New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
The hazards of hype in a real estate boom
The oracle of all home values — Zillow — says that the average Connecticut home now costs over $340,000, a 15 percent increase just in this last year. This explosion of price is higher than a robust inflation rate and more than an increasing mortgage rate. The result, for whatever reason, is that more people want to buy more homes than in any year since the advent of The Great Recession, almost fifteen years ago.
If the past is prologue, this boom will bust, but in the meantime the huge influx in cash that a housing boom generates means a fresh bombardment of hype as Big Real Estate (developers, agents, even architects and builders) use profits to fan the flames of irrational exuberance. Given that this is the fifth boom that I have experienced in the 45 years I have been in architecture, the deja vu is redolent. It may be a good time to offer up some insight into the hype machine. There are “push button” triggers used by those marketing homes, and all of them have one foot in our values and the other in our aspiration to virtue signal them in our home.
Net Zero
“Net Zero” homes boil down energy savings to zeroing out monthly utility bills. The ethics of devotion to the environment via reducing our carbon footprint is unquestionably a good thing. But marketing a monthly bill, whether it is for a car payment or your utility costs, simply ignores how those costs are reduced. Steve Mouzon, an architect who wrote “The Original Green” calls throwing technology at energy-use reduction “Gizmo Green” - where exquisitely complex controls
and material assemblies need to work perfectly to save energy. And those homes marketing “Net Zero” as a sales pitch absorb those huge costs in the “luxury market” in homes where size and cost can bury the price of these technologies. As the “Legally Sociable” website asks “Is a large net zero home no longer a McMansion”?
Design trends
The black window “Farmhouse” has become a cliche. Nothing says the 1980s like a palladian window and cherry cabinets with dark green granite countertops. You travel back to the 1990s every time you see a corian counter-topped kitchen. We are on the verge of forgetting the avocado and copper-tone appliances and shag rugs of the 1960s, and the solar panels that fed millions of hot water heaters, everywhere, are gone. So the zest of a black detailed home may just scream 2022 in a decade. Even if the black trim and windows survive the 2020s, their black purity will not — all deeply dark paints change over time, and the darkest of the dark, black, may change the most — a style buzz-kill.
Home redundancies
“Having it all” living creates redundancies that make no sense. Outdoor kitchens are a great idea, but they xerox the kitchen you have, 30 feet away. Gas cooking, refrigeration, sinks, all now being as battered by weather (just like your roof ). These complex constructions cost as much as the kitchen you already have. “En suite” bathrooms allow every single person in a home to have their own toilet, 24/7. Is every room simultaneously occupied? The dollar cost of these duplications is real, but the carbon cost of making, shipping, installing and repairing them is as real as 1970 insulation.
Flipped homes
The “Flip” home is a “pig in a poke.” In booms, flawed homes are purchased in good neighborhoods, then cynically tarted-up to make a quick sale, then abandoned to new owners that deal with the motivations of those seeking profit. Plastic surgery and Botox can even out what you see on a face, but the bones, voice and history remain part of the person you meet. So it is with the layering of surfaces, “features,” and technologies stuck onto a building that has unseen realities that will evidence themselves, no matter how “cool” the home has been made to seem.
Tear Downs
The “Tear Down” has re-emerged for the fourth time in thirty years. The “Great Location” of an ugly home can have a value in a housing boom profit-driven market greater than the value of embodied energy every building has. Failing buildings need to be removed if repair and renovation cost more money (and carbon) than building new. But the most ethical demolition still kills the energy that is in the home, creates landfill volume and has its own energy footprint, independent of construction.
My brother bought a Nehru Jacket in 1966, and wore it once. Our houses are our biggest investment, and the largest monthly cost of most homeowners. Treating a purchase as if you were on a dating app may have instant gratification, but being married to a fully-flawed person with a great profile pic will be regretted for a lifetime.
In a housing boom, you may be able to sell your home for far more than you ever thought possible, but no matter what you buy now will probably be far harder to sell when this bubble pops. If you live in a cliche, or a home with failed technology, or the never-ending leaks of a roof built to sell more than shed water, that sale becomes even harder. Think before you buy, and buy what you know, not what you aspire to be.