Is Some American Housing “Too Affordable”?
There are calculable and incalculable costs to lowering the floor of housing quality.
This summer, I was part of a cohort of new urban designers and builders who traveled to England to study Garden Cities. This post is part of a series in which I unpack the lessons from that trip. One of the things that struck me was how cheaply we build things in the United States—possibly too cheaply.
The word “cheap” can have positive or pejorative synonyms - it can be substituted for “affordable” and “practical” as well as for “corner cutting” and “second-rate”. The same principle now applies to the word “affordable” - depending on who you ask, it has a good and bad connotation.
The Garden Cities of the UK (and their brethren in the Northeast United States) are all built of modest homes, generally less than 1200sf, primarily as semi-attached two-story gabled boxes. As envisioned, they were the attainable homes of the day, targeted at the working man or entrepreneur class as an alternative to the bifurcated extremities of wealth found in industrial-age London.
Still, these homes, 10-30 miles north of the London City Center, were built of a higher quality than comparative products built in the US today- they are built out of brick and predominately with slate roofs. Such materiality is practically unheard of in the States, and you’d never see these relatively permanent materials on working-class American houses.
By comparison, our affordable housing is impermanent and, correspondingly, not resilient. Under intense pressures to build cheaper, faster (and maybe?) better, I have seen American affordable homebuilders be accused of building “instant ghettos”. This raises the question - is it possible to be “too affordable”?
THE THIN ASPHALT LINE
American houses are relatively disposable. There are arguments for a disposable housing culture, though few have an environmentally solid rationale. Japan has a culture of teardowns, and when a new house is needed, they build one. It’s not a fuss. In Japan, houses are not meant to be permanent, and it is not as if Japan has a reputation for being wasteful or environmentally reckless. American detached houses are socially presumed to be permanent, which is why teardowns can ruffle social media feathers, but other American-built forms are renowned for their impermanence. Sports stadiums and public housing often have shelf lives of 30-50 years, sometimes less. As Joe Minicozzi at Urban3 has pointed out, a Wal-Mart is designed to last 15-20 years.
In the States, you can judge a residential home's expected longevity by its materiality. Few new homes are built of brick, which should last (relatively) forever, require little maintenance, require no painting, and look great. Most today are built with fiber-cement siding, which is cheaper than brick or, even less expensive, vinyl.
The fact that we built much of the last 50 years of US Suburbia with synthetic materials, it is no wonder that younger generations are now so aggressive in their pursuit of authenticity.
Vinyl is the bottom of the barrel. You would never ever see vinyl in a British Garden City. Besides the harms of its manufacturing process, documented in movies such as Blue Vinyl, it’s also of questionable longevity. “If it’s vinyl, it’s final!”. On top of the environmental concerns, flimsy vinyl just looks terrible (the solid stock looks better but still evokes disdain from many architects and builders). Often, woodgrain is molded into plastic. It is peak American fakeness, and the fact that we built much of the last 50 years of suburbia with synthetic materials, it is no wonder that younger generations are now so aggressive in their pursuit of authenticity. We humans are not supposed to live in plastic boxes.
HOW LOW CAN WE GO?
The trend is troubling. There seems to be no bottom to how low we are willing to go. I heard of a case of vinyl siding being installed over insulative foam board, not OSB sheathing, and the omission of sheathing made it possible to cut into the house, through the wall, with nothing more than an exacto knife. Surely this is too far.
But I have learned never to bet against America’s ability to do it cheaper. And here I mean cheaper in the pejorative. It’s all a metaphor for America’s cardinal sin of suburban sprawl, which is penny wise and pound foolish, the equivalent of burning the furniture to heat the house. We, as a country, seem unique in our ability to deliver short-term results with wanton disregard for the long-term costs, or any costs, really, that are not on our immediately quantifiable financial statements.
Short-term thinking discounts that brick - the dominant material of choice throughout Garden Cities - simply looks better, which can also drive a rent (or sales) premium, let alone the quality of life. Short-term thinking also discounts the hassle of managing a painter at origin and every 10-20 years. That’s work. The painting is work. The managing of it is work. The financing of it is work. It’s work that the Garden Cities largely forgo simply by building in a more sustainable, long-lasting, relatively permanent material.
FAKE BRICK. REALLY?
Now, in America, even fake bricks are a thing. To me, these buildings ooze with short-term thinking - they look like the prime mover has the motivation to get out as soon as possible and leave the maintenance issues to the future investor or society. They feel icky to the trained eye (and maybe the lay one, too). Why haven’t secondary buyers picked up on the game? Is there no variable line item to increase or decrease Operating Expenses (OpEx) based on materiality and quality of construction? Why do we seem to be in a race to the bottom with materiality?
It’s remarkable that such calculations appear to be dismissed even by those qualified to perform them, including the Wall Street investors now so active in real estate investment. Brick might cost more upfront (it varies significantly by region), but it drives long-term returns by lowering OpEx, generally justifying the front-end investment.
Does the long-term savings exceed the capital or debt required to build it in the first place? I have never seen evidence that anyone is asking this question.
In the US, it seems like we are so obsessed with lowering start-up costs that there is no longer oxygen left to discuss long-term costs, which is a financial question that inevitably precedes any social and environmental follow-ups.
Ironically, this blind spot for the future can increase overall costs, profitability, and resiliency. Short-term thinking can increase overall costs while lowering quality. That’s a problem. And it drives one of my major conclusions from touring the UK’s Garden Cities architecture - we might be doing it wrong.