More delays mean higher costs. On the one hand, with the modifications to the drip irrigation system, the unexpected off-site road improvements, and the added public amenities, such as the recreation area, the total cost of New Daleville has increased significantly. Della Porta’s latest pro forma, or financial calculation, shows that the total cost of an improved lot is now considerably more than the original estimate. “This is moving from a high number to an even higher number,” says Jason. On the other hand, during the intervening two years, house prices have also risen. “We’ve been studying new communities in the area, and we believe that our house prices will start in the mid–two hundred thousands, and go up from there.”
The increase in house prices is driven by two factors. First, a strong economy has increased the demand for home ownership, and low interest rates have raised the prices that buyers are prepared to pay. Second, the price of land is going up even faster. The obstructionism of many townships, coupled with stricter environmental controls and a lack of infrastructure, has produced a scarcity of permitted land in Chester County. As a result, builders are prepared to pay more for lots. “When I entered the business in 1976, the lot represented only fifteen percent of the selling price of a house,” Duckworth says. “It was about twenty-seven percent two years ago, now it’s up to thirty percent. In some parts of the country, it’s as high as fifty percent.” In the case of New Daleville, that means that if builders expect to sell houses for $250,000, they will be prepared to pay as much as $75,000 for a lot. This will cover the increase in cost, but Della Porta’s pro forma indicates that with all the extra expenses, New Daleville’s rate of return has fallen from 17 percent to less than 14. “The project still works, although the profit margin is tighter than we would have liked,” he says.
*Deed restrictions are implicitly exclusionary, since not everyone can afford to meet their demands. Some of the early restrictions were explicitly exclusionary on the basis of race. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled racial deed restrictions unenforceable.
*George Woodward did not use deed restrictions in Chestnut Hill because most of the houses he built were rented rather than sold.
15
House and Home
Three-quarters of Americans live in houses. Contrary to popular opinion, this is not a reflection of suburbanization, since most city dwellers live in houses, too.
New Daleville will consist entirely of houses. Four out of five of all new housing units currently built in the United States are single-family houses.1 This statistic has less to do with the nature of the home-building industry, or the suburban location of new housing, than with buyers’ preferences, that is, What People Want.
I’ve lived in a house during most of my life. In Scotland, where I was born, my mother rented a room in a private village home (my father lived in army barracks). Later, we shared a large London house with a group of Polish émigrés. Eventually, my parents bought their own terrace house in a Surrey suburb. Growing up in Canada, I lived in a small-town bungalow. Except for a ten-year hiatus, when we lived in a flat in downtown Montreal, my wife and I have always lived in a house — first rented, then built, and last bought.
Many things — government policies, tax structures, financing methods, home ownership patterns, and availability of land — account for how people choose to live, but the most important factor is culture. To understand why we live in houses, it is necessary to go back several hundred years. Rural people have always lived in houses, but the typical medieval town dwelling, which combined living space and workplace, was occupied by a mixture of extended families, servants, and employees. This changed in seventeenth-century Holland. The Netherlands was Europe’s first republic, and the world’s first middle-class nation. Prosperity allowed extensive home ownership, republicanism discouraged the widespread use of servants, a love of children promoted the nuclear family, and Calvinism encouraged thrift and other domestic virtues. These circumstances, coupled with a particular affection for the private family home, brought about a cultural revolution.2 People began to live and work in separate places; children now grew up with their parents (rather than being apprenticed to strangers, as before); and the home, securely under the control of the now “housewife,” was restricted to the immediate family. This intimate family haven was always a house. Seventeenth-century Dutch cities and towns were composed almost entirely of houses built in rows, side by side, wide or narrow depending on the wealth of the owner.
The idea of urban houses spread to the British Isles thanks to England’s strong commercial and cultural links with the Netherlands. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain adopted the row house in many guises, as Georgian crescent, middle-class terrace, and workingmen’s row. It has been estimated that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, nine out of ten dwellings in England and Wales were row houses.3 Today, the vast majority of the British population — four households out of five — live in houses.
“A man’s home is his castle” is a basic concept in Anglo-Saxon common law. For example, the courts have upheld rights of privacy which allow conduct in the home that might be prohibited elsewhere. According to D. Benjamin Barros of Widener University, the so-called castle doctrine gives special legal protection to the security of the home. “First, the law privileges certain acts of self-help made in defense of the home that would in another context be criminal or tortious. Second, the law imposes criminal sanctions upon individuals who invade a home, and these sanctions are significantly greater than those imposed for invasions of other types of property.”4 The primacy of the home in law originated in Britain but migrated to the United States, where the Third and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution prevent the government from unilaterally quartering soldiers in private houses and provide special protections to houses in search and seizure law.
Modern Holland has remained a predominantly house-occupying country, as has Belgium, which was originally a part of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. In Norway, which historically had close trade ties with Britain, a large majority also lives in houses.5 The United States (as did Ireland, Canada, and Australia) inherited the Anglo-Dutch house tradition, and three-quarters of Americans now live in houses.6 Contrary to popular opinion, this is not a reflection of suburbanization, since most city dwellers live in houses, too.7
It’s one thing to say that people prefer to live in a house, but what kind of house? Basically, there are three choices: a freestanding house, a house sharing common walls with its neighbors, and a house that is oriented to an inner court. The last is an ancient model. The Roman dwelling was the classic courtyard house. Generally one story high, it covered the entire lot. Depending on its size, it had one or several open-air courtyards. The entrance court, called the atrium, led to the peristylum, a large court surrounded by an arcade. The latter, unlike the paved atrium, often contained a garden. The courtyard house, small or large, was the dwelling of choice; only the poorest Romans lived in insulae, or multistory tenements.
The courtyard house is common throughout the Mediterranean. In Spain, the court is called a patio, a domestic feature that was transported to Latin America. Although the courtyard house is efficient in terms of use of land — a courtyard house has no setbacks, usually not even a front yard — the court provides absolute privacy to the occupants. Courtyard houses are also found in Asia. Until the Communist Revolution, which introduced Soviet-style apartment blocks, Chinese cities consisted almost entirely of courtyard houses, which date back to the Han dynasty, about 200 B.C.8
Courtyard houses are limited to one or two stories; otherwise the courts become too dark. If land is at a premium, as it was in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, three-or four-story row houses are a higher-density alternative. The occupants of a row house must make concessions, however. The interior layouts will be constrained by the long, narrow shape and the limited number of windows. The backyards can be overlooked by neighboring houses. Privacy — visual and acoustic — is reduced. Semidetached hou
ses, sometimes called twins, which are attached to only one neighbor, mitigate some of these defects, since they have more windows and wider yards. In Britain, once a nation of row houses, today approximately one-third of all houses are semidetached.9
In America, as in Britain, row houses were a common feature of nineteenth-century industrial cities. Today, about half of all houses in metropolitan Philadelphia are still row houses. However, prosperity has given Americans other options, and the row house, or town home, has fallen out of favor in postindustrial cities. In metropolitan Houston and Los Angeles, for example, only about one house in ten is a row house.10
Ninety percent of single-family houses in the United States are detached (in cities, the proportion is only slightly lower). The advantages of detached houses are many: light and air from all sides; greater acoustic and visual privacy; less danger of fire from neighboring buildings; and being able to pass from the front yard to the backyard without going through the interior. Even if the lot is only slightly wider than the house, the difference in terms of privacy is significant. Typically, buyers will pay a 10 to 15 percent premium for a detached house over a row house, even if the floor areas are identical.
Americans are hardly alone in favoring freestanding houses; indeed, they could be said to be typical. The first African town I visited, in 1982, was Makurdi, in south-central Nigeria. This sprawling city on the Benue River had about 100,000 inhabitants. I spent a lot of time walking the unpaved streets, blocked with uncollected garbage, which was the reason I was there — our team of Canadian consultants was advising the government on municipal sanitation. The residential neighborhoods consisted of low, freestanding houses on large lots. Although the houses were surrounded not by lawns and flower gardens but by vegetable plots and chicken coops, the meandering streets were shaded by huge trees. In an odd way it reminded me of a garden suburb. Since Makurdi was laid out by British colonial planners in the nineteen twenties, the resemblance was not accidental.
Cities composed largely of houses are common in sub-Saharan Africa, where, as in America, land is plentiful and population density is low. That is not the case in South Asia. But even there, given a choice, people have opted for houses.* In New Delhi and Madras, well-to-do Indians occupy neighborhoods of freestanding villas; the poor live in slums — but in row houses. The same pattern is visible in Manila and Bangkok. In 1986 I visited a recently built housing development in Hong Kong’s New Territories. The developer proudly showed me around Fairview Park, five thousand small semidetached “garden houses.” Hong Kong itself is a city of apartments, but Fairview Park had many of the attributes of an Anglo-American garden suburb: landscaped streets lined by individual homes with garages and private gardens.
During the same trip I visited mainland China. In Shanghai, I was taken around extremely bleak apartment blocks belonging to the university. I asked my host, a professor, if he could show me any privately built housing. We drove to a residential neighborhood at the edge of the city. The owners were prosperous farmers who had invested their earnings in their homes — all freestanding houses. The spacious interiors were much larger than the two-room apartment that my host shared with his family. The economic revolution that would sweep the country was only just beginning. I doubt that the homes of university professors have changed much today, but for the growing entrepreneurial class, housing choices have expanded dramatically and now include American-style suburbs with single-family houses.
Even in countries such as France, Germany, and Russia, where many people still live in apartments, the number of single-family houses is growing.* “Polls consistently confirm that most Europeans, like most Americans, and indeed most people worldwide, would prefer to live in single-family houses on their own piece of land rather than in apartment buildings,” writes the University of Illinois professor Robert Bruegmann.11 It is the global nature of this desire, as much as the Anglo-Dutch tradition, that explains the popularity of single-family housing in the United States. Fast food, Hollywood movies, and American professional sports are a matter of taste, but most immigrants don’t have to be sold on the idea of the individual house. It’s a universal preference.
*Cities in North Africa and the Middle East, like those of continental Europe, tend to be made up of multifamily buildings rather than individual houses.
*The housing stock in France and Denmark is equally divided between houses and apartments. In Sweden and Finland, where government policies have discouraged building houses, fewer than half of families live in houses. In Italy, Spain, and Germany, the figure is even lower, although the number of houses has been growing.
16
Generic Traditional
Theming provides a coherent and instantly recognizable set of visual cues, to the home builders as the development is being created, and later to the people who live there.
The Chester County planned community of Weatherstone will have more than 270 houses when it’s complete, although now there are only about 30. All the familiar neotraditional features are here: small lots, houses close to the street, garages in the rear, porches, sidewalks. Everything is brand-new — the porches, the sidewalks, the street signs, even the grass looks new. There are some attractive details, such as the basement walls, which are brick rather than concrete and have molded brick caps. But every single house has exactly the same brick basement, the same cap. There are streets in Chestnut Hill where all the houses were built by George Woodward, but he used different architects and different builders, and made no attempt to standardize the house designs. Here, by contrast, the development, design, and construction are by the same company, so even the attempts at variety have a sense of sameness.
I’m waiting for Jason Duckworth and Tim Cassidy. They have spent the day visiting neotraditional developments to look at what local builders are doing. “The goal is to reduce anxiety and build confidence with Tim,” Jason told me earlier. Two of the four projects that they are visiting are in Bucks County; the others are in New Jersey and, last, here in Chester County.
Jason’s station wagon rolls up. He and Cassidy are accompanied by Christy Flynn, the Arcadia intern who has graduated and is now working with Jason full-time. “We’ve seen a bunch of projects today,” says Cassidy. “It’s a bit like looking at suits on a rack.” I ask him his chief impression. “Inconsistency,” he says. “One builder will use nice shutters but really cheap trim. Another will use a solid-looking bay window but flimsy railings.” We examine one of the houses. The sturdy windowsills are made out of rowlock headers, bricks laid side by side in a traditional pattern. But the pediments over the windows are flimsy plastic profiles that are obviously screwed to the brick wall. “Why did they have to do that?” says Cassidy. “It would have been better if they had just left them off.” He walks around the development, pointing out good and bad features, obviously enjoying himself. He can’t help pontificating, it’s the academic in him.
Jason says that an interesting aspect of the tour has been seeing how differently various builders did the same thing. One project they visited had concrete porches, which were cheaper than wood. Another builder used wooden porches but substituted vinyl for wood railings. Vinyl is cheaper than wood, and is a low-maintenance material, which appeals to buyers. “Plastic railings look okay from a distance,” he says, “but when you get close and touch them, they just feel so bad.” Flynn points to the stairs of a porch. “A lot of builders use these synthetic wood treads, I think they’re made out of recycled plastic or something. They actually look okay, especially when they’re combined with wooden risers, as they are here. They certainly fooled me.”
One subject on which Cassidy and Jason don’t agree is what Jason calls the four-sided versus the one-sided approach. Most builders use one or the other. The houses at Weatherstone are four-sided, that is, the builders have used the same materials and details on all four sides of the house. This appeals to Cassidy’s architectural sense of consistency. In another of the developments they visited, the buil
der used more expensive details and materials on the front of the house and cheaper alternatives on the sides and back: vinyl siding instead of brick, plain details, basic windows. Jason agrees that the contrast between the front and the rest of the house can be jarring, but he thinks one-sided houses greatly improve the appearance of the street.
Cassidy and Jason seem to be getting along. “We want to keep you involved,” Jason says. Cassidy appreciates that the developers really want to do something better than average; at the same time, seeing actual houses brings the conversation down to a concrete level. “It’s the first houses you build that are important,” he observes. “They will set the tone. If you can get them right, the other builders will follow. But if they’re mediocre, it will only get worse,” he adds.
Jason is generally pleased with Cassidy’s reaction to the tour. “There were two subjects that I thought we would talk about,” he tells me the next day. “The first was to identify good building techniques for New Daleville in terms of materials, details, and proportions. I think that’s gone really well. Tim has already made some useful suggestions about the architectural guidelines. He doesn’t like artificial stone, for example, and we’re going to require that artificial stone can only be used under specific conditions. Tim and I agree on a lot of things.”
Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town Page 14
