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Being from the NE, I am always amazed that basements are not common in tornado alley. I could not even imagine living out there with no basement. Do all homes at least have a storm cellar of some sort? Every home in Ohio has a basement, just like every home has a roof. The only exception would be condos built on slabs and some really small super cheap homes.
Up here we are on the very tail end of the tornado zone, we maybe get one small twister every 10 years, and small funnel clouds that never touch down, or touch down quickly and go right back up each year. People use basements during bad storms here all the time.
My two homes in Columbus Oh did not have basements. One had a crawl space.
Florida homes rarely have basements, unless the home is built on the side of a hill (which would probably mean it's in north Florida) and has a walk-out basement. The reason is the water table is so high. In fact, if you're building a swimming pool, you have to have a pump going constantly to pump the water out of the hole in the ground as the pool is being constructed. Once the pool is built you can't pump all the water out and leave the pool standing empty for any length of time as the pressure of the water in the ground will most likely make the pool walls collapse.
Floridians generally use their garages (or sometimes attic space) for the storage that a basement would provide.
I know where I used to live in South Mississippi we did not have them because we were right at sea level. I am sure Florida has the same problem. We recently moved to Missouri and noticed that a lot of the older homes here have them. I like the basement idea if it is at least partially finished because it provides extra storage space.
Pretty much every home in CT has a basement, for reasons already noted in other postings. When looking at homes we came across one that was on a slab and it just seemed odd to us that there was no basement. Even in Ohio we had a basement, albeit smaller than ones in CT.
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