These days affordable housing is considered an unlikely event.
When “affordable housing” programs are discussed now it’s not in terms of small houses on bare lots, but regular housing with subsidies and strings attached.
Yet in the post war era, mucho bungalows were built with 10 year mortgages and people first paid them off, then self-finished the attic into another bedroom, and built a sun porch, and finally traded up to a middle class house.
Can that model be repeated?
Affordable housing is not an unlikely event. Plenty of people are able to afford houses.
However, the desires of people in the 1950’s and the desires of people today are different. People today don’t necessarily want to own a small house and fix it up. They want a large house on a large lot of land that is well-insulated with a variety of gadgets. If you want to buy a small house that is relatively spartan, it is still pretty affordable.
You also have to consider that government is much more involved today in driving up the prices of houses today than in the past. Property taxes are higher, a variety of taxes and impact fees are placed on new construction and house sales, stricter zoning laws make land more scarce, etc.
Those houses built in the 50’s still exist in most cities. They are still affordable to most. YMMV, but not every housing market is paying $800k for a 1200’ ranch home.
True. 800k will get you an 900 sq ft condo on my block.
Where I live, 800k will get you 5000+ sq ft and a few acres, 15 minutes from your work.
Those bungalows and 1.5 story homes built in the 40’s and 50’s are going for $100-125k for 1200 sq ft homes in great neighborhoods.
I think that model gets repeated over and over. Sure, the starter home markets in the largest metro areas may have morphed into something different, but Austin, TX, Raleigh/Durham/Cary/Chapel Hill in NC, Northern Virginia, are just a few areas where you could have bought new homes fairly cheap 20 years ago and cashed out huge now.
Where the next generation of up and coming towns are I have no idea, but I suppose we’ll know when they’re choking to death on traffic and people are complaining about it on message boards.
Where I’m from, the homes you describe are all over the place, listed at between 50k to 70k depending on the neighborhood. They don’t sell too well, because they’re all in Pittsburgh.
Sure, but keep in mind that those bungalows were largely built on tracts of inexpensive land which was inexpensive because it didn’t have a lot of infrastructure or easy access to the nearby cities (i.e. pre Eisenhower Interstate System). The cities gradually expanded and sprawled and what might have once been a suburb could now be considered a border neighborhood, with traffic lights and sewers and municipal cops and snow removal and whatnot.
If you’re willing to buy and build as far from the cities as the bungalows were, sure you’ll save a few bucks. Of course, you won’t have all the services modern homeowners have come to expect, until a few decades later when the city might sprawl in your direction and your land becomes incorporated.
Didn’t the GI Bill finance many of the small homes built in the 50’s?
<snerk> You’re precisely right.
Anyway, isn’t that what gentrification is all about? Around here anyway, what’s happening is that young professionals like me move into the quasi-ghetto for, let’s say 90K, and they fix their houses up over time and their friends move in next door and before you know it you can’t even get a city loan in the neighborhood. (Please, god, let my very presence move the ghetto over a bit! Dumb me lost another damned ladder off my porch last night!)
My SO grew up in one of those post-WWII neighborhoods, and his mother still lives there. Today, the houses are appoaching 50 years old, and exactly what According to Pliny is asking about, is happening again, to the same houses. Many of the houses have had their long time owners move out in the last 15 years. The houses are now being bought by Bosnian immigrants and by young couples, who are replacing the old kitchens, finishing the basements, and building a new garage.
Ummm … in the interest of fighting ignorance here, could we start with some facts?
I can’t find home ownership rates in the '50s, the US Census Data is from the sixties. . However, the trend is evident (data is in percentage of home ownership):
1965 63.03
1966 63.45
1967 63.63
1968 63.85
1969 64.33
1970 64.18
1971 64.25
1972 64.38
1973 64.53
1974 64.65
1975 64.60
1976 64.73
1977 64.80
1978 64.95
1979 65.23
1980 65.58
1981 65.43
1982 64.78
1983 64.65
1984 64.48
1985 63.90
1986 63.78
1987 63.98
1988 63.80
1989 63.90
1990 63.95
1991 64.05
1992 64.15
1993 64.00
1994 63.98
1995 64.75
1996 65.38
1997 65.70
1998 66.28
1999 66.80
2000 67.38
2001 67.83
2002 67.93
2003 68.25
2004 69.00
2005 68.88
2006 68.73
Rates rose 1965-1980, drops to 1985 and stays level to 1990, and has risen since then. The current home ownership rate is the highest in the record.
w.
II dont think that housing was cheap because of an unfinished attic and lack of a sun porch.Remember the old slogan that in real estate the 3 important things are location,location,and location.
The crazy jump in housing prices over the past few years is not due to the size of the McMansions–it’s due to speculation over the price of land. In the 50’s, cities were crowded, but the new suburbs and Levittowns were opening up on cheap land
High density urban housing is the way to go- huge decrease in pollutions, CO2, etc.
Thus Condos have replaced Levit-towns.
I grw up in a 50’s single family house. As has been pointed out, they were small (3 small bedrooms), one bath, and were usually on small lots. They had small kitchens and batrooms-not what people want today. Still, it was a well-built house, and survived us (and three subsequent families). My guess is, given how expensive land is, it makes sense to build the largest house on it that you can. Also, I have a feeling that the time in building a house is a big factor-which is why builders use premade cabinets in the kitchen, rather than building them on-site.
The houses that my parents and my aunts and uncles bought in the early '50s were the first houses anyone in the family had ever owned since coming from Europe 70 years before. People bought houses as they started families in the post-war Baby Boom - the GI Bill and cheap mortgages and prosperity helped also. The developments were designed to get cheap houses to lots of people very quickly and efficiently, to build the volume.
Another reason houses aren’t as affordable is because of the increased cost of labor. In the first half of the 20th century, people who built homes just didn’t earn all that much. Today, the labor cost of a home is much greater.
People want bigger homes now not because they want to live in opulent space, but because they do much more in their homes. In 1950’s, clothing was hung on a line to dry. There might be one small television in the house. There were no computers, no microwaves, no huge refrigerators, etc. Also, people didn’t tend to work at home, and social/recreational life was spent outside the home to a much greater extent.
Today, people have many TV’s, and they are much bigger. They want home offices. They want kitchens with built-in dishwashers, and they want laundry rooms for their washer/dryers. Once you start adding those requirements up, house sizes balloon. It’s not about living large, or having a McMansion, or wanting to live with lots of open space around you - it’s about having a house big enough that you comfortably house all of the appliances and accessories of modern living.
Is that really what accounts for the bulk of the difference in home affordability, though? (And remember, we’re not comparing today’s homes with those of the “first half of the 20th century” but with the 1950’s in the early second half of the 20th century.) Economist Michael Reich notes that labor costs are actually decreasing as a share of construction costs:
Moreover, AFAICT, real wages for blue-collar workers such as construction workers haven’t grown much since about the 1970’s, but the real surge in home prices came afterwards. So I think there must be some other factors than labor cost accounting for much of the big-ticket home prices of recent years.
Some of this makes sense to me but some of it doesn’t. After all, people didn’t use outdoor clotheslines all the year round, not in temperate climates at least: for much of the year, they had to dry clothes on indoor clotheslines, which certainly take up more room than an electric clothes dryer. Moreover, people in the 1950’s certainly did a lot of socializing and entertaining in their homes: everything from dinners for the boss to teenage dances to cocktail parties. I’d really need a cite to believe that folks in the 1950’s did less socializing/entertaining in home environments than we do now. (Maybe you just mean that they didn’t sit around their homes watching TV so constantly, but that’s not quite the same thing.)
Yes, there are some modern trends, like the proliferating electronic entertainment equipment, that simply take up more room. (Though even that, IMHO, you somewhat overstate, due to the more compact size of much of modern equipment. Old-fashioned cabinet radio sets and record players were definitely bulkier than their modern equivalents.) And home offices are indeed more common now than they were in the 1950’s.
But I’m skeptical of the suggestion that people in the 1950’s somehow just didn’t need as much living space as we do now. I think mostly they were just more willing to make do with less. (For one thing, it used to be quite standard for same-gender siblings to share a bedroom, whereas now it’s expected that each child will have his/her own room—though families are smaller now, of course. And it used to be common to use basement space for “rec rooms” and “dens”, secondary social/relaxing space that nowadays tends to be built into the house proper while basements store our ever-vaster piles of stuff.)
But remember that this is affected by the so-called “graying of America”, as the bulk of the population shifts into higher age brackets. What we’re seeing in rising home-ownership rates is partly a reflection of the fact that more Americans are older, and older people are more likely to have reached a point where they either (a) have inherited a house or (b) have finally saved up enough money to buy a house.
You may have a point about labor if you’re starting in 1987. I was thinking more about the rise in labor costs from the early 1980’s until the beginning of the modern era of homebuilding, which I would put somewhere around 1970. I did a quick check of some labor statistics, and it appears that between 1939 and 1985 the increases in salary of construction workers outpaced the increase in salary of most other workers. I imagine a good part of that has to do with increases in productivity brought about by modern building methods. A single drywaller can put up as much wall area in a day that it might have taken a week to put up with lathe and plaster construction. Modern tools and processes are much more efficient.
But this might actually counteract my argument. If the wage increases are due to increasing productivity, then it shouldn’t affect the bottom line cost of a house at all. What it did do was shift home construction away from more custom, detailed type of work to generic drywall and manufacturerd mouldings.
I agree that it’s not just that there’s more to do in the home - it’s also that the standard of living has risen, and when people are wealthier they naturally want more space, at least within limits. I grew up sharing a bedroom with my brother. My daughter has a bedroom to herself, and it’s larger than the one I shared was. So sure, we’ve grown accustomed to more space.
There are no doubt many trends that have pushed us into larger homes. I suspect that on the whole, people are less social now and more likely to cocoon at home. That places a greater value on the living conditions in the house. The universal adoption of air conditioning in the south has eliminated the porch as living space - before air conditioning, people spent a lot more time outside.
I wonder if the highway system and access to good transportation is a part of it. Inner cities still have small homes, as land is at a premium. But now people can move out to the ‘burbs’, where land is cheaper and homes can be built larger.
I don’t know - Levittown was pretty far from the city. From the homes I’ve looked at, there are some causes for more space, like master bedrooms with baths, which weren’t that common 50 years ago. But a lot of the space is used as large family/living rooms, which don’t get used for any of the reasons you give. I think they get sold on the fantasy of big parties, but that’s pretty rare.
As for entertainment, the console my parents had, with just a record player (for 78s) and a radio, was bigger than my big screen TV and stereo combined.
I wonder how much of the increased size comes from purchasers upgrading, as opposed to the first time purchasers you mostly saw in the early '50s.