11 ms·

A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

93 points by davetron5000 3y ago

qingcharles 3y ago
The whole of Chicago is just Sears houses every direction you face. Whole streets filled with them for miles at a time on the South Side especially. I love seeing all the small variations and modifications people have made, either when they were building them or later owners.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  I grew up on the South Side and I had zero awareness of this. I can appreciate that they want to protect people's privacy, but now I'm so curious!
vsskanth 3y ago
I'm really impressed by how timeless these homes look even today. Why are kit homes not a thing today ? What replaced them ?
- Sebguer 3y ago
  Prefabs, of which there are many modern counterparts.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- tw04 3y ago
  Builders pumping out 100 identical, low quality, garbage houses in a development. See: d.r. Horton
  - jameshart 3y ago
    As opposed to a catalog company pumping out identical houses...?
    - smelendez 3y ago
      Right. The end result is arguably similar, but the builder is typically putting up a whole development including streets, water and sewer connections, etc., sometimes including concessions required by the municipality, like new parks or schools. They're also typically taking on a lot of the risk. It just typically makes more sense in 2023 for a home buyer not looking for a custom build to get a piece of land with a house on it where they can walk in and turn on the lights and faucets than to buy a parcel of land, order a container full of lumber, and start individually dealing with permits, construction financing, grid interconnections, contractors, etc.
    - Izkata 3y ago
      There was a lot of variety in the catalog, so lots of duplicates nearby would probably be the owner's choice rather than one developer doing the whole neighborhood.
    - tw04 3y ago
      A. Identical houses that aren't directly next to each other are far less obvious, and generally look better for the simple fact they look unique in their setting. B. The fact the houses are identical is less the issue than sub-par materials and most importantly, as you'll find in all of the DR Horton lawsuits, sub-par construction. They're not just pumping out 100 houses, they're doing it as fast as humanly possible with crews of questionable experience. I'd MUCH rather have a mail-order Sears house put together by a crew that actually cares about what they're doing than a company that just hires any crew they can find to pump out houses as fast as possible so they can move on to the next development.
      - jameshart 3y ago
        Where are you going to get this ‘crew that cares’? How much of a premium does making them care cost? When you’re hiring a crew to build one house, what’s their incentive to do a great job? You’re not likely to build another house soon. I don’t understand why people romanticize Sears houses like this. It’s like saying ‘I’d rather have an IKEA table assembled by a person who cares than a piece of furniture made by a craftsman who makes the same table design again and again’.
- salamandersss 3y ago
  [dead]
- whoopdedo 3y ago
  It's not so much that they were replaced but that the logistics of delivering an entire house's BOM to a single location didn't make sense. What made it work at the time was the railroads. The lumber would be dropped off at a freight yard to be picked up by a local contractor. (Although the homeowner could have done it themselves if they wanted the actual work was typically hired out to tradesmen.) But as the country shifted to highways, houses were being built in places that weren't accessible by train.
  - Daz1 3y ago
    What's your source on that? Freight yards are plentiful.
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    For what it's worth, my house was shipped a few thousand KM on two lorries. It was about €8,000 for shipping but a lot of that cost was related to it being in the middle of Covid and needing to use a roll-on-roll-off ferry.
- lmm 3y ago
  Postwar planning laws and building codes made them a lot less viable. You're now always going to have to hire an architect and a licensed electrician and a plumber and so on - to the point that you probably have to hire a building crew rather than project managing it yourself - and at that point they have their suppliers and can handle that at a B2B level rather than it making sense for you to get one house's worth of everything in a package.
- mighmi 3y ago
  You can still buy kit homes today: https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/the-project-store/home-projects/c-1474668109497.htm https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/the-project-... Construction permits and significantly increased regulation have made them difficult though. You get economies of scale not just in construction, but more importantly in permitting, electrical and sewer connections etc. Then consider than desirable urban areas are already built up leading to land costing much more than the structure.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  They are a thing, I had one built. But dealing with meddling biddies in the local council who wanted to tell me what my house should look like (not to mention that the only real house is one made of crumbling concrete blocks) put up a lot of barriers. Example: https://www.palmatin.com/ https://www.palmatin.com/ I honestly think a lot of the problem comes down to having people in positions of power who view affordable, commoditized housing as a threat.
- bluedino 3y ago
  People don't build their own houses like they used to. One of my grandfathers, and both of my wife's grandfathers built their own home at least once in their life. Re-modeling a bathroom is about the limit of my abilities, plus I work an 8-5 so I'm not sure when I'd have time to build a house.
BenFranklin100 3y ago
99% Invisible had a good podcast on Sears Homes: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-in-the-mail/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-i...
simonw 3y ago
I got excited when I found the link to https://www.searshouses.com/national-list https://www.searshouses.com/national-list But... > Do we share our national database? We largely keep our database private, for the use of our research team, but will certainly answer questions from homeowners, historical societies, press, or the general public, about specific information we have collected. I wonder why? I would very much love to see a map of Sears houses in the SF Bay Area. Here's a guess: maybe they're worried about people bothering the residents of those homes? It might be that people who talk to their researchers specifically ask them not to share their addresses, and not publishing a list is the best way to get homeowners to voluntarily talk to them.
grendelt 3y ago
Galveston, Texas still has some of these. My friend lived in one for several years before the real estate market (and new job in Houston) forced their hand.
- rocky_raccoon 3y ago
  Houston, too. Some of the historic neighborhoods (e.g. Woodland Heights, lower Heights for the most part) are resisting the 3 story box house paradigm and still have a bunch of amazing Craftsman bungalows.
doomlaser 3y ago
Love the original catalog index of homes. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm You can click on the pictures to see the original home ads in the Sears catalog, with prices (e.g. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1911_0113.jpg http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1911_011...) $1062 for the parts to a beautiful American Craftsman style bungalow ($34,394.38 adjusted for inflation)! Some assembly required :) On a tangential note: Sears killed the mail order catalog in 1993, just as the Internet was starting to take off. They could have been Amazon. Now, even their landmark highrise, the Sears Tower, has been unceremoniously renamed Willis Tower. I still like the idea of mail order house parts & plans though. Someone should start a startup to make and build them.
- salamandersss 3y ago
  [dead]
- opencl 3y ago
  You can still buy house plans and bundles of parts similar to what Sears used to offer, Menards sells them. Home Depot also has some prefab units but they're all very small.
- rawgabbit 3y ago
  To buy an equivalent house like the ones in Sears catalog in a desirable neighborhood can easily set you back half a million.
  - waveBidder 3y ago
    > in a desirable neighborhood land value =/=house price
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- nicolaslem 3y ago
  The Red Dead Redemption 2 video game which takes place in 1899 has a story arc about buying a house from a catalog, receiving the parts and assembling it.
codelikeawolf 3y ago
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and I didn't realize how weird the term "Chicagoland" was until I started traveling around a bit. I'm not aware of any other city in the world that tacks "land" onto the name to describe the surrounding area. Do this with any other city and it sounds like a weird amusement park: Dallasland, Indianapolisland, Seattleland, etc.
- rawgabbit 3y ago
  Dallas’ unofficial motto is “Keep Dallas Boring”. This is our strategy to hide from real estate speculators and homeless millionaires from California.
- wolfendin 3y ago
  It was a particular housing development and not a whole city AFAIK, but what first comes to mind is Hollywood(land) https://www.theeastsideagent.com/history-hollywoodland-storybook-style/ https://www.theeastsideagent.com/history-hollywoodland-story...
- bitwize 3y ago
  Every time I hear "Chicagoland", I think of the douchebag television exec from Wayne's World played by Rob Lowe.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and nobody says "Chicagoland" in conversation. It's only used by newscasters, and car dealers in their commercials. Even dumber is "Chicagoland area." My copyediting professor (who worked at the Chicago Tribune) loved to mock this dumb term, pointing out that nobody says "Detroitland" or "New Yorkland" or "Indianapolisland."
  - nkrisc 3y ago
    Growing up in Chicago, I only ever heard the term on TV or radio.
  - tkgally 3y ago
CalRobert 3y ago
For those interested in kit houses - Sears houses are fascinating but they were not the first houses you could order and have shipped. To give one random example, this house in San Diego was built in Maine, sent by ship to San Francisco, but then sold (and assembled) en route in San Diego when it was clear the bust after the gold rush meant there might not be a buyer in SF https://gaslampfoundation.org/ https://gaslampfoundation.org/
daoboy 3y ago
I live in a Sears house! This is very cool, I did not realize how common they are.
drzaiusx11 3y ago
Looking at the pictures I instantly recognize them as house designs from my neighborhood. Unwrapped a layer of history I didn't know about, very cool.
EvanAnderson 3y ago
On the theme of pre-fab (albeit not mail order): I'm in western Ohio and we have a few Lustron houses[0] left around. These were a post-WWII product. Once you know the design features they're easy to spot. In the town where I live we also have the Hobart Steel Houses[1] that were a quirky proof-of-concept by a local manufacturer. My daughter's first school is located in one of these houses. Being able to stick magnets in nearly any surface in the house is bizarre and cool. The school uses this property to great effect. I don't see how they would have ever been economical, though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustron_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustron_house [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart_Welded_Steel_House_Company_and_its_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart_Welded_Steel_House_Comp...
- nimajneb 3y ago
  Those houses are cool. There's two next to each other near where I grew up. I noticed them in High School I think. I never knew what they were until a couple years ago when I watched a video about them. They look quite unique with the smooth panel looking tiles for the exterior.

93 points by davetron5000 3y ago

The whole of Chicago is just Sears houses every direction you face. Whole streets filled with them for miles at a time on the South Side especially. I love seeing all the small variations and modifications people have made, either when they were building them or later owners.

AlbertCory 3y ago
I grew up on the South Side and I had zero awareness of this. I can appreciate that they want to protect people's privacy, but now I'm so curious!

vsskanth 3y ago

I'm really impressed by how timeless these homes look even today. Why are kit homes not a thing today ? What replaced them ?

Sebguer 3y ago
Prefabs, of which there are many modern counterparts.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tw04 3y ago
Builders pumping out 100 identical, low quality, garbage houses in a development. See: d.r. Horton
- jameshart 3y ago
  As opposed to a catalog company pumping out identical houses...?
  - smelendez 3y ago
    Right. The end result is arguably similar, but the builder is typically putting up a whole development including streets, water and sewer connections, etc., sometimes including concessions required by the municipality, like new parks or schools. They're also typically taking on a lot of the risk. It just typically makes more sense in 2023 for a home buyer not looking for a custom build to get a piece of land with a house on it where they can walk in and turn on the lights and faucets than to buy a parcel of land, order a container full of lumber, and start individually dealing with permits, construction financing, grid interconnections, contractors, etc.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    There was a lot of variety in the catalog, so lots of duplicates nearby would probably be the owner's choice rather than one developer doing the whole neighborhood.
  - tw04 3y ago
    A. Identical houses that aren't directly next to each other are far less obvious, and generally look better for the simple fact they look unique in their setting. B. The fact the houses are identical is less the issue than sub-par materials and most importantly, as you'll find in all of the DR Horton lawsuits, sub-par construction. They're not just pumping out 100 houses, they're doing it as fast as humanly possible with crews of questionable experience. I'd MUCH rather have a mail-order Sears house put together by a crew that actually cares about what they're doing than a company that just hires any crew they can find to pump out houses as fast as possible so they can move on to the next development.
    - jameshart 3y ago
      Where are you going to get this ‘crew that cares’? How much of a premium does making them care cost? When you’re hiring a crew to build one house, what’s their incentive to do a great job? You’re not likely to build another house soon. I don’t understand why people romanticize Sears houses like this. It’s like saying ‘I’d rather have an IKEA table assembled by a person who cares than a piece of furniture made by a craftsman who makes the same table design again and again’.
salamandersss 3y ago
[dead]
whoopdedo 3y ago
It's not so much that they were replaced but that the logistics of delivering an entire house's BOM to a single location didn't make sense. What made it work at the time was the railroads. The lumber would be dropped off at a freight yard to be picked up by a local contractor. (Although the homeowner could have done it themselves if they wanted the actual work was typically hired out to tradesmen.) But as the country shifted to highways, houses were being built in places that weren't accessible by train.
- Daz1 3y ago
  What's your source on that? Freight yards are plentiful.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  For what it's worth, my house was shipped a few thousand KM on two lorries. It was about €8,000 for shipping but a lot of that cost was related to it being in the middle of Covid and needing to use a roll-on-roll-off ferry.
lmm 3y ago
Postwar planning laws and building codes made them a lot less viable. You're now always going to have to hire an architect and a licensed electrician and a plumber and so on - to the point that you probably have to hire a building crew rather than project managing it yourself - and at that point they have their suppliers and can handle that at a B2B level rather than it making sense for you to get one house's worth of everything in a package.
mighmi 3y ago
You can still buy kit homes today: https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/the-project-store/home-projects/c-1474668109497.htm https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/the-project-... Construction permits and significantly increased regulation have made them difficult though. You get economies of scale not just in construction, but more importantly in permitting, electrical and sewer connections etc. Then consider than desirable urban areas are already built up leading to land costing much more than the structure.
CalRobert 3y ago
They are a thing, I had one built. But dealing with meddling biddies in the local council who wanted to tell me what my house should look like (not to mention that the only real house is one made of crumbling concrete blocks) put up a lot of barriers. Example: https://www.palmatin.com/ https://www.palmatin.com/ I honestly think a lot of the problem comes down to having people in positions of power who view affordable, commoditized housing as a threat.
bluedino 3y ago
People don't build their own houses like they used to. One of my grandfathers, and both of my wife's grandfathers built their own home at least once in their life. Re-modeling a bathroom is about the limit of my abilities, plus I work an 8-5 so I'm not sure when I'd have time to build a house.

BenFranklin100 3y ago

99% Invisible had a good podcast on Sears Homes: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-in-the-mail/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-i...

simonw 3y ago

I got excited when I found the link to https://www.searshouses.com/national-list https://www.searshouses.com/national-list But... > Do we share our national database? We largely keep our database private, for the use of our research team, but will certainly answer questions from homeowners, historical societies, press, or the general public, about specific information we have collected. I wonder why? I would very much love to see a map of Sears houses in the SF Bay Area. Here's a guess: maybe they're worried about people bothering the residents of those homes? It might be that people who talk to their researchers specifically ask them not to share their addresses, and not publishing a list is the best way to get homeowners to voluntarily talk to them.

grendelt 3y ago

Galveston, Texas still has some of these. My friend lived in one for several years before the real estate market (and new job in Houston) forced their hand.

rocky_raccoon 3y ago
Houston, too. Some of the historic neighborhoods (e.g. Woodland Heights, lower Heights for the most part) are resisting the 3 story box house paradigm and still have a bunch of amazing Craftsman bungalows.

doomlaser 3y ago

Love the original catalog index of homes. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm You can click on the pictures to see the original home ads in the Sears catalog, with prices (e.g. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1911_0113.jpg http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1911_011...) $1062 for the parts to a beautiful American Craftsman style bungalow ($34,394.38 adjusted for inflation)! Some assembly required :) On a tangential note: Sears killed the mail order catalog in 1993, just as the Internet was starting to take off. They could have been Amazon. Now, even their landmark highrise, the Sears Tower, has been unceremoniously renamed Willis Tower. I still like the idea of mail order house parts & plans though. Someone should start a startup to make and build them.

salamandersss 3y ago
[dead]
opencl 3y ago
You can still buy house plans and bundles of parts similar to what Sears used to offer, Menards sells them. Home Depot also has some prefab units but they're all very small.
rawgabbit 3y ago
To buy an equivalent house like the ones in Sears catalog in a desirable neighborhood can easily set you back half a million.
- waveBidder 3y ago
  > in a desirable neighborhood land value =/=house price
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nicolaslem 3y ago
The Red Dead Redemption 2 video game which takes place in 1899 has a story arc about buying a house from a catalog, receiving the parts and assembling it.

codelikeawolf 3y ago

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and I didn't realize how weird the term "Chicagoland" was until I started traveling around a bit. I'm not aware of any other city in the world that tacks "land" onto the name to describe the surrounding area. Do this with any other city and it sounds like a weird amusement park: Dallasland, Indianapolisland, Seattleland, etc.

rawgabbit 3y ago
Dallas’ unofficial motto is “Keep Dallas Boring”. This is our strategy to hide from real estate speculators and homeless millionaires from California.
wolfendin 3y ago
It was a particular housing development and not a whole city AFAIK, but what first comes to mind is Hollywood(land) https://www.theeastsideagent.com/history-hollywoodland-storybook-style/ https://www.theeastsideagent.com/history-hollywoodland-story...
bitwize 3y ago
Every time I hear "Chicagoland", I think of the douchebag television exec from Wayne's World played by Rob Lowe.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and nobody says "Chicagoland" in conversation. It's only used by newscasters, and car dealers in their commercials. Even dumber is "Chicagoland area." My copyediting professor (who worked at the Chicago Tribune) loved to mock this dumb term, pointing out that nobody says "Detroitland" or "New Yorkland" or "Indianapolisland."
- nkrisc 3y ago
  Growing up in Chicago, I only ever heard the term on TV or radio.
- tkgally 3y ago

CalRobert 3y ago

For those interested in kit houses - Sears houses are fascinating but they were not the first houses you could order and have shipped. To give one random example, this house in San Diego was built in Maine, sent by ship to San Francisco, but then sold (and assembled) en route in San Diego when it was clear the bust after the gold rush meant there might not be a buyer in SF https://gaslampfoundation.org/ https://gaslampfoundation.org/

daoboy 3y ago

I live in a Sears house! This is very cool, I did not realize how common they are.

drzaiusx11 3y ago

Looking at the pictures I instantly recognize them as house designs from my neighborhood. Unwrapped a layer of history I didn't know about, very cool.

EvanAnderson 3y ago

On the theme of pre-fab (albeit not mail order): I'm in western Ohio and we have a few Lustron houses[0] left around. These were a post-WWII product. Once you know the design features they're easy to spot. In the town where I live we also have the Hobart Steel Houses[1] that were a quirky proof-of-concept by a local manufacturer. My daughter's first school is located in one of these houses. Being able to stick magnets in nearly any surface in the house is bizarre and cool. The school uses this property to great effect. I don't see how they would have ever been economical, though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustron_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustron_house [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart_Welded_Steel_House_Company_and_its_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart_Welded_Steel_House_Comp...

nimajneb 3y ago
Those houses are cool. There's two next to each other near where I grew up. I noticed them in High School I think. I never knew what they were until a couple years ago when I watched a video about them. They look quite unique with the smooth panel looking tiles for the exterior.