No basements in N. Arlington? Just crawl spaces? (Alexandria, McLean: house, neighborhoods)

[coolio69]

Was over at a friends house the other day and he basically told me that there's some kind of regulation that prevents people from having basements in his area. He lives around the intersection of Glebe rd and lee hwy. Something about the high water table. I thought this was one of the highest points of Arlington.

[7 VII 7]

My old house had a basement off Lee Hwy and Kirkwood.

[CaliTerp07]

A friend's house at the corner of Glebe and 15th has a basement--quite a big one too. He rented the basement room and it had super tall ceilings.

[Carlingtonian]

I'm sitting in the basement right now. Our old house (also in Arl--about two blocks from CaliTerp's friend!) also had a basement, as does my sister-in-law's house.

[ACWhite]

Not sure if this relates, but in Addison Heights and apparently some other neighborhoods, and possibly in the area of your friend's house, I was told there were some underground springs that interfered with construction when the homes were built ~ 1940s. However, these apparently are very localized such that you may see no basements on three or four nearby streets, then on the fifth, basements are constructed. I was also told there are also some issues in some parts of Alexandria near the river that prohibited construction of basements, but that wouldn't apply to the location you described.

I don't know if any of this is true.

[saganista]

Slab and crawl-space construction are faster and cheaper than putting in a basement. Like the old quonset hut buildings on The Mall, some of the housing in Arlington was built in rush-rush mode to meet the needs of a huge influx of government workers during WWII. And wouldn't you know it, these folks didn't leave once the war was over. They stayed and put down roots and then a new wave followed them in and did the same. Some of that war- and post-war era construction is apt to be still around. And it isn't just water that can rule out a basement. A nice slab of solid rock near the surface will be enough to do that, and as the palisades suggest, there are areas closer to the river where rock is a definite possibility. Out in Fairfax, there are areas that sit above a sheet of nearly-as-hard-as-concrete hardpan clay. In the 1950's, the well-to-do lived in Arlington or maybe McLean. Only the lower income folks lived in what would later become outside-the-Beltway country. A lot of crawl-space homes were built out that way at the time as well simply in order to keep costs down.