I live just south of Jacksonville FL, and I have a basement. Our house is on a fairly steep lot, so rather than lay block and fill it all in with soil, the builder put a basement under the back half the house. About 15 years ago, my inlaws built a bit south of here and they also had a basement - similar deal - sloped lot, so the front half of the basement was buried and the back half was a walk-out.
Sadly, our basement is far too damp to store things - tho we’re in the process of finishing it, including a dehumidifier, which I expect will run year-round. The ultimate plan is a workshop, a bonus room, and a big storage room. All I hafta do now is hit the lottery…
Heh. When I read the thread title I thought the OP would be asking which is a better pickup line: tell her you have a basement, or tell her you don’t have a basement?
I live in a 77-year-old bungalow in East Atlanta, Georgia, and it has no basement. My friend Paul’s house, three blocks away but built 30 years later, has a basement. Where there are no geological considerations, I think it comes down to trends in building styles. You’re looking for a line in time, not geography.
Somewhere in Atlanta, I’d say. A lot seems to depend on when the houses were built, the terrain involved, the size of the house, etc.
In our neighborhood, there are about 210 two-story, brick and frame, 2,000 to 3,000 sq. ft. houses, built between 1978 and 1986. The terrain is hilly – not terribly steep, but there’s not a level lot in it; the elevation varies from about 920 to 1120 ft. above sea level, typical Georgia clay soils. Probably 75% of the houses have basements, with another 10% on crawl spaces and the rest (like our house) on a slab. There’s a 20-25ft. elevation drop from the rear property line to the street in our 1/3 acre lot, but the house sits on a shelf tucked back toward the rear. In many cases, the lay of the lot made a basement of some kind inevitable; many of the houses have the garage under the house on the low side of the lot (the exposed half of the basement) while the rest of the basement is below ground level. Most of the new construction I see in the area has a basement if the intended selling price is above about $200,000 or if the terrain dictates, and is on a slab otherwise.
In the parts of Arkansas where I grew up (all around the eastern Arkansas Delta area and in Fayetteville), basements were rare in houses, even expensive ones, built in the 1960s or after. Even the older houses we lived in were usually on a crawl space rather than a basement. Of course, in a lot of those places the water table was not much more than a couple of feet below ground level.