Life Expectancy of a Home (Baltimore, Columbia: wood floors, foreclosures, rental)

[jonjj]

I read a very interesting article today on life expectancies of homes. They are typically about 100 years. After that, the home either goes rental, decays, or receives major renovation. Factors include plumbing, electricity, foundation work, etc.
It goes on to state that if renovation does not occur in a majority of the homes, it's a signal of a neighborhood that enters decline.

Having paraphrased what I have read today, I think this is a major issue in Baltimore. Add to that, the combo of crime and poverty and we see today the fate of many city neighborhoods. Those areas that are receiving attention seem to be coming along fine. Those areas where folks cannot or will not renovate definitely show signs of decline. It also spoke of the future for many inner-ring suburban areas.

From the article:
"When the third owner sells the house, it is becoming functionally obsolete. Electrical and plumbing are becoming seriously outdated. It desperately needs a new kitchen and bathrooms. It will either need a thorough rehab or it becomes rental. The houses in the neighborhood begin to decline in value. This is the point a neighborhood starts to decay.

If the neighborhood has some feature that makes it worth rehabbing, the neighborhood will survive. If there isn't a good reason the houses will sink into rental and eventually into demolition.

It is still cheaper to build new on the edge of sprawl than it is to rehab in the older neighborhoods. As long as this continues there is no hope for the inner ring suburbs.

There has to be some barrier to prevent cities from sprawling. We have eliminated all of the barriers preventing sprawl in the region."

[vanyali]

That 100-year rule of thumb might be a bit optimistic. I think the life-expectancy of a house depends a lot on the era that the house was built.

For example, my house was built in 1942 -- right after the Great Depression and during WWII with all of the rationing and what have you that went on at that time. So my house is several decades younger than 100 years, but it's a falling-down piece of junk. The wires and pipes were steel, so the pipes were rusting out, and the wiring was falling apart and really scary behind the walls. Back then, they didn't use big enough pieces of wood to frame the floors, and then they let the plumbers hack those floor joists to pieces to pipe the bathrooms, and THEN they poured thick, heavy concrete all over the bathroom walls and floors (not to mention the really heavy cast iron tubs they always used) which is just a recipe for sagging and broken floor joists. My slate roof leaks like a sieve, the steel gutters are rusted out, the windows haven't been painted in decades and some of them are actually rotten, not to mention the bad renovations that the house *has* suffered through.

Just a few years later, after the end of WWII, people started building with copper and iron pipes again, and started using wiring that has held up better. There are some other defects in mid-century houses (ever notice how every single 1950's ranch house always has a big crack right down the center of the ceiling of every room? An engineer once told me that it was because they didn't use big enough lumber for the ceiling joists so the ceiling heave a little bit from pressure changes in the attic as air blows through the attic vents -- there's really no good way to fix that) but overall most of them seem to be holding up OK (except for the mid-century modern houses -- leaky roofs, bad windows -- because they were so experimental at the time).

There was an era more recently -- maybe the 70's or 80's? -- when builders experimented with aluminum wiring. People always mix aluminum wiring with copper wiring when they replace outlets or switches and things, and many, many, many houses have burned down as a result. Also in the '70's, right after they stopped building bathrooms completely out of concrete, they tried building them completely out of drywall. Drywall doesn't hold up in a shower or around a tub, so it has rotted away in a lot of those areas, letting water through into the structure of the house and possibly causing water damage. Bathrooms of that era seem to be coming due for renovation about now (when you can put your hand through the tile by accident and find out there's no wallboard there anymore) even though they are really only about 30 years old.

Other technologies haven't held up either -- some old plastic pipes that people experimented with for example (modern plastic pipes seem to be fine). It's hard to completely re-pipe your house without making a bunch of holes in your walls (and even messing up your bathroom tile).

There was a little scandal in Charlotte, NC a year or so ago when I lived there when the local paper printed a series about a builder who was building really cheap outer-ring developments, duping really poor people into buying into them (totally defrauded the people with teaser rates, outright lies, the works) and then bailed with the cash to do it again right next door. The kicker was that the brand new houses started falling apart as soon as they were finished. The things are such pieces of junk, there's no way they'll stand up for even half of that 100-year rule of thumb.

I had a house from 1899 once, and it did need renovation, but mostly because it was originally built with a really bad floor plan and hadn't been maintained in decades. It was probably better constructed than the 1942 house that I'm in now, and I think it probably could have been fixed up OK with less work than I put into it (especially if it had been taken care of previously).

[nurider2002]

My house was built in 1958 and for its time was considered an expensive house. Although its obviously well built, at 50 years of age, the cost of rehabbing it has already outweighed its value. We love the house for the location--a rural setting with several acres minutes from the beltway, and it has quite a bit of character. That said, in less than five years we've replaced water lines, electrical lines and boxes, furnaces/heat pumps, gutted and rehabbed the kitchen and three baths, repaved side walks and driveway, relined the chimneys, sanded or replaced all wood floors, added some replacement windows, the list goes on and on. There is still brick that needs pointing up, concrete porches and patios that need repair, windows and doors need replacing, a new roof is probably only a few years away, etc. The point is, no matter how great the location and character of an older home, its almost always cheaper to build new than to rehab an older home. We already realize we will take a loss when we decide to sell. Most of our neighbors are in the same boat, putting money into the houses because we love the location but the bottom line is, there are always limitations (realistically) to how much you can do. New homes tend to have huge baths with jacuzzi's, a separate shower, double sinks, etc. They may come with 3 or more car garages, all sorts of extras that are impractical when rehabbing an older home with existing load bearing walls, etc. Thus, you can sink a ton of money into the older home but it may still be "functionally obsolete" as realtors are so fond of saying these days, since newer homes are designed for today's tastes. I've never cared for the feel of a new home so, I keep buying dinosaurs and then complaining about the endless work and money involved. Eventually some neighbors give up and let their houses go into complete decline and the neighborhood values plumment. You quoted the article as saying when the third owner sells the house becomes functionally obsolete. I've already had one realtor tell me that. Friends always rave about what a great house it is and why would I ever want to sell. My guess is that its a great house to visit but, not too many people would want to live there and maintain it.

[Tallybalt]

I can't entirely agree with the article. The absolutely best built houses in American history were non frame houses built between, say, 1900-1930. Homeland and Guilford in Baltimore are prime examples of brick, stone and stucco houses built with high quality materials and are now easily outlasting most houses that were built after WWII, and will be standing around long after the last Columbia condo from the 1960s is bulldozed. The quality of construction of a well-built, upper middle class house from the 1910s, 1920s and the 1930s is without peer.

Frame houses are a slightly different story, as wood does decay over the years. However, careful care over the years can easily preserve the neighborhood's integrity, after all, just look at Roland Park or Mount Washington.

[well?]

If hemp were legal, and hemp concrete were used as inselation the shel structer could last hundredes of years. but who realy cares about the enviroment anyway.

[barante]

Good to know about hemp. I've been looking for key to longevity.

[barante]

The redlining of 239 U.S. cities that was done circa 1937 by the federal government's bailout agency, Home Owners' Loan Corporation, shows us how thinking in these matters has changed.
In redlining, HOLC's criteria included newness, housing type, as well as ethnicity, race and economic standing. The ideal was a new single-family home in a neighborhood of Anglo-Saxon professionals, protected by covenants that certainly excluded blacks if not Jews. Residents were likely to go to an Episcopal church.
While Roland Park met the latter criteria, it did not meet the requirement of newness. For that reason HOLC gave the highest ranking to Guilford, Homeland and even Northwood, which was being built at that point. Because of the age of houses, Roland Park was given only the secong highest ranking of "still desirable." As far as the predecessor agency of the Federal Housing Administration was concerned, Roland Park was not very different from Edmondson Village.
I mention all this to underline that houses are ageless in some special situations, redone and redone again. Our previous house was built in 1857 and is likely to go forever if people with pockets deeper than ours keep buying it. In some other situations, ten-year-old houses are falling apart. With the current wave of foreclosures we may get a new yardstick in some staple-gun and cardboard developments. I've been reading the proofs of Antero Pietila's forthcoming Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City. His review points to another major change. The least desirable among the four colors on HOLC's maps was red, the universal symbol of alarm. It marked neighborhoods where housing stock was old and which were populated by blacks or white ethnics. The next worst category was yellow where, according to HOLC, the negative processes that already had been completed in red areas were taking place and would lead to the area's inevitable deterioration.
Contrast this with the following fact: Some of Baltimore's most desirable neighborhoods are places that the feds in 1937 deemed to be beyond redemption. Colored red were Mount Vernon, Bolton Hill, Eutaw Place, Federal Hill, Canton and Highlandtown.
That's how reality changes.

[TeamBenya]

could you post a link to this article? I'd like to read it

[barante]

Antero Pietila HOME

[GraniteStater]

Most houses built today are of rather inferior quality IMO.
I toured an 1828 built house in NH last year and it was in great condition and excellently maintained. You can't duplicate the quality of the materials that are found in some of those antique houses with what we have today.