I wanted to put this in MPSIMS but you can’t set up polls there.
Basically, what I want to know is do they have basements where you live? Answer the poll and then in the posts below state where you live. If they don’t have basements where you live, say why.
Coastal North Carolina. The water table is too high for a basement. I’m only 23 feet above mean high tide, and the realtor said the house was “on a virtual mountain”.
Around where I am, it depends on whether you’re in the Chesapeake flood plain. I’m less than a mile from the bay, as the crow flies, but I’m on a plateau about 90 feet above sea level, so a basement is no problem. But I live just a few minutes from houses that can’t realistically have basements.
States are big places, and in some parts of them, houses will have basements, and other parts, not. The house I grew up in in northern Virginia had a basement; houses in Newport News, where I lived a bit later, didn’t.
I live in Dallas, and basements aren’t common at all. And FWIW, they’re not common in parts south either- I’ve never heard of one in Houston, Austin or San Antonio either.
We don’t have one but “they” have them here, there, some places in the area of Memphis. I had one when I lived in midtown. I don’t really know how to answer the poll. You need an “I don’t have one but they are not unheard of in this area” option. Or pie.
South Carolina and they exist, but are rare - most often as “half-basements” where the house is built into a steep slope.
High water table here, and it rarely freezes, so there’s no need to stabilize the structure into the ground that deeply, and if you build one, you’re constantly sump-pumping it out.
No, not in California where I grew up, although people I knew had a disturbing tendency to call the crawl-space under the house their “basement,” even going so far as to install some shelves to the pillars holding the house up because they’re so desperate for storage space because they don’t have a basement.
Portland, OR. Most houses have basements. Or at least houses that are Craftsman style, or older Victorian style. I’d venture to say that most of them are finished, and that there is a significant percentage that use that space as a rental unit. Ours is finished (Craftsman bungalow), but it’s used for storage.