They don’t build ’em like they used to, we hear constantly. We wax nostalgic about the houses in which we grew up, recalling the great little nook in the attic where the roof sloped to the big old porch out front, or the intricate molding in the big family dining room.
But were houses of the past really any better than today’s new ones?
Doubtful.
Comparing today’s new homes with those built earlier in this century is almost like comparing apples and oranges. Designs have changed dramatically. Technology has made today’s houses much more energy efficient, as well as easier to build.
And if construction quality sometimes suffers, it’s often because buyers are more interested in glitzy options than in the house’s “innards,” many in the business say.
The house we picture from the past probably bears little resemblance to the one going up around the corner. Sought-after design features of the 1920s, such as the sleeping porch, weren’t given a second thought after the invention of central air-conditioning.
And, in the years prior to the energy crisis of the 1970s, barely a whit of attention was paid to insulation; fuel was cheap, so who cared if it blew through the house like the wind?
The sheer multitude of new homes and the panoply of technological advancements that go into construction and design today, such as vastly improved and highly prized insulation and “Get Smart”-like electronics, puts new houses in a whole different category than the old ones.
Houses across the board are bigger now. They have more bedrooms, more bathrooms and, obviously, more high-tech equipment.
Interior systems have also benefited from innovation. For example, PVC pipes increasingly replace cast iron; they’re lighter, cheaper and more durable.
New types of materials that allow for an increased R-factor (a measure of insulating effectiveness) in less space have boosted insulating capabilities. And better engineering has improved the soundness of the overall structure.
While technology has mainly been good for the building business-lowering costs while offering buyers greater efficiency and choice-the age-old question remains: Does the buyer know enough to recognize quality?
To many home buyers, construction technique takes a back seat to comfort and domestic efficiency, as evidenced by the litany of options offered by most home builders today.
People no longer pay as much attention to the structure, partly because they don’t expect to live in the same house their whole lives and partly because they-unlike their parents or grandparents-probably don’t know much about what it takes to build a solid house, housing experts say.
“I think when they talk about the shoddy construction work today, they’re not speaking of the structure,” said Ronald L. Gan, owner of a property inspection company in Chicago. “They’re speaking of finishes and some of the materials used in the finishes . . . hollow-core doors versus heavy, solid-core doors.
“Today’s buyers are much better researched, but not as smart as they think they are. They miss the important things all the time. They cannot discern a quality product. So builders know how to put a Levittown facade on it,” said Gan, referring to the mass-produced towns built by Levitt and Sons following World War II.
“They know how to give you the show but no substance. Today’s home buyers don’t want substance. We live in a throwaway society,” he said.
Gan said he recently inspected a new, $1 million house in Glencoe. The buyer wanted to know if the price tag fairly reflected the quality of construction.
The house didn’t even have a high-efficiency furnace or water heater, Gan said. In addition, the soffit material on the exterior was just plywood, when it should have been covered with aluminum or a Drivet material (which is like stucco) to match the home’s exterior.
“It was going to rot and deteriorate and look like hell in six months,” he said. “Water gets in, and pretty soon it’s growing like cancer.”
Part of the problem, he said, is a psychological byproduct of mass production-how people now think about houses.
“Most people don’t care about the innards of the house,” Gan said. What hooks people into buying the house are the design features that have become so common: volume ceilings, good-quality cabinetry, tile in bathrooms and kitchens-all of which were showcased in the Glencoe house.
Gan, who until recently built as well as inspected homes, illustrated the trend. In the last few houses he built, Gan said, he switched from solid-core to hollow-core doors, not only because they were easier for his workers to hang, but also to save money for upgrading highly visible items, such as counters and cabinets, which were more important to his clients.
“(Builders) only rise to the expectation of the people who are buying,” Gan said.
“People pay for what they want,” agreed Jeffrey Stine, curator of engineering and environmental history in the division of the history of technology at the Smithsonian Institution.
“There’s not a lot of craftsmanship in most homes,” he explained. “They’re thrown together out of materials that are prefabricated, premade. That doesn’t mean it’s not a warmer house, not a more comfortable house, but the signs of human skill, of care going into it, are fewer.”
Chicago architect Sam Marts who specializes in the centuries-old timber-frame technique often seen in old barns, noted, “America, in particular, has this romantic idea that everyone should own his or her own home and has come very close to achieving that process on a relative scale. But in order to do that there has been some compromise in construction quality.”
Marts pointed out that some of the expense in building a solid house is not easily discerned.
“There may be two houses looking almost exactly alike except one is (priced) 10 percent more. The difference may be in the construction,” he said. “They may be assembled with 8-penny nails instead of 6-penny nails, and they may have three-quarter-inch plywood instead of half-inch plywood. It may have plywood all around it for sheathing, instead of just the corners.”
As our forestry resources are restricted, he continued, the quantity, as well as the quality, of wood used in construction is declining.
The standard 2-by-4 has been reduced to 1 1/2 inches by 3 1/2 inches, he noted. There also is a greater reliance on replacement products, such as oriented strand board, composed of wood chips adhered under pressure. But, he added, as with many products, if they’re not installed properly, their use may weaken the structure.
“It has to do with the level of craftsmanship, but it also has to do with what the consumer is willing to pay. . . if they’re willing to pay for craftsmanship as opposed to Jacuzzis, microwaves,” Marts continued. “They tend to buy a shopping list of fashionable items.”
“So much is the reputation of the builder and developer,” he cautioned. “People don’t shop that way enough. . . . They’ll tend to look for real estate location and price and tend to not consider the reputation of the builder.”
Building codes are meant to insure a minimum standard. Each municipality may differ in terms of inspections as well as codes, but most are much more vigilant than ever, those interviewed agreed, which helps improve overall quality.
Unfortunately for some buyers, though, certain builders are good at hiding what may be questionable building techniques, Marts noted. That means a house deemed to meet code requirements shouldn’t be assumed to be built perfectly.
Quality sometimes suffers because demand is outpacing supply, not only of materials but of qualified labor.
“There’s so much demand for hardwood flooring that it’s never dried properly. It’s never seasoned properly, and it’s installed under the wrong conditions so everybody’s floors shrink and there are gaps,” said Gan.
“Well, if you look at an old floor, it doesn’t have as many gaps as new floors do. There’s just too much demand. They’ve got to get this stuff out.”
Yet there’s plenty about home-building today that’s a vast improvement over just a generation ago.
“We have all these new products made of plywood now, structural products that are incredible,” Gan said. “Plywood is very strong. It’s stronger and more stable than regular lumber and it’s lightweight, easy to build.
“Now we’re using a lot of metal framing, which is really good. . . . It doesn’t warp and twist. So from a structural point of view, I’ll take today any day.”
By far the most often mentioned improvement in new homes is insulation and energy efficiency.
“Houses are built tighter; (there’s) not the air infiltration,” noted John Emigh, president of Kennedy Residential in Belvidere, one of the Kennedy Group of Companies, which builds starter and some move-up homes up to $165,000.
Part of that is made possible by new and better insulating materials and techniques as well as vastly improved double- and even triple-glazed windows.
Most insulation is standard, Emigh said, the only exception being the type of window chosen, which tends to vary by the price of the house.
“Personally, I’ve bought older homes,” he said. “The ceilings don’t have the insulation. The first thing you do is . . . you go in and blow insulation into the attic. . . . It just makes it more comfortable. It reduces your utility bill.”
Energy efficiency and environmental awareness have driven much of the new product development, noted Curt Langille, president of Lanco Development Co. in McHenry, which builds homes in the $250,000-to-$700,000 range.
Lanco uses 90 percent high-efficiency furnaces and water heaters, which save significantly on energy costs; the company also uses various types of house wrap, from Styrofoam sheeting to Tyvek, plus window glass that is highly insulated.
In addition, the company increasingly uses oriented strand board, composed of wood chips adhered under pressure, instead of plywood, for floor decking and roof sheeting. This new product doesn’t consume large logs of old growth timber, which are in greatly reduced supply, and, therefore, it helps to save trees, Langille emphasized.
Another engineered wood product that Lanco uses is called microlam, which consists of laminated veneer lumber that has a load carrying capacity comparable with steel, only it can be used in the smaller spaces commonly found in residential housing, Langille said.
Modern electronics has opened another whole arena of new products for homes, from theater, music and intercom systems to central vacuuming and security systems, he added.
But once you get past the glitz of amenities and the impact of technology, homebuilding per se hasn’t changed much.
Bruce Blietz, president of Blietz Organization Inc., of Evanston, noted that while home styles have changed greatly, the way they are constructed is very similar to when his father started building homes in 1922.
The big difference is the development of new products, automated tools and heavy machinery to speed up the process-from the power screwdriver to earth moving equipment for excavating a basement, he said.
“I remember as a little kid seeing the horses with the guy behind them and with a big scoop excavating the foundation,” he said, recalling the family house his father built in 1935. “Today we use heavy equipment. . . . But an excavation is still an excavation.”
If you go back before the ’20s, he added, brick foundations were more commonly seen because contractors didn’t have the ability to pour concrete the way they do today.
The switch from plaster to drywall also was a great improvement, Blietz continued. Not only is drywall easier and faster to install, it is stronger; in the old days, it was not uncommon to have chunks of ceiling suddenly fall out.
Most recently, Blietz has switched to stainless steel flexible gas lines from cast iron pipe at the company’s Regent Villas development in Northfield. While a more expensive product, the builder saves time on installation.
The line is fed through the house like a garden hose without the installer having to cut through structural members, and it allows the easier use of gas in multiple locations within the home. Also, Blietz added, because it comes in one piece, it is much less likely to spring a leak.
One of the very best things about new houses compared to the old ones is their affordability.
In 1900, the median sales price of a home was 10 times the average income, according to Gopal Ahluwalia, director of research at the National Association of Home Builders. By 1980, the ratio had fallen to 3-to-1.
In the 1940s, the average number of homes built each year was 744,000, which was just a little more than in the 1920s, Ahluwalia said (home building dropped off substantially during the Great Depression).
By contrast, the average number of homes built each year in the four decades that followed hovered at about 1.5 million, he said.
Homeownership rates rose from 46 percent in 1920 to 64 percent in 1991, according to the U.S. Census.
In the 1960s, the average house was 1,400 square feet; by 1994, it was 2,100 square feet, Ahluwalia noted.
Perhaps the most important factor that enters the equation when people complain, “they just don’t build ’em like they used to” is which houses have survived through the decades. The better houses tend to be the better maintained-and thus still are around today.
“You’ll see that over the years the porches have been redone, siding has been replaced, roofs redone, electrical systems redone,” Emigh noted. “If you built a small little boxy ranch house, maybe those people didn’t maintain it because of the income levels or it just wasn’t worth saving.”
