Why are houses in America so...ugly? (San Francisco, Sacramento: rent, bad credit)

[nmnita]

Originally Posted by Chango

I think America stopped building attractive houses after about 1939. Right after that consumer culture was invented and we were suddenly all happy living in identical mass produced cubes. So you can blame the "McWorld" for America's crappy architecture. It's just our way.

Remember most everything stopped around 39 and then the war. You were probably not even born then. Anyway, after 1945 there was a huge move just to get homes built, at a reasonable price for all our returning service men and women that were just coming into thier own with new families. They needed cheap and VA financing. There was no choice but to build a bunch of cracker boxes, perfectly square on smaller lots and lacking curb appeal.

Nita

[Chango]

Originally Posted by nmnita

Remember most everything stopped around 39 and then the war. You were probably not even born then. Anyway, after 1945 there was a huge move just to get homes built, at a reasonable price for all our returning service men and women that were just coming into thier own with new families. They needed cheap and VA financing. There was no choice but to build a bunch of cracker boxes, perfectly square on smaller lots and lacking curb appeal.

Nita

It wasn't the only choice... it was profitable choice.

[nmnita]

Originally Posted by Chango

It wasn't the only choice... it was profitable choice.

Actually it really was the only choice. You could build homes that were more charming with more curb appeal as the word we like to use, but the cost would be a little more. We had our vets, many with low paying jobs (they had entered the service out of high school and had little education) and they needed housing. 2 or 3 bedroom homes were the thing they needed at a price they could afford. This meant no frills.

of couse there were still upper price range homes being built that had more charm, but for the most part the basic tract house was jut that: basic. It served the purpose.

Nita

[edwardius]

Up until WW2, most families couldn't actually afford to live in a single family home. Instead they lived in apartments. Cars allowed people to live further from where they worked and where the land was cheaper. Mass produced housing using common designs lowered the cost even further. In Levittown and most of the early suburbs that were built immediately after the war were filled with people who formely had been living in apartments. The move to the suburbs was one of the factors that created and expanded the middle class in this country. It was one of the factors behind the post war prosperity.

Also remember, city centers used to be much dirtier and more polluted because that was were the factories were and where the air pollution was the worst. If you look at pictures from that era, often the buildings were covered in coal soot and city centers tended to be surrounded in haze from the smoke stacks.

Frank Lloyd Wright's "Broadacre City" was one of the first to argue for mass suburbanization. He made the point that in a big country, the population shouldn't be cramped into tiny homes in dirty conditions, but instead the goal should be to get as many people living in there own homes with their own backyards away from the dirt and crime of the city center. He basically argued for suburbanization.

A lot of the tenement and substandard housing of that period has been bulldozed. A disportionate amount of what is left is the custom housing of that period. Custom built housing is better designed and much more expensive.

If you look at Arden Oaks, Willhaggen, even South Land Park, you can find very pretty custom built homes that were built after 1940. Custom homes are better built, but they are much more expensive. But that housing isn't representitive of the housing stock of the eras in which they were built. It never is because its too expensive.

Modern planning advocates of the 50's and 60's advocated strict land use seperations in order to keep residential uses away from the pollution and grime of the industrial activities.

The combined effects of de-industrialization and the increased enviromental legislation in the 70's helped to clean up the inner cities. Modernly, you don't find factories in city centers and its rare to find industrial activity in urban centers (the traffic is too bad for the trucks that supply the factories under the just in time inventory policies so now its much more important to be near the freeway than the railroad station).

That has reduced the need for segregating land uses quite as tightly and made living in older neighborhoods less of a problem. Given that its the better housing stock from that era that is the most likely to survive, that has given us a distorted notion of what the housing stock from that era was really like. If we kept Arden Oaks and Willhaggen, but bulldozed the rest of Arden Arcade, our children would have a very different impression of the housing stock from the 50's, 60's and 70's.

One other thing to consider, tract homes keep improving. Levittown was like the model T, it basically came in one or two models with vary little variation. Modern manufacturing techniques have allowed something starting to approach mass customization. If you look at the choices the owner of a modern tract home buyer has, its almost overwhelming. Its almost impossible to find modern track homes that are exactly the same as others in the tract, yet costs have stayed low. The big national builders can build for less than 80 a sqft (more with upgrades). The rest of the cost is land (which is constrained by various smart growth plans), various impact fees and the buyers share of the cost of subdising the cost of the low income people in the neighborhood under the various mixed income ordinances.

[PalmBch]

There are both nice homes build with brick and garage not on front, and also cheaper ones.
Not everybody could efford brick homes

[Bluesbabe]

Originally Posted by hellaslover

I don't understand why houses are so ugly and cheap made? I mean, in Europe we use brick and stones to build a house, here they are made out of wood. I was told once it's because it's cheaper to make them out of wood + we have lots of trees. But it seems to me that houses here are more expensive compared to Greece (where i'm from), for example a million dollar home here is not worth that much in Greece. And why not use clay tile roofs? And another thing that bugs me the most, why do they put the garage door in the front? Shouldn't there be the entrance or a large window in the front of the house? Why do they build the houses with entrance on the side and a huge garage door (sometimes 2) in the front? And not only that, a lot of houses that i see have a tree right in front of the entrance, it's like they are doing it on purpose to not show any house other than the garage! Is it a privacy issue? Seems like million dollar homes are built this way, is it that hard to make cheaper homes look nice? And what's the deal with tiny doors? In my country most entrance doors are double, made out of nice wood with glass, here's it's just a wooden door. Is there a reason homes are built this way or do americans have no sense of style?

I agree that a lot of houses in America are eyesores. And among the ugliest ones are those built in the last 25 years or ago. In subdivisions they tend to lack character because there is no "trim" or any special touches on the designs. They look like blocks with plain cut-outs for windows.

But. . . .

In many places in the US it would be MORONIC to build homes from bricks. They are the first to crumble in earthquakes, as was proven during the Santa Cruz earthquake in '89.

Homes in desert places like Palm Springs are often single-level, Spanish style, and tan colored in order to handle the blazing hot climate better. (And those are MY favorite types of homes, so beauty is in the eye of the beholder.)

And because of the monsoon weather where I live, tile roofing is not ideal.

I don't see what's wrong with the garage in front, although I happen to hate "snout houses" (which were a trend in the late-90's and they really hide the rest of the house). But you need to know that lot sizes here are getting so small that many of them will not allow for a driveway around the house.

My pet complaint about houses here is that Americans are "afraid" of color. They think they need to settle for boring tans, browns, greys. . . There is a lovely 2-story house a few blocks from me that is a perwinkle color with white trim, and I think I'm about the only person around who likes it. A friend of mine just painted his old house in M&M colors, a different one for each side of his house, with another color for the entrance. That's going over-the-top but it IS cool, and at least it isn't a boring-ass brown.

[hellaslover]

I love Spanish homes as well...and that tan/yellowish color is my favorite! My house will be a Spanish home with palm trees on each side of the entrance and green spot lights lighting the trees...plus a huge fountain in my front yard! Now that's living..only if i had the money..
I don't really think putting the garage in the front is to save space/lack of space, that is the case in some cases but i've seen homes with big land that still have the garage in the front or attached to the house. I just don't like sharing my house with my car, and my car having the best view, that's all. Speaking of roofs i forgot to mention how much i hate some roofs that look like bad haircuts. Especially this one http://images.webster-dictionary.org...02-mansard.gif reminds me of Will Smith's haircut in The Fresh Prince...Funky colors on a house won't do it for me...I've seen different colors on houses in S.F and just look funny. I want my house to show value not look like kindergarten kids painted it or that i hired a painter on ecstasy..but that's just me.

I gotta give credit to some people that build their houses (they 're usually more expensive homes) that have the driveway that forms a circle/loop in front of the house, but i understand you need room to do that. I think it looks awesome.

[Limine]

IMO, post-WWII American houses are ugly because:

1.They are built primarily by developers for maximum profit, which means stick and stucco cookie cutter boxes that can be quickly slammed out by laborers.

2. If not built by developers, houses are often designed and built by contractors. Contractors know about building stuff - they are not schooled in design or the history of architecture. Therefore, they tend to design garish stuff.

3. Labor costs more in the US than in some other countries, so houses are built from easy, stupid, cheap crap that an average man can assemble. If it were possible to hire a master stonemason, bricklayer, or carpenter for $5 a day, you'd probably see alot more good-looking stuff.

4. American is a car-centric culture, so the garage has to be up front and big, which necessarily detracts from the appeal of a house by detracting from the entryway and the proportions.

5. Americans tend not to be concerned with context or proportion. They like big things and they don't care if they build a tuscan villa in the middle of the desert. Houses that are too big for the site look ugly. Elizabethan England and Italianate styles look stupid when transplanted here. A tudor looks dumb next to a colonial. For some reason, most Americans just dont see it.

6. You can only do so much with crap materials. When the affordable or popular building materials are plywood, fibreboard, stucco, fake rock veneer, styrofoam molding, asphalt shingles, vinyl siding, and hardiplank, there's not much you can do to make it look pretty.

7. Builders tend to reject old-fashioned methods. The mainstream choices are stick and stucco, concrete block, etc. If more people built with old-school or natural materials like adobe, cob, strawbale, rammed earth, etc., you would probably see more homes that please the eye with their proportions, angles, and finishes.

8. Americans come from all over the world and the culture is relatively new, so taste is not cohesive or reliable. Ancient cultures have had time to develop a "style" that pleases their collective eye. After repeated exposure to a dominant style, citizens tend to make that style part of their "taste," whether aesthetically worthy or not. Post-WWII Americans have seen so much junk that their taste calibration is totally off.

[Chango]

Originally Posted by Limine

IMO, post-WWII American houses are ugly because:

1.They are built primarily by developers for maximum profit, which means stick and stucco cookie cutter boxes that can be quickly slammed out by laborers.

2. If not built by developers, houses are often designed and built by contractors. Contractors know about building stuff - they are not schooled in design or the history of architecture. Therefore, they tend to design garish stuff.

3. Labor costs more in the US than in some other countries, so houses are built from easy, stupid, cheap crap that an average man can assemble. If it were possible to hire a master stonemason, bricklayer, or carpenter for $5 a day, you'd probably see alot more good-looking stuff.

4. American is a car-centric culture, so the garage has to be up front and big, which necessarily detracts from the appeal of a house by detracting from the entryway and the proportions.

5. Americans tend not to be concerned with context or proportion. They like big things and they don't care if they build a tuscan villa in the middle of the desert. Houses that are too big for the site look ugly. Elizabethan England and Italianate styles look stupid when transplanted here. A tudor looks dumb next to a colonial. For some reason, most Americans just dont see it.

6. You can only do so much with crap materials. When the affordable or popular building materials are plywood, fibreboard, stucco, fake rock veneer, styrofoam molding, asphalt shingles, vinyl siding, and hardiplank, there's not much you can do to make it look pretty.

7. Builders tend to reject old-fashioned methods. The mainstream choices are stick and stucco, concrete block, etc. If more people built with old-school or natural materials like adobe, cob, strawbale, rammed earth, etc., you would probably see more homes that please the eye with their proportions, angles, and finishes.

8. Americans come from all over the world and the culture is relatively new, so taste is not cohesive or reliable. Ancient cultures have had time to develop a "style" that pleases their collective eye. After repeated exposure to a dominant style, citizens tend to make that style part of their "taste," whether aesthetically worthy or not. Post-WWII Americans have seen so much junk that their taste calibration is totally off.

That about sums it up. I fully understand why we ended up the way we did with domestic architecture, but I still don't like it. I moved into a 100 year old house so I could have something "real" to live in. Maybe someday the winds of change will blow back to homes with good porportions, architectural honesty and clear, coherent styling.

[sarahkate_m]

Originally Posted by hellaslover

I love Spanish homes as well...and that tan/yellowish color is my favorite! My house will be a Spanish home with palm trees on each side of the entrance and green spot lights lighting the trees...plus a huge fountain in my front yard! Now that's living..only if i had the money..
I don't really think putting the garage in the front is to save space/lack of space, that is the case in some cases but i've seen homes with big land that still have the garage in the front or attached to the house. I just don't like sharing my house with my car, and my car having the best view, that's all. Speaking of roofs i forgot to mention how much i hate some roofs that look like bad haircuts. Especially this one http://images.webster-dictionary.org...02-mansard.gif reminds me of Will Smith's haircut in The Fresh Prince...Funky colors on a house won't do it for me...I've seen different colors on houses in S.F and just look funny. I want my house to show value not look like kindergarten kids painted it or that i hired a painter on ecstasy..but that's just me.

I gotta give credit to some people that build their houses (they 're usually more expensive homes) that have the driveway that forms a circle/loop in front of the house, but i understand you need room to do that. I think it looks awesome.

In Oregon, people do tend to think outside the box & paint their houses in a "look at me" way: I enjoy seeing people exercise their freedom of expression California insurers would never approve of such... wild behavior.

hellaslover: I love the Spanish homes too! Especially the quads with the common garden in the middle.

Circular driveways rule. Pure common sense.

Tile roofs: the prettiest in my estimation.

If I could have a wish come true: I'd own a Spanish style quad & have my family live in it.

I also love the homes built in the 20's & thirties.

My grandmother's house was built small & efficiently with art deco details to offset the tiny-ness. Her house was torn down in Huntington Park to expand the Mexican grocery store parking lot....just like the song: tear down paradise & put up a parking lot.

My favorite street in downtown LA is Wilshire Blvd. I loved it more before the old buildings had to go. The adjacent residential streets were also exciting.

There is exciting architecture in CA but it's usually quite dated & endangered by rebuilding.

Kate