Hermit crab housing: Part 1: how and why, physical
What do you call the invention of something so clever you immediately say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Why didn’t I think of that?
That’s what struck me upon receiving an email from Nancy Murray, executive director of Builders Of Hope in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a subsequent phone call with Lew Schulman, its Director of Operations, during which I christened their program ‘hermit crab housing’ –
What’s the build cost on your accommodation, eh crab?
– for reasons that – well, let’s start with a big media reference, a feature in the Wall Street Journal:
In Raleigh, where hundreds of old houses have been torn down to make way for bigger, fancier new ones, one neighborhood stands out. Called
Builders of Hope: house, before relocation
The same house moved, prepped, and with a new frontage
What’s the deal? What, precisely, are Builders Of Hope doing? Like the hermit crab, they are moving house, lifting them off the land on which the house currently sits, transplanting it elsewhere, and renovating the transplant to modern systems:
The houses, which go for $89,000 to $185,000, are sold to moderate-income people who have been priced out of the
Builders Of Hope is conjuring workforce housing, using the clever technique of buying down the physical cost, through:
And that’s how you conjure up workforce housing!
Cheap land – donated by the city, or sold by private sellers and then rezoned for higher-density residential.
Cheap build costs – by reusing a physical structure that has a substantial value, just not on its current site.
They also add a nice flourish: creating job opportunities for people who need it.
Some of the workers come from a homeless mission, getting on-the-job training that results in letters of reference for future employment; other workers are “at risk” youth from a program that teaches construction skills.
Affordability is a requirement, at the beginning if not over the long term:
The house went for $119,000 to a woman who works for the state government. Homeowners must meet income and other requirements.
But that doesn’t damp enthusiasm among the new homeowners. “Just to be able to own a home is a feeling of jubilation,” says Phil Brickle, a 53-year-old minister who was
As I’ve previously posted, You are what you live in. Particularly if you’ve earned it, and value what you pay for.
The program is an overnight success – meaning it took years of toil in obscurity before suddenly being noticed:
There’s such a supply of teardowns in the city that Builders of Hope felt confident enough to break ground on a second development last month.
Way cool, right?
Joe Cool likes it
Why does it work? I count six reasons:
Let me count the ways … on one hand
1. Why it works: demographic change
Because the value of urban land is a direct function of improved value, rising population and a growing economy have brought more money into greater
Even as recently as fifty years ago, the American Dream house was a small thing, 1,200 to 1,400 square feet — still bigger than today’s European counterparts! But in the intervening half-century, it has doubled in size; the evolving modern house of 2006 is roughly twice as big as its 1956 counterpart.
And in 1956, here’s what they thought the house of the future would look like!
Meanwhile, even as the houses expanded, the lot shrank. From the acre to the half-acre, quarter acre, or even less. (Nancy’s and my first
Rising land value and changing demography rendering a physically acceptable housing economically obsolescent, not for itself but for its location.
2. Why it works: ‘location economic obsolescence’
As physical structures, houses endure – especially if they are well-built.
Laura Clark, a 38-year-old stay-at-home mom whose ranch house is being prepped for the move to Builders of Hope’s new community, agrees. She and her husband, a surgeon, hired an architect to help design a 4,000-square-foot traditional-style home. When the architect told them that it would be impossible to redo the existing house and that they should just “scrape” the lot, they were dismayed.
In fact, they are economically too durable: just as cellular death is probably a species survival trait, allowing for periodic cellular renewal and improvement, healthy neighborhoods include a fair bit of continuous demolition-and-rebuilding, Schumpeter’s creative destruction.
Schumpeter’s world: Brahma and Shiva fused in one
The opening up of new markets and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as US Steel illustrate the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one … [The process] must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction; it cannot be understood on the hypothesis that there is a perennial lull.
Meanwhile, old houses that were market when built are no longer market today, because market is a rising standard that includes expanding square footage (which I wrote about in The Evolving Modern Home).
Have you ever returned to the old neighborhood, to see the house you grew up in? Are you shocked at how it’s changed, or horrified at how small it is? Can you really have grown up with all those siblings in that shoebox?
And there was an insect problem too ….
You’re not merely reimagining your past — the last fifty years have experienced an evolution in housing so rapid it might almost be called a mutation, driven by seven profoundly significant trends:
Rooms are bigger. Bedrooms (walk-in closets), bathrooms, family sizes, island kitchens, breakfast nooks — all are larger than their 1950s’ counterparts.
Houses are bigger. Fifty years ago, a three-bedroom house was 1,200 square feet. Today that’s a two-bedroom flat, and the median house is 2,500 square feet and rising.
The American dream, 1948:
The house hasn’t changed; we have. The market has. Yesterday’s market standard is today’s affordability standard – if only we could get it out of its current high-value location, and into a more suitable lower-value neighborhood.
What makes this house (Old Maynard) obsolescent? Only its location
3. Why it works: physical
That statement completely misunderstands what’s going on. It’s not ’saving’ a struldbrug building, but liberating it from an economic and demographic environment that is now hostile to it.
I have a theory, that one day I will ennoble in a blog post, that a city’s streets define its skeleton, and the skeleton defines the equilibrium socioeconomic situation.
For a home, the skeleton is its framing structure, and it is exoskeletal:
People are endoskeletal (except for one organ which you’ll deduce if you think hard enough); our bones are a frame on which hang cables, wires, and soft structures.
Only one spot is really hard – think about it!
Insects and crustaceans (arthropods all) are exoskeletal; their structure is imposed from without. The two groups grow in very different ways, the lobster and insect having to discard a too-constricting old skeleton and then growing a new one.
I keep my skelton on the outside, and I travel with my house on my back
A townhouse is essentially exoskeletal – its bones are the bricks or stones that define front wall, back wall, and side walls. Of its five built sides, only two can expand, three cannot:
The roof can be raised with new floors.
Behind the back wall of every townhouse is an alleyway or mews.
The front wall touches the street and faces setback requirements.
The side walls are nestled as tightly as airline middle-seat passengers (where, as it happens, I am writing this post).
You sure the corridors are wide enough?
In effect, moving a well-built existing home replicates the value proposition of mobile homes, but without saddling the buyers with an essentially unimprovable structure.
To survive uprooting, the houses need really good bones:
The 1,500-square-foot house, which he bought for $139,000 … has an office, a lavishly decorated guest bedroom and a master bedroom with a walk-in closet. The solidly built kitchen cabinets stayed with the house when it was moved, as did the hardwood floors and crown molding.
With bones often comes good interior amenities. How many of us, upon moving into that first or second post-college apartment, got out the paint-stripper in a burst of restoration-philia, thinking we’re find the beautiful natural molding underneath, only to be first agog and then appalled at the four (six? eight?) layers of paint between us and that longed-for teak or mahogany? Or scraped our way down to the original marble fireplace mantle?
Services that buy house parts from people who are remodeling or razing have proliferated in recent years. These “rebuilding centers,” typically nonprofits, resell the old windows, doors and cabinets to the public.
My brother Justin specializes in historical reproduction window sash. (He’s really good at it, too.) He buys authentic hardware and authentic leaded glass, materials that if not rescued vanish into landfills. There’s value in quality workmanship and rare materials, if they can be rescued.
Meanwhile, what is obsolete are the building’s systems – plumbing, electrical, and ventilation – so the building needs a good bone structure to take a complete retrofit of the structure’s nerves:
Green Hope Village, [Builders of Hope’s next project], will have even more of a utopian twist: All the houses will be made super energy-efficient to meet the standards of a local green-building authority that guarantees monthly heating and cooling bills under $40.
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
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