Parents always have lectured their children about watching out for their health and safety, and now it appears Mom and Dad may be getting serious about taking their own advice, at least on the home front.
Customers–and their communities’ building codes–are asking home builders for more features that will do a better job of protecting them from fires, making their drinking water purer, making it less painful when little Brad bonks his head on the kitchen countertop and chasing germs out of their bathrooms, according to industry reports.
Codes aside, there appears to be a growing desire to insulate our nests against the dark what-ifs of our lives: Who might have foreseen, for instance, the growth of businesses that specialize in “childproofing” our homes? Wasn’t it just a few years ago that smoke alarms were a novelty? Did home security systems become commonplace while you weren’t looking?
“You can draw a parallel to the auto industry,” contends Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y., who has made a business of spotting the bends in the road of consumer attitudes. “Home alarms are now almost standard, the same as with car features. It’s not something you order any more.
“I remember when there were no seat belts in cars,” he adds. “I also remember how vehemently the auto industry fought against putting the seat belts in. They didn’t want to leave their drivers with the notion that these things–cars–may be unsafe.”
It appears it’s also the case with our houses. Home accidents caused about 30 percent of all unintentional fatalities in 1995, according to the National Safety Council in Washington. Other studies indicate that many of these accidents are related to falls, and a large portion of the accidents in general happen to children. The National Safe Kids Campaign in Washington estimates that 2,700 children die in home accidents each year.
This is but a glimpse of a morbid parade of home-accident numbers, which might make you fear getting out of bed every morning. But instead, they–perhaps combined with the awareness of mortality that has come with the overall aging of our population–seem to have inspired us to speak up about our concerns for personal health and safety.
A 1997 survey by Professional Builder magazine indicated that 37 percent of custom-home buyers would be willing to pay $1,000 for so-called “healthy-house products” such as whole-house vacuum systems and air cleaners. And significant numbers said they would “really like to have” safety products for their kids. For example, about 85 percent want rounded corners on all countertops and vanities to reduce the severity of accidental bumps; 53 percent want anti-scald devices in showers and faucets; 36 percent want spring-loaded locks on electrical receptacles.
Though it hardly amounts to a roar, the consumer interest already is making its way from that custom market to production, or tract, building.
Dave Smith, marketing director for the Cambridge Companies, parent of Cambridge Homes and Lexington Homes, says that such requests are starting to be noted more often. When his staff gets more than three requests for a specfic item, the company makes it an option in the communities where it has been requested.
Lately these options have included “childproofing” services (making outlets harder for kids to reach, for example) in several communities. The company gets requests for water-filtration systems with some frequency, he says. At the company’s Cambridge at Carillon “active-adult” development for residents 55 and older, in Will County, grab bars in bathrooms have become options.
Smith predicts that air-filtration systems will become ubiquitous in the industry. “Our homes are becoming tighter and tighter,” he said of energy-conserving construction techniques, which in turn will increase the demand for systems that bring in fresh air and filter out stale air. “In the next five years, you’ll see that as one of the top options–if not a mandated system.”
But, as builders point out, these things come at a cost.
For example, the next time you come racing down the stairs to answer the door, consider that the specific size of each step was debated long and hard in the name of safety, with the issue being whether to shorten each riser by half an inch and increase the depth of each tread by an inch.
Motivated by safety proponents who view stairway-fall figures very seriously, the Building Officials and Code Administrators International (BOCA), which writes the code requirements that are a standard throughout much of the Midwest, changed its requirements in 1996, after dozens of hours of debate.
So the tread got shorter and deeper, which sounds simple enough, but builders’ trade groups are unconvinced that the change actually affects safety. And then there’s the money.
“The home-building people indicate that changing the geometry increases the cost of the house to a significant degree, such that it adversely affects first-time home buyers,” explains Mike Pfeiffer, manager of technical services for BOCA in Country Club Hills.
He says the numbers have varied widely. “Some have said it would cost them as much as $3,000 per house. Some views have been considerably less than that, maybe in the $100 to $200 range.”
Builders say that changing the stair geometry takes floor space out of the house, and might end up affecting the entire placement of the stairs. “I don’t really believe that the evidence was there that it was a safety issue,” said Bruce Deason, assistant vice president of government affairs for the Home Builders Association of Greater Chicago.
“We heard all the statistical information about how many falls result from the stair geometry, but there are so many things that go into a stair’s configuration. It’s not only the width of the riser but also things like lighting and hand-rail placement.” He added that communities are free to add their own variations to the code, and they do.
North suburban Long Grove is among a handful of communities that have begun to require fire-sprinkler systems in new single-family homes. Greg Ford, vice president of sales and marketing for Insignia Homes, says that the system adds $7,000 to $7,500 to the cost of each house, though over time those costs may come down as technology and materials improve.
Customer reaction is mixed, he says, adding that in the price range of his company’s houses ($350,000 to $500,000), “our market is looking more for the luxury baths and luxury kitchens.”
Insignia Green customer Eileen Batchen says she will be happy to have the sprinklers in her home, which is now under construction. “I had them in Arlington Heights in an apartment eight or nine years ago,” she recalls, adding that they never had to be used. “They give you a sense of security. You can get to your kids before a fire really spreads.”
Dave Karlson, president of Karlson Kitchens in Evanston, says that most of the safety requests he hears are child-related.
“A lot of them are regarding appliances, particularly kids not being able to touch burners and knobs on stoves,” explains Karlson, whose firm frequently works with remodelers and builders.
Jean Neumann, vice president of sales and marketing for Neumann Homes in Naperville, says her company routinely puts anti-tip devices on all ranges. The firm’s policy also is to space all rails four inches apart at most, in order to keep children from falling through.
Indeed, much of the market for the newer health-and-safety products is child-driven, according to marketing experts. But age is a factor at the other end of the scale, too.
Karlson says he’s starting to hear from older clients who want grab bars in bathrooms, but the common-sense devices don’t seem to have piqued the interest of younger homeowners.
Centex Corp., parent of the large home-building company based in Dallas, has launched a retail subsidiary, Centex Life Solutions, which last year opened a store in Skokie. The venture is banking on the demands of a population that is feeling its age.
The store, whose ambience has the unmistakable overtones of such retail successes as the Sharper Image and Borders Books, features what in the industry is known as “durable medical equipment” such as walkers and back-support devices.
But it also sells products that, as the company says, are for “life improvement,” and within these is a health and safety category. Among the more novel offerings is the Guardian, a rangetop device that detects suspicious flames and extinguishes them, then turns off the gas or electricity to the rangetop. The company has developed services to supply its products to contractors and builders, according to marketing director Luise Baggett, director of marketing.
Some other categories and products that are intended to make the cocoon more secure:
– Over a 10-year period, garage doors caused about 68,000 finger injuries and 1,700 amputations, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Wayne-Dalton Corp., a garage-door manufacturer in Mt. Hope, Ohio, won awards recently for safety features that the company hopes will set it apart from competitors. These include a pinch-resistant door panel that helps keep fingers out and a system to encase garage door springs in a steel tube.
Lori Devereaux, vice president of Sunshine Homes in Valparaiso, Ind., said that when her garage-door distributor suggested the switch to the Wayne-Dalton “no pinch” line, the company changed right away. Sunshine is building a subdivision in Valparaiso called Shamrock, which will have 156 single-family homes. It has mostly first-time buyers for its houses, priced from about $111,000 to about $121,000.
“The safety issue does come up somewhat,” Devereaux said, “because, when you’re building reasonably priced homes, people worry that builders might short-change them on some things. We assure them that we do as much for safety as we can.”
– The antibacterial materials that have been showing up on and in cutting boards, soap and even toys now are on the building-materials horizon.
Aqua Glass Corp. is using a product called Microban to coat its bathroom fixtures. The gel coating on bathtubs and shower stalls purportedly inhibits mold and mildew. The products were introduced in February, though they have yet to make a dent in the Chicago market, according to Aqua Glass. Formica Corp. also plans to incorporate Microban gels in countertop materials, according to a spokesman.
– The government agency that broadcasts alerts of weather emergencies recently announced that it would like to see so-called weather radios included in every new home.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has transmitters in almost every county in the United States to deliver warnings of such potential disasters as hurricanes, floods and tornadoes. The receivers, which typically cost about $25 and are sold widely in such outlets as Radio Shack, will come on automatically at any hour to warn of weather emergencies in specific areas that homeowners program into the devices.
“We’ve sort of borrowed from the smoke-detector imagery,” explains Barry Reichenbaugh, a NOAA spokesman, who speculates that currently less than 5 percent of homes have such radios.
He’s an enthusiastic proponent of the radios’ potential: “It’s seldom that you have a chance to do something that makes a difference,” he said. “I don’t know whose life it is that I have saved (by convincing people to get weather radios), but I know I have.”
