cheap wooden furniture that happened not to have any sapwood in the pieces used for it. or whatever.
There are some things wrong, just to list a few:
- Stick+drywall building have terrible sound isolation, that drives people away from more efficient high density housing options, everybody wants a fully detached house so the air between the houses may help isolate you from the neighbor's noises. - Stick+drywall needs more diligent maintenance (a simple leak may destroy a house), so again it drives people towards fully detached houses, otherwise your neighbor's bad maintenance may cause troubles for you.
Good walls make good neighbors. I'm convinced that big part of the American aversion to urban living comes from their use of sticks+drywall.
I agree with you that stick built is not desirable for multifamily housing or any housing that shared walls with other families.
I disagree that people dislike shared and more dense housing because of their conceptions about what what noise insulation could be. Shared maintenance would be more of a concern, but shared and dense housing has a ton of other drawbacks (on an individual family level), even though the society wide level benefits are positive.
Who would not want space to park their individual cars and store their skis and beach gear and have a backyard to throw parties in? Not to mention the use of zoning only for detached single family housing on larger plots of land to be able to keep out people who cannot afford as much from the local schools. But that is a separate conversation.
Have you ever lived in apartments? Because It's the reason I bought a house instead of a condo or townhouse. Not everybody has families, in fact single person households are on the rise in the US and this style of living would be ideal for them.
However, I feel like the cost for building concrete shared housing unit must be high enough such that the people willing to pay that much for shared housing units would rather just pay a little more and buy a detached stick house.
But it's not accounted for when building at all. It feels like this thing that gets hand waived away at every step of the process. It's personally why I feel like that style of living is off the table for me.
… and their fires. I don't want my property burned because Aunt Sally went to sleep with a lit cigarette hanging out of her mouth.
But the underlying fact remains that the structure and infrastructure (electrical, plumbing, gas, air ventilation) of a 2021 house are likely going to be much better than those of a home from a previous era.
> e.g., you can realistically restore a stone farmhouse that's gone to ruin more easily than a stick+drywall house that has), no? My sense is that the 500-year TCO is many times higher (maybe as much as an order of magnitude) for US-style homes.
No, labor for masonry related work is insanely expensive, and rightfully so. Even at its most basic, more mass needs more force to move around.
It is so cheap and easy to cut some wood and drywall and install new things and patch it up rather than deal with masonry that will last 500 years.
You could also argue that this type of construction allows more room for generational upgrades than those expected to last 500 years.
Integrating PV solar into the roof might be a more reasonable proposition if you know you're planning to replace the roof in a few years. If you don't expect to have to replace it for several more decades, you're less likely to make that investment.
This also applies to insulation, air sealing, electrical upgrades, etc.
Older houses tend to be much higher quality. You can obviously find custom homes or more expensive homes built with better materials, but according to my contacts in the home building business, ~90% of homes being built right now are the bare minimum required to get the customer to buy, and most of them wouldn't meet regulatory requirements because the inspections just weren't done.
My home was built in the 1970s, at the same time as most of the others in the neighborhood. There was a fire that gutted about half of the home in ~2008, and as a result the entire electrical system, internal plumbing, insulation, and most of the windows were replaced.
Because of this the home was priced like others from the 70s, but I'm very confident that I won't have any major and unexpected structural, electrical, or plumbing issues in the near future.
The only real downsides are that there isn't a basement (I have a dirt crawlspace, with a ~10x10 area dug out enough to stand up for the water heaters and such), and I own one of the few homes inside city limits with a septic tank.
City code prevents me from making major repairs on the septic system, so within the next few years I'll need to connect the home to the sewer. That's going to cost between ~$500 (if I do the work myself, which will probably take about a week of full-time, dirty work) and ~$10k (if I just pay someone to do it all). I'll likely end up hiring someone to dig the trench needed in the front yard and in the crawlspace but do the rest myself.