I live in Ontario, Canada, in an area that’s seeing much developmentent. All the new houses being built have basements and as far as I know always had to have them. I was once told that this was necessary due to some issue with frost.
While reading treehugger I’ve seen mentioned many times the concept of prefab homes as being somehow “good.”
Now none of these prefabs seem to include a basement, yet I get the impression that they are aimed at Northern countries as users.
Given this, are basements NECESSARY or just a market driven custom in this part of the world? Could you build a house such as the one in the above link in, say, Ontario?
None of the homes in our area have basements. It’s just not possible because we’re so close to sea level. So obviously they’re not a requirement.
Not a requirement, and in these parts they can be considered a hindrance: Basement space cannot be considered living space. Basements cannot legally hold apartments, bathrooms, or even kitchens.
i’m a new orleanean and i can tell you that there are no basements in new orleans. even before the storm.
back in the college days i was on a concrete crew that poured foundation and basement walls. basement add value to the house but they also cost more in construction.
the issue of frost only impacts the depth the footers need to be (they must be at least a predetermined depth below the frost line). in areas with high water tables basements are not practical. they flood, leak, mold, and are generally a pain in the ass. in those cases they do nothing for the value of the house
Even here in Massachusetts, right next door to homes with basements you’ll find homes on slabs with no basements. Down in New Jersey, too. I understand they’re pretty big out West as well.
I grew up in a home with a basement, so unbasemented homes bug me. Where else are you gonna put the washer and dryer and furnace and temporary body storage? You gotta use upstairs closet space.
Basements: it’s a northern thing. 
I understand that basements evolved because, in order to be stable, the bases of foundations have to rest on soil that is below the frost line (I seem to recall that this is typically more than a metre below the surface in Ontario). You can either place the house on pilings or on walls that extend down this far.
You can also place the house on an insulated slab, but it will be then be ‘floating’ on soil that can freeze, thaw, and shift. The house ends up shifting, cracking, and tilting.
I suspect that the use of basements was reinforced because of a number of cultural factors.
Since a room was needed to house the dusty coal furnaces of yore, and since supplying fuel for the furnace was easiest through a gravity chute, the furnace went to the basement. Later furnaces used liquid or gaseous fuel that did not have this problem, but the pattern was set.
The basement is also useful as a place to place workshops and machinery–water heaters and such–that was regarded as ‘too messy’ for the regular house.
In areas that do not get frost, the main technical reason for digging deep goes away, and you get many houses built on slab.
What I am wondering now is, we now have a lot of commercial and industrial buildingd built on slab here in Ontario, even as the bouses nearby are built on basements. Obviously techniques of building on slab have improved. Do these buildings have colder floors or some other quality that does allow their construction techniques to be used in residential construction?
Here in my little neighborhood in NE Ohio, which was built in the early 1960’s, most of the homes are ranches. Some of them are 2-stories.
I haven’t been in ALL the homes in the neighborhood (there’s probably about 50) but I only know of 3 ranches with basements. One 2-story I know doesn’t have a basement.
There’s a street of a dozen or so newer (80’s-90’s) 2-story houses in the neighborhood that DO all have basements.
So it seems that at least in my northern neighborhood, basements aren’t required and aren’t necessarily a selling point. But they are enough of a selling point to make SOME of the houses with basements just to bring folks in the neighborhood.
The newer homes have basements, maybe because it was more expected for them to be built that way in the last 20 or so years.
I can’t say it’s for true everywhere but the foundation work i’ve done was in central and northern indiana. the homes that had basements had their footing set at a depth of about eight feet.
the homes built without basements had their footings set at about 4-feet depth. so, basementless homes still had footings and what amounted to 4 foot basement walls. the short basement was then filled with dirt up to about 4 inched below the top of the 4 foot was. rebar was placed to tie the slab to the walls and then the slab was poured.
My home here in Maine has no basement. It’s a stick built ranch on a heated slab. At first I wasn’t crazy about buying a house without the standard basement, but after an extremely wet spring where everyone’s sump pumps were failing and the low cost of heating it in the winter, I’m pretty happy now that I don’t have a basement.
here in Seattle a basement is a nice addition in the summer, it gets hot enough to be uncomfortable but you really dont need AC. with a basement you have someplace to relax in the cool or use a fan to pump the cool air upstairs once the sun goes down so you can sleep.
Definitely a selling point in my part of Michigan, especially if it’s a completely finished basement. Virtually all homes in SE Michigan have basements except for tract houses where economy was the factor. My previous house, for example, had no basement, which means my garage served that function, which means I had to unbury my car from time to time. Many of the homes in that neighborhood didn’t even have a garage. I don’t know where the heck they stored anything.
It sort of weirds me out that all those people up North have basements. Like a room under your house, not your house but in the ground under your house. And you have to go down a bunch of stairs to do the laundry? And this room under your house isn’t full of water? Crazy, just crazy. What do you need it for? Don’t you have a shed?
Some newer houses here are built with “daylight basements”, but that just means you come in on the second floor and the lower floor is built partly into a hill. I don’t believe I’ve ever been in a building here with a true basement unless you count academic libraries, and I’m not entirely sure how they’re dry.
There’s always the attic, but carrying that body up the ladder… I donno…you could pull something.
The only part of the country I’ve seen basements pretty consistantly is the mid west…Tornados, ya know.
I live in New Jersey, in Monmouth County, not far from the ocean.
As far as I know, everyone around here has a basement, even if it was just for the coal shute. Having a slightly damp basement is not a big deal.
My basement is big - so big that it has a front and a back stairway.
My basement looks like the rest of my house, except it has basement windows instead of regular wood windows like the rest of the house. There’s a full bath with shower, a bedroom, a utility room (big one), walk in closet, wet bar, storage room, wall to wall carpet, and it’s the size of my upstairs space less garage. There’s a sump pump so it doesn’t fill with water. My laundry room’s on the main floor (and real estate listings advertise this fact – main floor laundry – so you don’t have to climb stairs). I am investigating adding a pole barn of sorts out back, though. Shed just seems so small.
My basement looks like the rest of my house, except it has basement windows instead of regular wood windows like the rest of the house. There’s a full bath with shower, a bedroom, a utility room (big one), walk in closet, wet bar, storage room, wall to wall carpet, and it’s the size of my upstairs space less garage. There’s a sump pump so it doesn’t fill with water. My laundry room’s on the main floor (and real estate listings advertise this fact – main floor laundry – so you don’t have to climb stairs). I am investigating adding a pole barn of sorts out back, though. Shed just seems so small.
I’ve lived in Houston, Austin, Waco, and now Bend, Oregon. I’ve never lived in a house that’s had a basement.
A friend of mine had a house built in Yuma, AR, and his house had a basement. That was the first time I’d ever seen one.
The amusing thing, I thought, was that he’d had the basement built to be an almost exact duplicate of the ground floor of his house- so, effectively, he had two houses- one on top of the other. Staying the night at his house was amusing- we had a house entirely to ourselves…
If you have to make a four foot deep “basement” and then fill it it and pour a slab, you might as well dig 4 feet deeper, add 4 more feet of wall and get useful space.
Don’t have a basement at our house. Love the house. Hate not having a basement.
Our lot, on the side of a mountain doesn’t lend itself to a basement. It could have been done, but would have been very very wet.
A basement makes it much easier to work on a house. It gives you a place to run wiring and plumbing.
I’m adding a 2 story 500 square foot addition to the side of the house. The main reason is to get the mechanical room out of the house, and the washer dryer out of the kitchen.
I have a 10x12 shed. It’s mostly just a big tool box.
There are basically no basements in Albuquerque because of the way the ground is. Lots of rock not far down, and nobody is going to blast out a hole in the rock just to put in a basement.