In North Central Georgia it’s a mixed bag. Older construction is probably 50/50 basement vs. crawl space. Newer construction is mostly slab, but basements are not rare even in new homes.
As stated earlier, most of Texas, you either get rock or shifting clay, do no basements. It’s more likely to create a living space in the attic.
My best friend’s father turned the garage into a family room. Just left the cars outside.
I live in Nashville, Tennessee. Most houses around here have basements. My house has a “walkout basement”; half of it is finished and used as a den / TV room with bedroom. (But I just use that bedroom as a storage room.) The other half is a garage.
Ohio, and yes we have a basement (unfinished, but used for indoor plant growing, washer and dryer, storage and as habitat for the demons).
Cayman Islands beachfront. No basement. House is on pillars and waves can wash under the house in a hurricane. Easy access under the house - no crawling required - to reach the cisterns.
North Central Alberta and most homes have basements. The exceptions are those built near lakefront due to the water table and mobile homes for obvious reasons.
I installed a natural gas hydronic/boiler system which makes a massive difference to how comfortable it is. It’s not finished yet but will be soonish.
I am in the same area as you and agree - no basements in NorCal. There are a few homes with crawlspaces, tho. Most everything around me are slab foundations.
Basements? Negatory.
I wonder if this is compensated-for with larger garages, or additional living/storage space in the house itself.
Western Washington and yes. The majority of them are “daylight basements” that are finished and feel like any other downstairs room. With my house, for specifics, the basement floor is only three feet below ground level. If you weren’t watching closely, you might not realize it was a basement at all. I’ve seen a few people do a double take when looking out the window and realizing the dirt is only about a foot below the window.
When I lived in CA, mostly no. The one exception was a building dating back to the 1860’s that had a sort of root cellar with an exterior entrance.
Massachusetts - yes, they are very common.
Louisiana - No for the whole state although some grand old houses have an elevated first floor with a pseudo-basement or crawl-space under it. There may be a few in older houses in extreme northern Louisiana that have some sort of true below-ground level basement but I have never seen a real one there. You can’t even bury people underground in much of the southern part of the state because the water table is so high.
Both the house I grew up in and the house I lived in as an adult in Northwest Indiana had basements. My parents’ home had a split basement - the front half was finished and furnished with an extra bedroom, bathroom and family room. The back side was what was called a Michigan basement with mud slab floor and exposed dirt walls and was used as a root cellar and storage for home canned goods.
My married home had a very large basement with several ‘rooms’, one of which was a retired coal room that still had the chute that opened to the outside, although we put a lock on it to prevent accidents or unwanted incursions. Another room was a workshop, and another was a laundry room. All floors and walls were cement.
Here in Colorado, I have a full basement that is one open area. Half is occupied by laundry facilities and the other half is my office. When I moved in the walls were just dry wall, but I’ve since had them plastered and sealed. Floor is concrete.
North Idaho. Basements are common here.
From what I’ve been told it’s because the ground is so marbled. Not only does it make it tough on basements it can also create problems for regular foundations.
I live in Ohio and the Western part if it is mostly moraine. You can dig down into a very consistent layer. Basements are very common.
I’d love a basement, a place to keep things nice and cool all year round, but this is the Granite City.
MN - yes, always. You’ve had a couple of MN respodees already. The reason for it up around here is frost heave. Every winter the ground freezes down to 3 feet below grade. Any foundations/footings set above the freeze line will crack and heave through the freeze/thaw cycle. Building codes up here require foundations to be set at least X feet below grade (usually 4 or 6 feet, depending on local rules). And if the foundation has to be that low, might as well make use of that space.
New England, New York, New Jersey – yes for basements
I’m in the suburbs and my house is on a slab. But, yeah, it’s sort of a cheapie house (one bath ranch; bought when it was just my son and me, now it’s four people and wife really wants to move).
My house is definitely an oddity for the region. All the other houses I’ve lived in or are familiar with have basements.
Currently in NC where about 1 in 4 houses has a basement. Not unheard of or even rare, but not the norm. Mostly the ones that do have them are walk out basements for houses built on slopes.
Another NE Ohioan, and yes.
As for beach houses, I have an uncle in the LA area who does live right on the beach (as in, if you step out his back door, you’re on the boardwalk). Worse, his entire neighborhood is basically a sandbar peninsula, with more water on the other side, only a few blocks away. And despite this, he somehow manages to have a basement. I can’t imagine how much that costs him to keep dry.
Southern Ontario here. Basements are standard. Some commercial building are built on a slab, bue even then, I think they put a foundation wall around the outside down to frost line, and insulate that, so that the ground under the slab never cools to freezing.