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Grandpa’s Basement House
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoSee also, Chile's half house concept: https://www.archdaily.com/797779/half-a-house-builds-a-whole-community-elementals-controversial-social-housing https://www.archdaily.com/797779/half-a-house-builds-a-whole...
- geoffeg 4y ago> Growing vegetables on what should be a lawn is verboten in many locations, if not by the government than by private association bylaws. I'm aware that some HOAs limit (sometimes to what seems like an extreme) what can be done with the yard and lawn, but I wasn't aware of any governments that ban growing vegetables. Is that more common in water-restricted municipalities? (I live in midwestern US, where backyard gardens are very common.)
- iratewizard 4y agoI've never heard of anything like that. Outside of HOAs, most regulations we see about the front are length of grass, what can and can't be done at the easement, public health issues, and maybe laws about invasive plant species. My wife used to work at a company that codified these laws, and she didn't know of anything either.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoMy HOA defines the acceptable types of trees, plants, and shrubs that can be planted. I don’t know if vegetables are restricted, but you cannot plant anything you want. This is common in colorado.
- vharuck 4y agoMy HOA prohibits any vegetable or fruit plants, except heirloom tomatoes. So I can guess somebody on the board has a particular hobby.
- HarryHirsch 4y agoWhat business does a bunch of Wikipedia admins have to rule what I can plant in my own backyard. Mind, I get concerns about invasive plants, water conservation or agricultural pathogens, but that's not what HOA's are usually about. They will tell you you can't paint your shed pink.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoWikipedia admins? I agree this restriction is ridiculous. I don’t know the purpose except maybe to make the neighborhood all look the same.
- rmatt2000 4y agoThe three sets Wikipedia admins, HOA board members, and Karens have an intersection with a large cardinality.
- yardie 4y agoI know in Florida because of orange canker if one orange tree has it basically all orange trees within a 1-mile radius have to be destroyed. This is state law because of the orange produce farms lobbying. It’s almost unheard of to see suburban or wild orange trees in south Florida anymore.
- rdtwo 4y agoIdk we visited some folks that had oranges growing in their yard in a major urban area. Enforcement is probably not great
- jimmygrapes 4y agoThey likely don't have orange canker issues then. It isn't a blanket ban, it's just "if bad thing happens then there's swift and large response"
- cdmckay 4y agoWhich is a shame. I have fond memories of visiting my grandparents in Florida and going to their backyard to pick oranges and grapefruits to make fresh juice in the morning. It’s unfortunate the orange lobby can ban something that just seems so Florida to me.
- bin_bash 4y agoI could see front yards but not banning growing vegetable in back yards
- nicoburns 4y agoI really don’t se why this is a thing for front yards either. Growing vegetables are just as pretty as a lawn, and even if you don’t think so, surely productive use of the land ought to take priority. I find it so strange that such restrictions only seem to exist in the US, where there is normally so much emphasis on individual freedom.
- hamburglar 4y agoThere seem to be a lot of people who like the idea of willfully entering an HOA agreement that limits freedoms that they wouldn’t want their neighbors exercising. I can see both sides but it’s not really for me.
- Gigachad 4y agoThere is something to be said for being able to restrict negative activities. Someone piling up junk on their front yard for example. I own in a Strata title apartment building which comes with a lot of very similar restrictions but its all pretty reasonable imo. You are free to paint the inside of your apartment however you want but painting the balcony or the hallway side of your front door is not allowed as it compromises the visual image of the building. Similar issues in a suburb. One person with rusted out cars on the front compromises the entire street. No one will care if the rusted cars are inside a shed though.
- nsv 4y agoI am part of the minority that would not mind at all if my neighbor had a rusted out car in their lawn. I recognize that this isn't a very common opinion though.
- throwaway742 4y ago
- duxup 4y agoThis is interesting/ strange to me. I grew up in the Midwest and a modest garden in the backyard was often the case. I’ve never heard of them being banned. I don’t doubt they are some places. I’m sure some suburban guy decided to plow his front yard and be a corn farmer, but generally I find nobody minds a garden.
- webmaven 4y ago> This is interesting/ strange to me. I grew up in the Midwest and a modest garden in the backyard was often the case. I’ve never heard of them being banned. I don’t doubt they are some places. Backyard gardens are generally unobjectionable, it is the front yard that gets neighbors riled up when they see dirt and messy looking plants. Even then, if you make an effort to have it present as ornamental (eg. herbs, cherry tomatoes, mini peppers, etc. in attractive raised beds and containers that don't displace the entire lawn) you may be able to get away with it. Oh, and definitely keep the compost pile out of sight.
- cafard 4y agoSome neighbors have dedicated their front yard to vegetable growing. They have raised beds--I should say not particularly attractive ones. I don't know what kind of yield they get, for the house overshadows it a fair bit of the day. But we are not in an HOA. At least a couple of households nearby have composting drums in sight from the street.
- Handytinge 4y agoThis is such a strange and uniquely American sounding thing. Not once in my live have I complained about a neighbours yard, or had them complain about mine. And if they did, I'd laugh them off the property. What business is it of theirs?
- cheriot 4y agoI've seen municipalities prohibit keeping chickens, but not gardens.
- girvo 4y agoWhere I live, they only prohibit keeping roosters, though there are restrictions on chickens as well I think -- though theres no enforcement. A couple of my neighbours have them (and they escape and wander around the scrub land behind my fence and make friends with the local brush turkeys, which I find cute and endearing). Its quite fun to live basically in the centre of Brisbane's city, but have chickens wandering around. But that's also part of what makes this place neat, in my opinion, while I'm a kilometre from the CBD, the townhouse I live in is in a suburb filled with old Queenslander houses, newer builds, townhouses and small apartment buildings.
- fsagx 4y agoI remember this topic being a big news item several years ago: Dear Modern Farmer: Can I Legally Grow Food in My Front Yard? https://modernfarmer.com/2013/06/dear-modern-farmer-can-i-legally-grow-food-in-my-front-yard/ https://modernfarmer.com/2013/06/dear-modern-farmer-can-i-le... oak park hates veggies- trying to make sense of oak park's war on vegetables: https://oakparkhatesveggies.wordpress.com/about/ https://oakparkhatesveggies.wordpress.com/about/ Homeowners Across the Country Face Citations for Illegal Gardening: https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/right-to-grow-food-zl0z1211zrob#axzz2VIgR7Na2 https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/right-to-g...
- donthellbanme 4y ago
- ac29 4y ago> Is that more common in water-restricted municipalities? Where I live, watering outdoor plants is only allowed 3 days a week, and only before 9AM or after 6PM on those three days. That doesnt mean growing vegetables is specifically illegal, but it does mean starting seedlings requires breaking the law during the warmer months.
- maicro 4y agoI wonder how that law is worded - could you for instance fill up several X gallon jugs (1, 5, 55 [~4L, ~19L and ~208L] - whatever you have/need) during those permitted used windows, and water the plants from that supply as needed? I could see the time window applying to the actual act of watering the plants ("don't water during the hottest/brightest part of the day, to avoid wasting most of it to evaporation"), but the specific days seem to me like they're just for load balancing... I believe some areas object to the use of rain barrels, so I wonder if this option would fall under the same or similar restrictions.
- gorgoiler 4y agoThe idea of HOAs having any kind of say feels so undemocratic, but not in a standard way. We should not tolerate purely popular democracies. We allow representative democracies, and part of that public contract is for our leaders to represent all those in their constituency, not just those who voted for them. That means those in the minority. The crazy guy growing gourds instead of a lawn. The loon with the purple house. The impoverished who can’t paint their house every other year. Those kinds of folk need representation the most.
- giantg2 4y ago"that public contract is for our leaders to represent all those in their constituency, not just those who voted for them." That's the statement, but it's never worked that way. Of course minority groups have been steamrolled
- tomcam 4y ago> Those kinds of folk need representation the most. An understandable sentiment. How much are you willing to pay for it? If you have a $1.5 million mortgage and that loon shows up next door and paints their house purple, your house might lose $300,000 in value. Same with the other neighbors, who also pay mortgages but aren’t as compassionate as you. What happens when your spouse gets a sudden offer to relocate and you can’t make your money back on the house?
- watwut 4y agoThe root issue here is that you frame it as you paying something for him. What is actually happening is that you demand that everyone else pay for your mortgage by subjecting themselves to your restrictions.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoShocking how quickly peoples opinions change on this stuff when an eccentric next door can lower the value of their own investments
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- djvdq 4y ago> Growing vegetables on what should be a lawn is verboten in many locations, if not by the government than by private association bylaws. So again, USA is country with most freedom? Freedom™, but you can't grow vegetables on your own property. Or you will be punished for having too long grass. Lmao
- next_xibalba 4y agoWhat the author is describing are rules of homeowner's associations and other similar organizations. Individuals freely enter agreements with homeowner's associations which dictate land use. One is also free to choose to live in a place not governed by these rules. But, they are not the law of the land and they do not implicate a lack of freedom in the U.S. relative to other countries. Its quite silly to suggest as much.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoAnother wrinkle is that many more areas are technically cities; which usually comes with rules like no bees, chickens, goats, etc. Yet just a block or two away and one could live in a township which rarely has such rules. Generally though I think your point stands, the USA is big enough and varied enough one can usually chose a nearby location which permits hobby farming.
- djvdq 4y agoSimple question - if you want to leave HOA and after that grow vegetables, can you do that? If not - it has nothing to do with freedom. It's only propaganda of having the most freedom when citizens of a lot of "non free" countries (by American standards) will laugh at your absurds. I'm not saying USA is not free country - of course you are free. I'm only saying that telling that you have the most freedom is at least funny.
- pvg 4y ago"most freedom" is a thing you brought up yourself to start a silly flamewar. This stuff is in the guidelines: Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
- kasey_junk 4y ago“I asked why and was told that by the 1950s it was clear that the national economy had re-centered away from agriculture and small farm towns to a handful of big cities.” You were told wrong by more than 30 years. The US was officially more urban than rural by the 1920 census but the demographic trend had been going on for 50 years before that. By 1900 1 in 10 Americans lived in just 5 cities (NYC, Chicago, Philly, St Louis & Boston).
- giantg2 4y agoThey aren't wrong, and neither are you. Population growth was large in the cities due to immigration. And if you had many children on a farm, you couldn't divide the land for the next generation and still be profitable, so they had to move to cities. What happened from the 50s-80s were small farms being given up because they weren't economical. The machinery during the 50s-60s eliminated a lot of agricultural jobs, and drive down prices. Not just for farmers, but also in processing agricultural products.
- rayiner 4y agoNote that, the census considers many “small farm towns” to be “urban areas.” For example, Sibley, Iowa, where my wife grew up. It qualifies because it’s population is 3,000 people (over the 2,500 limit the census bureau uses). But it’s not what most people would consider to be an “urban area.”
- ghaff 4y agoI own a number of acres. One neighbor has an orchard and a horse pasture. Another has a Christmas tree farm. We're adjacent to a fairly large conservation property. We're urban according to the US Census. And we certainly have no practical way to shop by either walking or public transportation.
- bombcar 4y agoThe census basically calls it urban if you have a sewer not a septic heh. Most people consider “small town” to be rural though it’s technically not as it’s a city.
- tomcam 4y agoFelt like I read a wonderful book in 5 minutes. That was a (to my mind) politically neutral tour de force that captured the last 150 years of housing policy, grounding its thesis with fascinating images and writing.
- armadsen 4y agoThere was one of these basement houses in my neighborhood (mostly built in the 40s) until a few months ago when it was flipped and they built a top floor on it making it look like a completely different (and unremarkable) house.
- pintxo 4y agoThis style of incremental building seems to be still in existence in Southern Europe. It‘s not uncommon to see unfinished concrete structures. Basically the raw skeleton often with exposed rebar at the top or sides, indicating future work. They may stay in this state for years. As apparently everything is paid in cash and so building only advances whenever the owners have enough at hand.
- oxfordmale 4y agoIn Spain it also related to planning permission. Once the building work has finished, you need to have the planning permission paper work in order. Therefore they often leave one small room unfinished (exposed on the outside wall) to claim work is still in progress.
- alistairSH 4y agoI read something similar but in Egypt. Leaving the home unfinished avoided either taxes or planning paperwork or both.
- daydream 4y agoIt also lets the eventual buyer do a lot of customization. Buy a concrete shell, complete with the finishings you want.
- happy_path 4y agoI have lived all my life in Spain and that's not my experience. Maybe in some small rural towns you can (illegally) keep an unfinished work for years, as long as nobody notices. However, that is absolutely not true for most Spanish cities.
- oxfordmale 4y agoMaybe not in major cities, however, definitely applicable to a medium sized town in Catalunya.
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- chiph 4y agoI have a friend who lives in a rural area. He'd like to build a house on some land he owns that is unsuitable for farming (too steep) but he is unable to get a construction loan from the bank as they will not write a loan that is secured only by the property. Incremental construction might be the only way to do it (assuming the county will issue him a building permit that would span 5+ years). Being debt-free within a few years of the house being completed has a lot to be said for it. But when a loan payment is 80% or more interest at the start, that's a lot of profit for a lender to give up - they're not exactly going to be jumping at the opportunity to write those loans.
- rdtwo 4y agoBanks don’t Usually hold loans. The loans are typically packages and sold as bundles to institutional investors and banks get a cut of the deal with minimal risk. But to do that banks have to follow rules on what the packages look like so only certain products get loans and everything else isn’t worth dealing with
- Handytinge 4y agoThis may be specific to whatever country you're in. The major 4 banks in mine hold loans.
- gscott 4y agoHe should check this lender https://www.umpquabank.com/ https://www.umpquabank.com/ I have been watching some videos from a local builder and he says they will do off-grid construction loans.
- bombcar 4y agoOften in those cases you build a minimal “setup” perhaps not even technically legal for habitation - thing barn with power and septic. Then with that in place you modify it toward a house. Or drag a mobile home onto the lot for temporary.
- Maursault 4y ago> to filter out the riffraff who can’t afford larger homes. When I was poor, I just wanted a home I could afford in a safe neighborhood. Now that I have money, I just want poor people to be homeless. /mockery
- rayiner 4y agoResidential zoning is just so wrong. It’s trendy on the left to say it’s “racist” and it is that, but it’s also classist and elitist and WASP supremacist (e.g. banning multigenerational families, which are common among both Hispanics and lower-tier whites). I live in a pre-zoning code suburb in Maryland. The current minimum lot size is 20,000 square feet. Our house and most of the neighboring houses are on 2,900 square foot lots. At least on this side of the neighborhood, nobody tattles on each other for doing unpermitted work. The result is real diversity and a tightly packed community. (Though as housing prices increase, our neighborhood, being so close to DC, is under threat from PMCs.)
- spacemanmatt 4y agoIIRC, we call it racist without the scare-quotes because of it's disproportional effect. That's how that word works.
- rayiner 4y ago> That's how that word works. Incorrect. In ordinary usage, “racism” means prejudice based on race. There are efforts by some to muddy its meaning, to encompass both racial prejudice and “disproportionate effect,” but that’s not the common usage.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> In ordinary usage, “racism” means prejudice based on race. There are efforts by some to muddy its meaning, to encompass both racial prejudice and “disproportionate effect,” but that’s not the common usage. Thank you. For some reason I've never been able to explain it so succinctly when two people I respect get into an obviously semantic argument around something being or not being racist and then getting lost in the weeds of the intentions of the long dead.
- fencepost 4y agoMy wife recently pointed out a real estate listing for a basement home very like the flat roof variant in the first part of the article. Not sure where she saw it, while in the same state it's rural. I'd actually figured it as someone making the best of what was left after a tornado or other disaster.
- drewg123 4y agoThe farm my father bought in rural Ohio for his retirement had a house that started life as a basement house. It was built in the 50s, and the basement had a kitchen, full bath, a very nice fireplace, and a few other rooms. Plus the garage. The ground floor basically re-did it all. My father's theory was that they did the basement first, then built the rest of the house later. I hadn't realized such a thing was common.
- ddoran 4y agoA basement house featured on Zillow Gone Wild this week [1] . According to the same account it went sale pending after 1 day on the market. [1] - https://twitter.com/zillowgonewild/status/1526625530136694784?s=20&t=jsJ_vUfwbk8v2g9w4460eg https://twitter.com/zillowgonewild/status/152662553013669478...
- WalterBright 4y agoPro tip: don't build your house in a swamp. It'll sink.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anonymouse008 4y agoPro-pro tip: anything buried will bubble up. (re: Nola graveyards)
- k__ 4y ago"Minimum square footage requirements have been put in place to filter out the riffraff who can’t afford larger homes" Disgusting.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- protomyth 4y agoAs incremental construction goes, my grandma's house in North Dakota is a pretty good example. It went from a one story small home to a two story home with a wrap-around deck. I'm sure it was some ordered house put on a basement. It had an outhouse in the 70's but indoor plumbing was added. I remember sometime in the 80's putting in a support beam so they could remove some of the walls and support the second story. It was an all-hands task of the relatives with most of my uncle and aunts. I remember Dad's reaction when Grandma announced she had bought a wood stove to put in the house. That was a fun install requiring the removal of a wall, brick base, and running venting. There was a bit of danger in all this expansion. The look of utter horror on my Dad's and Uncle's face when we turned off all the breakers and the stove was still on makes me laugh but was deadly serious at the time. Fixing that was a bit of an adventure. Dad and Uncle traced every wire in the damn house and I learned some new insults.
- mastazi 4y agoI think the last two paragraphs, which I quoted below, sum up exactly something that has been on my mind for a while now. Somehow, while we were all busy debating for or against this or that political view, we, common people, lost control of more and more of our existence. We lost control of the food we eat, the kind of houses we live in (as this article explains), the way we invest our money, our work schedules, our means of production, our means of transportation (and more). Saying this, immediately triggers alarm bells (ah! He is saying that buildings should not be regulated, he must be a libertarian right winger! Oh! He says we need to own the means of production? He's obviously a communist!) and this prevents us from discussing many of the things that really matter. -- > I want you, dear reader, to set aside all the squirrelly feelings you may have about the political Left or Right. Perhaps you hate the evils of Big Government or the evils of Corporate Capitalism. Maybe you like cities. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like the kinds of people who live in them. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like places that are a bit messy. Maybe you need a place that’s orderly and tidy. That’s not the point I’m making here. > Look at these images of the Summerlin West development on the far edge of Las Vegas. The scale is massive and the same dynamics are at work. Everything about this place is enormous and predicated on vast amounts of institutional complexity and debt. Somehow, as a society, we’ve drifted from ordinary people being able to build their own homes on a cash basis in an interactive iterative way, to these immense hyper elaborate habitats. You may not aspire to live in a small underground home that takes years to complete. The Summerlin West homes may be better in many ways. But there are trade offs involved. Both individuals and the larger society have agreed to a set of interlocking delicate systems that are simultaneously highly effective and spectacularly vulnerable to disruption. That’s my point.
- wordnerd2022 4y ago“One by one the old parking lots, gas stations, and muffler shops are being transformed into new structures and uses.” Not if the SF Board of Supervisors has anything to say about it. They’ve actively blocked the transformation of parking lots into dense house as recently as this year. SF is anti housing somehow wrapped in a veneer of progressivism.
- bo1024 4y agoWow, this was great. Thinking about codes and permits, I think the idea of self-reinforcing change is interesting here. As more people rent or frequently buy/sell, it makes more and more sense to have strict safety codes and permitting rules because the people building and making money off the structure don't bear the safety risks of bad construction. But as this raises costs and places barriers, it makes renting more common, etc.
- ggm 4y agoA contradistinction: Traditional Queensland houses are built raised on stumps, first, because of floods and cooling airflow under (sub tropical) When you can afford Air Conditioning, or have too many babies you build under. So our pattern is build high first, fill in later. The one here is "build basement first, digging under the ground with a house on it, is a pain" (also raised because termites: gumtree hard stumps treated with CCA can survive them, siding and framing wood less so. Modern build tends to be either a slab of concrete and single storey, or a mcMansion, or units)
- waiseristy 4y agoReminds me of this https://dengarden.com/misc/The-Pitfalls-of-an-Underground-House https://dengarden.com/misc/The-Pitfalls-of-an-Underground-Ho...
- thenoblesunfish 4y agoFascinating! In many parts of the world, the incremental approach seems alive and well. I'm sure many have had the experience of traveling in a developing country and wondering why it seems that all the buildings are unfinished. Rebar sticking out everywhere! It actually makes a lot of sense, when one does not have access to credit or even a safe place to save money. You build your house as you can afford each component, storing the value that way - take any surplus cash, buy some more bricks, and add them to the house.
- OJFord 4y agoThis is quite a tangent (it's a novel, not some non-fiction deep-dive) but A House for Mr Biswas (VS Naipaul) is a great book that I'd recommend, your comment just reminded me of it.
- Ichthypresbyter 4y agoI live in one of the earliest post-WW2 planned suburbs (in Maryland). Many of the houses here are two-storey and were built as such, but with the second floor unfinished (in other words just an attic with no interior walls, decoration, etc) until the owners needed the space and had the money. On some other streets, people have added a floor to what were originally built as one-level homes.
- sheepybloke 4y agoMy parent's house was built like this! The previous owners built a single story basement house into a hill, and then added the main story later in the 60's. It's a cute little ranch now, but sort of weird in that the basement now has all the hook ups needed for a kitchen.
- sheepybloke 4y agoMy wife and I have talked about building something incrementally recently. Looking at what we could afford, we can't purchase an actual house, but we could get some land for a reasonable price. So, we were thinking of getting an airstream, buying some land, and then building a set of smaller buildings like this around the property as we got the funds. However, there can be lot of pushback on this from what I read.