Build Small, Live Large :: Adaptation

The developer community began to see success with their business plan of providing more for less. It is a pretty potent concept, after all. As they strove to provide more, however, they concentrated solely on quantity forgetting quality and livability. Every additional bit of trim, detail, windows, doors, all of that, was weighed against how many square feet they would otherwise be able to build and still be at their target price point. Too many windows adding $5000 to the budget could easily be another 100 square feet of the cheap space. That's practically another bedroom. You can see this mentality play out in the plans and the façades of suburban homes across the country.

Instead of an all brick house you get brick veneer on the front elevation
Instead of rugged properly proportioned windows you get the cheapest available that meet egress
Instead of classical columns with a full entablature you get cylinders that die right into the soffit
Instead of a usable front porch you get a mini tacked-on porchlet

The list goes on and on. I'm sure you can find all these compromises and more when you drive through any subdivision.

The home buying public was told that in order to get the most bang for their buck they should buy a house that offered the most living space for the least dollar per square foot cost. Supposedly the houses that met these criteria would be good investments, as well. This fed into the greater fool theory that saturated the real estate market in recent years. Valuation mainly by square footage ignored the other requirements of a home that establish its intrinsic value.

This trade off between square footage and pretty much every other aspect of home design remains the driving force in the industry. This is the main culprit in preventing a recovery in this sector. To change their philosophy now may mean the builders and developers have to devalue their existing unsold stock. They'd much rather wait it out and hope beyond hope that fools greater than the last will soon show.

There have been many attempts to change this mindset. Plenty of other theories have been offered, some having great success in the marketplace. Despite the success of other models, and in defiance of the numerous warnings of a pending bubble burst, these new models did not receive widespread acceptance from the development community. The problem was that the existing business model had been so consistently successful that it would take a major, earth shattering paradigm shift for it to be derailed. Welcome to the recession.

Posted via email from Kenneth Hitchens: Architect