Like you said, part of this is differences in what you get, building codes, and amenities.
That said, Craftsmen homes are wonderful and in some respects have better build quality than modern homes.
They cost like 3x what a newbuild does, this "but building codes" stuff doesnt stand up to scruitiny.
You dont have to use wood, we have brick. We've had automation and 100 years of growth in productivity.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. There is a fixed supply by definition of those old buildings, so their price will be pushed up by demand with little relation to their cost to build since they can't be built anymore.
A better comparison would be to look at the cost of new houses in developing places like SE Asia where there are little to no building codes.
They build using the cheapest methods allowed by law, see the choice to build with fireproof cladding (£24 psm) vs flamable (£22 psm). Building codes are about setting a floor in the construction quality, not a ceiling (pun intended).
Maybe this is highly biased toward craftsman homes that have been well maintained due to how expensive CA housing is. But why wouldn't D.R. Horton homes also be maintained? They're theoretically equally expensive.
The average D.R. Horton home is built further out on lower density, less valuable land.
There’s also an element of scarcity here. There’s a subset of people who find older homes appealing specifically because they are older. The supply of older homes can’t increase, but the supply of D.R. Horton homes can and does.
The 1910’s were a very different time. Comparing houses now to houses then is like comparing a horse to a Honda Accord. We’re not just talking luxury features here —- You can be pretty certain that a home built in 2022 has indoor plumbing, a refrigerator, and a furnace that doesn’t require shoveling fuel.
That said, I think the difference is overstated. I have lots of friends who live in craftsmen homes. They resell at basically the same price as similar sized houses built 25 years ago (even with single pane windows ect) . If somehow you got one that wasn't upgraded since 1920, you are looking at a few tens of thousands to put in electrical, plumbing, and appliances.
Still, you are right that that they are not the same. But a lot of people today would kill to own a beautiful new craftsman home for 40k! I wouldn't trade out my car for a horse, but I would trade 40k a year rent for a craftsman home!
The point is that even you wanted to replicate an original craftsman home today, you wouldn't be able to do it for that price, even ignoring regulations. Labor costs have gone up, wood has gone up, minimum cost of every material used has gone up.
The craftsman homes that have survived for 100 years in good condition are. That’s a very different thing.
Old houses also have tons of problems even when upgraded, and they just aren’t anywhere near equivalent to a modern home unless you essentially gut them and rebuild.
Insulation isn’t nearly as good. Bathrooms aren’t nearly the same size. The floor plans aren’t nearly as open. This last one in particular is a big cost difference because creating large open spans is expensive.
Those things might not matter as much to you, but they are big differences.
>The point is that even you wanted to replicate an original craftsman home today, you wouldn't be able to do it for that price, even ignoring regulations. Labor costs have gone up, wood has gone up, minimum cost of every material used has gone up.
Depends on the part of the country and whether or not you can use modern equivalent materials.
Where I live, assuming pre pandemic prices, I could probably build a 900 sq ft, single story house with a wooden pier foundation, no plumbing, no electrical, no insulation (or maybe old newspapers like my great grandmothers house used for insulation), no driveway, no sod, and no inspections for $40-$50k.
That would be roughly equivalent to your average house built 100 years ago.
That especially is just fashion, I'd be really careful with that sort of conversion. Or, if the only 'problem' with a property is that it has too many segregated rooms, and that's depressing the price.. snap it up, fashion's bound to come around. (Unless it's for you to live in and you particularly care of course, live where you want!)
Cooking is also less frequent, extraction fans are better/cheaper, we don’t use wood burning stoves. When people do cook it’s less likely to be an all day process, and less likely to involve methods like deep frying in bacon grease. It’s also less likely that a middle class family has a servant to do the cooking for them.
All this leads to less need to segregate the kitchen from the rest of the house.
If you look at Victorian houses, kitchens were placed as far away from living spaces as possible. Going forward from the 19th century there has been an overall trend towards integrating the kitchen with living spaces. Culminating in the modern trend of combining the kitchen and living room into one large space.
Families are also smaller than they used to be, so there’s less need for as many rooms. Plus furniture is larger on average.
The point is there are factors pushing houses towards larger open spaces, and larger open rooms in general that are likely durable.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. I've lived in a Sear kit house. It had everything someone now would recognized as necessary for a house (including everything you mention, plumbing, wiring, etc and as opposed to a house built in the 1800s, which could have or not-have anything).
A fair comparison is a VW bug versus a modern SUV. The bug has everything needed to be a basic car but has nothing to make it special. And the comparison would be closer if only giant SUVs were being sold as cars today.
I dunno if you've dug deeply into most building codes but they're almost always overly specific in pointless ways and in ways totally unrelated to safety. Getting an engineer to sign off on a design should be enough, especially for a freestanding (tiny)house.
There's an unfortunate number of locations in the US where you must use wood frame for your house, or you must route your power in exactly this way, etc, even if it'd be equally safe or cheaper to do something else.
This varies widely by state. In some states, it matters if you're in a municipality or if you're rural.
Where I am, in this county, I do not require a permit or inspections or anything to build a house for myself unless I'm inside a municipality. The government doesn't care until it's time to pay taxes. I may need some sort of inspection to hook up to the electric grid though, or to get water turned on. In (edit: some) other states, you can barely build a small dog house behind your house in the country without permits, inspections, engineers, surveys, and all kinds of other stuff.
Here we just have city inspectors to check basic code compliance. They'll take a quick look at the framing, electrical, and plumbing before the sheetrock goes up, and then they come back for a walk-through before issuing the certificate of occupation. No engineers.
The biggest fees by far are the permit fees, but that's for revenue and would still exist if engineers were doing the analysis for the construction.