Time to Teardown

An essay on torn-down homes and enormous dream houses

Sitting atop a nearby hill, there used to be a small yellow home. It had a Cape Cod style and a covered porch. The landscaping, though overgrown, had a charm defined by a cluster of knobby old trees, all taller than the home itself. Sometimes, as I drove by, I saw an old man mowing the lawn with what looked to be an even older mower. Every Halloween, I would wind down the home’s curving gravel path, ready to knock on the door and receive candy. To me, the tiny place epitomized cuteness.

Outside of my Halloween visits or occasional drivebys, I had no interaction with the owners. I didn’t know why they decided to sell. But, when the ‘For Sale’ sign popped up, it had an extra banner reading “land value.” This meant that when it finally sold, the cute yellow Cape Cod was torn down into nothing, trees and all. In its place, rose a monstrosity.

The new house seemed to strain against the constraints of its corner lot, like a chained beast aching to break free. It’s exorbitant height added to the illusion that the house was on the verge of collapsing into the neighboring lots. What had once been a small house with a nice yard became a mansion with no yard to speak of. Worse, it’s eclectic design elements were more suited to building Frankenstein’s Monster than a house. Though the place was custom built, it exhibited no discernable sense of style.  Sleek, modern windows alternated with ornate, old-fashioned designs. The color palette was incomprehensible, combining orange stone with gray stucco and an inexplicable blue driveway. I went through a kind of phase where every time I passed the mansion (an almost daily experience), I would rip into its ugly color scheme and complain about how the structure seemed to be grabbing at every bit of extra space it could find. It’s orange! I would protest. It’s all over the place! Mostly, though, I think I just missed the little yellow house that had once stood in the behemoth’s place.

Living in the suburbs, I am no stranger to “teardown culture,” the real estate practice of buying homes simply to tear them down and build ostentatious mansions in their place. My own town is often named as a posterchild of teardown culture, with over one-hundred permits for demolition issued in the last year(1). And, while the practice is still nowhere near the heights it reached toward the end of the most recent housing boom, it is certainly on the rise once again.

There are two reasons for these teardowns. The first is when a family buys a house to demolish so they can build their dream home. While I can certainly understand the desire to build something that’s entirely your own, I would be much more supportive if those dream homes didn’t turn out like the orange brute on the corner. Often, these homes must combine many dreams into one, and seem to end up an eclectic mess lacking any sort of architectural continuity. The other reason for a teardown is, of course, the money.  Real estate companies and developers buy old houses to demolish and replace them with spec mansions, all without a buyer lined up.  Typically, by buying houses for the land value and building new constructions to sell instead, they are able to turn a hefty profit.  My father owns a local real estate agency, and, in 2007, tore down a house to begin a new construction. Of course, with the housing crash happening just a year later, the project wasn’t successful; when my dad finally sold the new mansion, he wasn’t eager to try his hands in this field again.

I understand why teardowns happen, and the housing market’s recovery means that their popularity is on the rise once more. But it still doesn’t explain to me why people choose to tear down cute little Cape Cods to build oversized, unsightly mansions, or why anyone would need a mansion in the first place. My own house"big but not quite mansion sized, at least compared with the rest of the town"has two rooms we almost never use between our family of five. There is a dining room in which we eat on special occasions, though I can’t see our lives being too different without it. Then, there is a formal living room that we sit in maybe three or four times a year. Otherwise, the rooms are empty. Stiff and formal as they are, those rooms aren’t a part of my home. They aren’t places of security, love, and family. They are just rooms in my house. Why would I want to live somewhere even bigger, where half the rooms were left neglected to breed spiders and gather dust?

When I was younger, I was in awe of the White House and its 132 rooms. My first grade teacher told us there was even a bowling alley and a pool! It sounded like a paradise. Many kids, myself included, wanted to be President just so they could live in the Executive Mansion. But now, I wonder how on earth the President, or anyone, really, could use all that space, or why people would aspire for that sort of excessive grandeur in the first place.

The White House is not the only example of American excess. In fact, the average home size in America is greater than that of most of the world. According to a study by the BBC, homes in England, Ireland, and Spain that were built after 2003 had, on average, less than half of the 2,300 square feet of an average American home(2). Others, like France and Denmark, were around 1,000 square feet less than America’s average. So why such a huge disparity? One explanation is simple: the United States is a larger country, area wise, than its European contemporaries. Having extra space in a country leads to having extra space in a house. But, even as our homes have grown bigger, the amount of people living in them has decreased, down to 2.54 people per household today from 3.33 in 1960(3). We don’t need all of this space for families that, on average, are smaller and smaller. There must be other reasons for our obsession with big, spacious mansions; reasons that go back to the origin of suburbia itself.

In the ashes of World War II, the American Dream would rise again, this time manifested in the growing popularity of suburbs. The 1950’s saw white, middle class Americans fleeing the cities (and their rented apartments) in the hopes of owning their own house. Thus, the new ideal of American homeownership was born. A home became not just a place where you lived; it was a place that you owned. Home ownership conveyed success and security.  They became status symbols, a way of “keeping up with the Joneses.” Just as people bought fancy cars and appliances to one-up their neighbors, they also bought and moved into bigger and bigger houses. Soon, the size of their house became a statement to the world of their success. They didn’t need the space, they just wanted to show that they could afford it.

As a result, many Americans have gone into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt just to buy and build their dream houses. Such excess contributed to the devastation of the 2008 housing crisis. Countless homes were foreclosed upon in the aftermath of the recession, and people found themselves buried in debt from houses they couldn’t afford. People tend to forget about it, but even if you can afford the purchase, there are additional costs associated with owning mansions: having all that space means spending more money just to furnish, clean, and maintain them. And, of course, life tends to be unpredictable. Sometimes money is there one year and gone the next. People die and get divorced, kids grow up and move out, and we are left with a custom-built, taste-specific home that is difficult to sell(4).  Not many people are going to be lining up to buy an orange stone house, after all. Tearing down a perfectly serviceable home to build a mansion that you can’t sell five years later won’t show how wealthy you are, but it may demonstrate how foolish you can be.

Despite all of this, this part of the American Dream remains today; the dream in which houses are built as symbols of wealth, and bigger is always better. The orange monster on Madison Street was built after 2008, indicating that we seem slow to learn from the mistakes of the housing boom. Worse, its construction was followed by the arrival of two equally enormous new neighbors. I understand the neighborhood I live in, and I know these people can afford their extravagance. I don’t understand, however, why they take the risk, or what they feel they have to prove.

It seems that in our minds, from the fifties to today, homeownership has been linked to happiness and success. And yet, not one study has discovered any correlation between real estate and contentment(5). Dr. Dunn, a researcher at Harvard, agrees, saying that “People still view housing as a central component of happiness and a critical aspect of the American dream,” but “there is little research to support that(6)." The reality is, just owning a bigger house isn’t going to make anyone happier. A house, after all, is just four walls and a roof, and all the money in the world can’t turn a house into a home.  Only love and family can do that.

The family who bought the cute Cape Cod tore it down to build their dream house, ugly as it was. Only a few years later, their American Dream would fall apart with the reality of divorce. The house was put on the market, but it was slow to sell. The asking price dropped. The monster was empty, starving for new tenants, but no one came.

They built the dream house, but it was never a home.

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Sources

(1) Fornek, Kimberly. “Teardowns Continue in Hinsdale, but Much Less Frequently.” Chicagotribune.com. Chicago Tribune, 18 Mar. 2016. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

(2) Yunghans, Regina. “Average Home Sizes Around the World.” Apartment Therapy. N.p., 20 July 2011. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

(3) “Average Size of Households in the U.S. 1960-2015 | Statistic.” Statista. Statista, n.d. Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

(4) Block, Fang. “Dream Homes Can Be a Tough Sell.” Mansion Global. N.p., 27 July 2016. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

(5) Higgins, Michelle. “Homeownership, the Key to Happiness?” The New York Times. The New York Times, 13 July 2013. Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

(6) ibid.