The Case Shiller Housing Index was down 18 percent between October 2007 and October 2008 (source). Boston was down only 6 percent. Should we celebrate Yankee ingenuity and work ethic? We did almost as well as Charlotte, North Carolina (-4.4%), which has a favorable business environment and very strong job creation.
I am more inclined to credit the fact that it is almost impossible to build a house in Boston. Most of the land close to the city center is already occupied by a wreck of an old structure. Due to zoning regulations, that structure usually can’t be torn down and rebuilt. The old structure is too big for its lot under the law, but the city won’t force a tear-down. Once torn down, however, the lot is subject to current zoning law and you’d be lucky to put up a dollhouse in place of the old 4500 square foot three-family. That is assuming you had the money and patience to work through a year or two of historical, planning, and zoning board meetings. Once you get your approval you’ll find that construction costs per square foot here are close to double what you’d pay in parts of the country where houses are routinely built. Should you be forced by zoning laws to rehab an old structure rather than start from scratch, the costs can go up even more. An old wreck of a house in Boston is thus worth a lot more than an old wreck in Atlanta, but mostly because it is easy and cheap to build a nice new house in Atlanta.
A Boston Globe story, subtitled “Boston lags others in adding homes”, adds a bit of weight to this theory. There are ever-fewer jobs in the Boston area, but the housing stock, mostly made out of wood, is deteriorating at least as fast as the job market. Those folks who have high paying jobs therefore compete intensely for the few nice houses in nice neighborhoods.
Given the energy-intensive nature of life in New England, with its cruel winters and increasingly hot summers, it would be nice if the zoning and planning process could be streamlined to allow the construction of double-walled German-style houses, built starting in the early 1990s but finally entering American consciousness in 2008 (nytimes story). Perhaps we need a state law that says anyone wanted to tear down a drafty old New England wreck of a house and rebuild a German-style house-within-a-house can do it without local approval as long as it is within 15 percent of the same above-ground exterior volume as the old house. That would create a lot of jobs here in Massachusetts and a local industry with expertise that could be marketed outside of the state.
I’ve been in a lot of “super-insulated, air-tight” homes. Not fun! A 1200sf home needs to exchange the air approx every 4 hours, or it gets “stuffy” (horridly so) and that’s the problem. The solution is to introduce air via an underground heat-exchanger so the air introduced into the home (or perhaps heat-unit) is 50F instead of the freezing air from outside. Few eco-homes have this. Still, eco-homes “the future” but based on my own (recent/extensive/sorry) experiences the *enemy* is Zoning Boards who are controlled by local construction lobbies.
Certain towns in CT (like Boston) have a similar “can’t tear down” zoning problem. The “solution” there is to build a house-within-a-house and tear down the shell.
The last eco-problem for eco-homes is external light. Large windows (nice) introduce a lot of heat if facing south, creating a huge HVAC (Heating Ventilation Air-Conditioning) problem even in the winter. In summer, these same big-south-windows become HVAC nightmares.
philg, I still reference your (awesome) long-ago story on Early Retirement. Irvine CA is (sadly) not the place to be. I’ll investigate Reno in January (the “worst” weather). Your #1 tip: (paraphrase) “You want to be fundamentally wealthier than the general population” (a brilliant deduction).
When I was but a wee lil nerd in the 80s, one of my mom’s friends had a double-walled house. They had to borrow space heaters long enough so they could meet code because the heater was judged to be undersized.by the zoning folks.
That is possible factor, but it does not show up in the Schiller indices. Using 2000 to establish the index of 100, Boston peaked at 182 while the top 10 market index peaked at 226. This means Boston showed only 2/3 the average price increase post 2000. The drop has been slower in Boston, which might reflect the difficulty in building and renovating. Boston is presently 159 vs the top 10 composite value of 170.
Boston is a good bit colder than Germany in the winter.
And…
“And those who want passive-house mansions may be disappointed. Compact shapes are simpler to seal, while sprawling homes are difficult to insulate and heat.
Most passive houses allow about 500 square feet per person, a comfortable though not expansive living space. Mr. Hasper said people who wanted thousands of square feet per person should look for another design.”
It looks like that they are talking about multifamily dwellings.
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The attitude about housing construction in Europe is different than in America. Europeans tend to have less of a problem with building expensive (but not fancy) housing. That is, they have more of a tendency of seeing how the housing is built as a long term investment. You can see this when comparing things like doorknobs in typical housing.
In the US, houses are built cheaply to maximize the profit on the initial sale. (the -builders- don’t look at the house as a long term investment). The fact that it costs more to heat in the future is irrelevant to the person who built it (since they don’t have to pay for it).
A related problem is that it takes quite a long time (at least it did, historically) to recoup extra construction costs (to make more efficient housing) with future savings in reduced energy needs.
What is the net migration into / out of the Boston area? I seem to recall reading that there is a net migration out of MA, but it did not have numbers for Boston.
There was an earlier energy efficient house movement in North America after the ’70s energy crisis. It was very big in Canada, I believe many aspects of research then migrated into their building codes. When I was designing my superinsulated house in the early ’80s, I tried to obtain some software called HOTCAN, but it was too pricey for me. I ended up doing calculations on heat loss in a spreadsheet.
There is a US book, The Superinsulated Home Book. http://www.amazon.com/Superinsulated-Home-Book-Ned-Nisson/dp/047188734X claims it is from 1985. The author did a newsletter (Energy Design Update) that I used as a resource in designing my house.
Mine is a double wall house, using two 2×4 stud walls and 6″ insulation space in between. A friend built one about five years back, he used the ICF wall method. I wish that technology was out when I built. And the windows I used were R3.3, I see that R10 windows are available now.
The Atlantic ran A Tale of Two Houses in 2007, which describes part of this problem. Notice the graph in particular and that Boston is relatively inexpensive.