If you really want to build a new house, what is the most ethical approach? (Pittsburgh: how much, living in)
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Yeah, I think people in Pittsburgh are not necessarily familiar with the fact that the OP is asking about a very real issue in other places, where people are tearing down individual houses in older, more modest neighborhoods and building what look like stereotypical McMansions on fairly small lots.
LOL, yes this thread turned out to be one of the more awkward and clunky ones I've ever started. I think it was because I asked a question about a situation that apparently doesn't occur very often in Pittsburgh. Which, in and of itself, is a fascinating thing to learn.
I'm just an outsider so I could be completely wrong, but the conclusion I'm drawing is there's an interesting combination of factors in play in Pittsburgh: 1) People who move to Pittsburgh tend to also be people who like older architecture--that's one of the reasons for moving to Pittsburgh. 2) Apparently the new construction there tends to be shoddy. I'm not sure why this is (maybe a local preference for budget housing leads to developers who use cheap materials?). At any rate this may be a reason people wouldn't want to hire a local developer to build a home for them. 3) There are enough lots and nearby areas where these homes can be built that tearing down an existing structure wouldn't be worth the effort.
So, even though this thread turned out to be a dud it did create a few interesting thoughts. Not completely worthless--just mostly.
I'm just an outsider so I could be completely wrong, but the conclusion I'm drawing is there's an interesting combination of factors in play in Pittsburgh: 1) People who move to Pittsburgh tend to also be people who like older architecture--that's one of the reasons for moving to Pittsburgh. 2) Apparently the new construction there tends to be shoddy. I'm not sure why this is (maybe a local preference for budget housing leads to developers who use cheap materials?). At any rate this may be a reason people wouldn't want to hire a local developer to build a home for them. 3) There are enough lots and nearby areas where these homes can be built that tearing down an existing structure wouldn't be worth the effort.
1 and 3 are a majority true, I think.
For 3 another thing to keep in mind is that there just aren't many places where you would justify buying a house and tearing it down for location only because that location would already have a reasonably valuable house on it. If the house is cheap enough to do that, it's already not in the sort of location that would make it desirable to take it down. The only thing that would come down to be replaced by another house is an already beyond repair house, or nearly so. (There have been some arguments posed on this forum about houses that have been proactively torn down suggesting they weren't beyond repair, that sort of thing.)
For 1, people moving here are either looking for a place in the city where they can get the older house of their dreams at an affordable price to them, or they are looking for a standard suburban place at lower cost. There's no market for new people to move in and tear down a house due to 3 above.
2, on the other hand, is an over-generalization I think and hasn't really been explored enough. Certainly at the lower end of the price scale in new construction this is true. But would that not be true anywhere? Does Ryan Homes not still build in the metro DC area? I know they used to when I was growing up closer to that area, always ads on TV and radio, so I gather they must. Maybe somehow they don't have the shoddy rep there that they have here, but I'm not sure why as I can't imagine the construction is that different.
There are many variables with this. Methinks you are likely comparing apples and oranges as far as construction quality. You are living in Loudoun? Hm. I'm not intimately familiar with the state of Loudoun these days, but it's still closer than, say, Jefferson County, WV. A lot, but not all, of what people are looking at in suburbs here would be more akin to the far out bedroom communities of DC, price-wise. It is mixed, as I'm sure it is mixed to some degree in Loundoun. In a place like Cranberry, there are some expensive homes built more recently, and there are some cheap homes built in the 80s and 90s. And a lot of the ones being built right now are still at more moderate price targets, think $300k range, often under that at least to start. (I know to reach the low price touted on those signs there's basically no features to the house, and most people don't get it quite that stripped, but anyway.)
A lot of the people buying suburban houses have been and still are locals, not those moving in from outside the area. They've lived in a couple older houses and now want a brand new one. The builders accommodate varying levels of these folks by having stuff at many price ranges. The way you get shoddy and McMansion sometimes is because some people are looking for a lot of interior space as their absolute goal, don't have a huge budget, and thus you have 3500 sq ft houses that have little attention to the outer appearance or yard size in order to keep the price lower. The typical developments done by Ryan, Heartland Homes, etc. are completely constructed by the one developer. The places where you go in and choose a builder are up the price chain a bit more, not typical until you get to about half a mil, and I mean as starting point, as you can easily make your Ryan/Heartland cost half a mil even if the starting point is $280k.
These are not all the factors, but certainly some of these could result in the majority of new construction being toward the lower end of the quality spectrum. We have a lot of well-built older houses on the market at reasonable prices too, so people who would just as soon have one of those can get one within their budget, most likely. If you're spending, I don't know, $600k-$700k and up, maybe half a mil and up, yeah, you probably don't have to settle for too shoddy new construction even in a large house. I'm thinking the houses you put up pics of are probably in that range or higher, right? Maybe not. We haven't discussed price ranges really in this thread. Perhaps that is part of where we are out of whack.
I'm pretty certain there are parts of the DC metro where you will find new developments full of lower-end, lower quality construction. At this point, though, they are quite likely much farther out than such places here. Whatever space is left closer in to DC would be filled in with higher cost housing.
If this is a little disjointed I wrote it fairly quickly and didn't want to keep running on with it.
I would say this thread has been far from worthless, even if it didn't follow the originally intended track.
On (2), I think you are observing a side-effect of housing prices norms being so atypical in Pittsburgh. As I have noted many time, we tend to spend a lot less money on housing than in many other larger metros. Even a household with a relatively high income--say $200K--is only going to be looking to spend something like $500K. At price points like that, you can get new, high-quality construction, but it can't be super-big. So to the extent a builder wants to offer "McMansions" to that market, they will have to sacrifice on quality to meet the expected price point. If the builder instead had a target price of $800K or more, which might be a more typical price point in many other cities for our hypothetical $200K households, they could maybe offer more quality.
Of course in those other cities, they also then end up offering the same shoddy $500K McMansions, but to $100K households instead of $200K households, because $100K household in those cities may be willing to spend $500K on a "prestige" house. So I don't think it is true--in fact I know it isn't true--that Pittsburgh is the only city with a shoddy McMansion problem.
Similarly, people are in fact still building new homes here that are both nice and big. It is true a lot of that potential market is being diverted into nice, big, and older homes (including my own household, in fact), which we have in relative abundance. Nonetheless, some people strongly prefer new, and can afford both big and nice, so that's what they get.
But that is inherently a thinner market because of these house-price norms--again, the $200K households typically aren't doing that here, and as you are going up the tail end of the income distribution, you are obviously cutting the percentage of the overall market you are talking about.
So there you go--that's why the market for non-shoddy McMansions is a little thin here.
For 1, people moving here are either looking for a place in the city where they can get the older house of their dreams at an affordable price to them, or they are looking for a standard suburban place at lower cost. There's no market for new people to move in and tear down a house due to 3 above.
Yep, and I think a big part of the difference is that the locational premium for the core area is not nearly as high in Pittsburgh as some other cities. In some other cities, even a very modest house in a decent core neighborhood has gotten very expensive (forget about the non-modest houses, which have become multi-million properties). But this sets up the tear-down scenario: you need a lot of money just to buy into the location, but then the existing house you get is very modest. That's won't do, so you tear down the modest house and build something observably less modest.
But here, if you had that sort of money you wouldn't need to buy a modest house and replace it, you could just buy a nice existing house (or a fixer-upper with the potential to be a nice existing house), because you don't need to be a millionaire to do that in Pittsburgh.
Which is all because of the steel bust (it always is). The steel bust and the associated population loss in the core areas has delayed the gentrification process in the core areas, which means there is still a more than ample supply of properties in decent core neighborhoods, which means prices have stayed low, and no one is forced to spend a lot on a modest house they intend to tear down just to get a nice place in the core area.
So, even though this thread turned out to be a dud it did create a few interesting thoughts. Not completely worthless--just mostly.
This thread was definitely NOT a dud. I've read it with great interest thus far. Lots of great insight.
The "tear-down" McMansion issue is indeed not quite as prevalent here in Greater Pittsburgh, though, as it was back in Fairfax County, VA. I think of places like Vienna as having an issue with people who had above-average discretionary income and who loved the community yet hated the existing residential offerings tearing down existing smaller homes and replacing them with much larger homes, leading them to sort of "bulge" out of place in relation to neighboring homes which were still much smaller on similarly-sized lots. Arlington County, VA had this issue as well, especially in North Arlington, but I think they really clamped down on it.
Sadly, many of the older homes in Pittsburgh won't need to be torn down. They'll fall down on their own within my lifetime due to neglect and abandonment. Yes, our prized and tony East End is humming along quite nicely with people in Point Breeze, Squirrel Hill, and Shadyside sipping their lattes, Tweeting while driving their BMW SUVs, and keeping their lawns impeccably maintained, but just venture into Esplen, Sheraden, Elliott, Manchester, California-Kirkbride, Beltzhoover, Knoxville, Arlington, and various other neighborhoods in the North Side, West End, and South Hills, and you'll see home after home that will meet its untimely demise on its own before someone will come in to salvage it. Ditto Braddock, Duquesne, Donora, Monongahela, Clairton, McKees Rocks, McKeesport, Swissvale, Rankin, North Braddock, New Kensington, Arnold, etc., etc.
So Cranberry and the East End are now both on your sh&t list (despite living in Polish Hill, which is in the East End)? Whatever happened to the long lectures about promoting more development in the core area? Or do you really think redevelopment can be forced into the West End by process of elimination?
Redevelopment will spread to other parts of the core area by growing out from the established areas--we know this because that is how it has worked everywhere else. The primary mechanism is that investment opportunities in the established areas get scarce and expensive, and so investors move on to the next nearest neighborhood that still has more plentiful and cheaper opportunities.
Given that dynamic, if you want to see redevelopment coming to more areas sooner, you need to be cheering on the existing redevelopment sites, so that they get used up faster. Because no amount of b&tching about the East End is going to force investors to look elsewhere before they have used up most of the opportunities there.
So I don't think it is true--in fact I know it isn't true--that Pittsburgh is the only city with a shoddy McMansion problem.
Some great posts--I'll have to wait until I have time to read through most of it.
One thing I did want to say right away though was that I never meant to infer that Pittsburgh is the only city that may have newer developments with cheap construction. No, no, let me set that straight. That's definitely not what I think--there are lots of cities in the same boat (or at least portrayed as being in the same boat). You do give the impression, though, that newer construction there is shoddy. It may be unintentional, but that's the image you guys portray.
To be clear, I think there must be at least a few developments in Pittsburgh where the builders did not cut corners and the homes are well built with quality materials. In fact, maybe this is a good place to name a few, because there are people who want to move there and who do like new construction, and those people might want to know where to look.
It does make me sad that you never seem to hear about these places. There are so many communities that never get mentioned on this forum at all, and often I wonder what those places are like. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of them are well built developments, because such places exist all around the country. But on this forum I get the impression that those people who do live in newer homes that are well built are afraid to share photos or say how they're proud of their house because they're afraid that if someone has new construction they'll be mocked, and told their house is a piece of crap and that all the other homes in their neighborhood are crap too. If I'm wrong about that I apologize. Sometimes it's easy to get a wrong impression, but that's one I've gotten after having read this forum for many years. I also get the impression that Pittsburgh's new construction is mostly quite shoddy. I don't know if it's true or not, but that's the image you guys portray. You don't always make your city look appealing to people who don't happen to want historic homes--of course maybe that's a good thing, I don't know.
It may be unintentional but when you read this forum Pittsburgh comes across as a place with lots of cool old things, but things built in recent years aren't well made. Which is not to say that Pittsburgh is the only city portrayed this way--many others are, too. If that's not the case, then I'm glad I started this thread because it's a chance to see Pittsburgh though a new pair of glasses.
(and that the people who do know about these places and are proud of their house are afraid to share it on the photo thread because if you have new construction you'll be told your house is a piece of crap and that all the other homes in your neighborhood are crap too.)
Did that actually happen?
Because I think the more logical explanation is that for whatever reason, we seem to have a lot of old-house-loving folks around this forum (as suggested by the poll in another thread).
Quote:
It may be unintentional but when you read this forum Pittsburgh comes across as a place with lots of cool old things, but nothing that's been built in recent years is well built. Which is not to say this forum is the only one to give this impression. Many cities are portrayed this way.
In addition to this forum not necessarily being representative, I think it is also worth noting that in general, people tend to complain a lot more on the Internet than they praise when it comes to people who have provided them with goods or services. It is probably good that the Internet gives people a handy place to vent, but it can lead to biased impressions if you think of the Internet commentary as a random, unbiased sampling of opinion. So I suspect to the extent people talk about recent experiences with builders in Pittsburgh, it will be subject to a similar effect.
2) Apparently the new construction there tends to be shoddy. I'm not sure why this is (maybe a local preference for budget housing leads to developers who use cheap materials?). At any rate this may be a reason people wouldn't want to hire a local developer to build a home for them.
I don't think this is true at all, maybe it is in the north or south suburbs...i don't know them well.
but in the east, the busiest builder is a local one and it is what some of you would drop the McMansion insult on, but they are very well built houses. Mine is 3 years old and isn't slated to fall down for another 2-3 years
In addition to this forum not necessarily being representative, I think it is also worth noting that in general, people tend to complain a lot more on the Internet than they praise when it comes to people who have provided them with goods or services. It is probably good that the Internet gives people a handy place to vent, but it can lead to biased impressions if you think of the Internet commentary as a random, unbiased sampling of opinion. So I suspect to the extent people talk about recent experiences with builders in Pittsburgh, it will be subject to a similar effect.
Yes, I agree with this.
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