FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Housing as consumer item
[Rod Dreher 03/13 11:17 AM]Chris in Austin writes: Part of the reason the built environment is now in such sad shape in this country is because of the fundamental change in the way we use housing. Used to be that a house was intended to be a permanent structure and a part of a permanent community. That is no longer true. Housing has changed from being a durable good to a consumer good. Houses in the big developments are now built with a shelf-life, they aren’t intended to last longer than 20-25 years (and I would argue that the houses currently being built in Texas by the big publicly-traded builders will last only about 15 years). Instead of buying a house to live in, possibly for the rest of our lives and to pass on to our kids, we buy one to stay in for a few years, like a Motel 6, and then move on. No wonder there’s a lack of community. In the Home chapter, Houston lawyer Bill Davidson says:"Where we were living before was a center for McMansions and teardowns. We were watching them being built, and my then-father-in-law, a retired chief engineer with NASA, would walk over there with me to look at them. He’d point out how the contractors were using substandard materials behind the walls, and expensive materials on the outside.”
A developer of some of these houses ended up as a legal client of Bill’s. “He was laughing about how people who bought $80,000 houses were pickier than the people who bought the McMansions. The people who bought the less-expensive houses were going to live there forever, and the McMansions people weren’t. A lot of them were planning to move out before there were problems.”
This disregard for craftsmanship and the ethic of disposability rubbed Bill the wrong way. “It seems to me the essence of being a conservative is appreciating what’s there, what you have. Conservatives seem to be not so willing to cast aside what they have just because something new and superficially more interesting has come along. They ought to have the same views about their homes and communities.”
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