Fifteen years ago I noticed a neighborhood house that had been completely demolished except for the front wall. It looked like a plywood movie-set for a Western. Nothing about it made sense and there it stood for a year or two and then someone came in and built a house behind it. At some point the vestigial wall disappeared or was absorbed and now nobody remembers what was there before. The new house is massive. I think it ate the wall.
I wondered at the time if it was an effort to keep the neighbors calm so they got used to seeing the front of the old house and thinking everything was on the up and up. Like, they’d add a little bobblehead hound in the window, and a cardboard cowboy silhouette with his arm waving, Howdy, Howdy! And they wouldn’t notice things getting darker and darker until their own house was in total eclipse.
Builders don’t like objections from the neighbors. They’re not above a little subterfuge, which is French for horseshit. I recall seeing an ominous red ribbon around a magnificent old tree on my route once and I confronted the developer about it. Oh that, he said. Yeah. We had a tree guy come out and look at it and it’s rotten at the base. It has to come down before it falls on someone.
Two weeks later the magnificent tree was a sawdust memory and the magnificent tree’s trunk was clean and unblemished, but something must have been a little off about it, because it turned into a condo. The tree inspector is on his private island and can’t be reached for comment.
Well, I’ve seen plenty of remaindered house bits since then. It’s a thing. I haven’t got the authentic story yet, but pretending a new development is actually just a remodel gives the builder either tax advantages or breaks on permits. They don’t need the whole front wall, either. Why, you can do a substantial remodel on a small portion of siding.
It’s like Michael Jackson retaining one original earlobe.
That’s what happened around the corner. Tiny little house there, and one day whoosh it was gone, and was replaced by a utility pole with a box of electricity on it, and a little sign with a phone number you can call if you have erosion concerns. They don’t mean erosion of the neighborhood, per se. A while later the utility pole had a dab of the old siding nailed to it. I’m pulling something over on the taxpayers, the dab of siding said, if you squinted at it just right, and it’s all perfectly legal. I thought nailing the old house-bit to the upright was a little biblical and over-the-top, but it was just temporary. I will be damned if they didn’t get the whole new house framed up and then reattached the old siding to the corner.
And then they sided over it.
I always thought a remodel was when you came in and added a toity and put in new sheetrock and cabinets. This sucker was remodeled like the Allies remodeled Dresden.
I’m in favor of building codes. And thoughtful housing policy. As far as I can tell, all this does for the city is fatten up the tax base. The same number of people probably live in the new house only with more space and money around them. There’s probably a lot of insulation and a heat pump and energy efficiencies but it’s still heating an extra 4000 square feet. And repurposing a forest to do it.
This happened around here recently. Behind a shopping center, and across from yet another shopping center was a copse of old trees and an old stone schoolhouse. The trees were really tall and beautiful, and crows liked to hang out there. Well, in just one day, they razed it all — trees, old schoolhouse, everything. I shudder to think of how many nests were destroyed. I heard that a young deer was hit by traffic while making his escape. And what are they putting in that place? Glad you asked. A shopping center. Also some houses. I mean, there are FIVE shopping centers in that area, all within walking distance of each other, even for ME! A lot of them have vacancies. Other stores can’t find enough employees. So they want to build another one? I hate developers.
In my neighborhood, we’re losing trees right and left: a combination of the apparent need to put big houses on small lots, and that damn heat dome we had two years ago (almost exactly). That one event continues to take down trees.
In Michigan, if you leave one wall standing, you avoid a 15-20K demolition permit. We are in the midst of losing 20 acres of woods behind our house to a development of some kind. There will still be 25 acres of nearby woods, which seems weird in the middle of the Detroit suburbs. It’s been pretty much untouched since our sub went in, in 1966, though one does find the occasional old beer bottle in there.
There are big areas around here where people buy 1000 square feet homes, raze them and build those 4000 square foot monsters. I’ve never seen the appeal.
Families are getting smaller, yet houses are getting bigger. WTF? I’ve read somewhere (It may have been in Freakanomics, but I can’t remember exactly) that 90% of these people who buy McMansions end up having to sell them in a few years because they cannot afford them. Idiots!
Mary, we put an addition on our house that bumped it from 1200 to 2700 square feet, and I think if we’d waited five years it would have been a much smaller addition (but I did want a studio!) The older you get, the simpler you want things.
Murr, I turned one of the kids’ bedrooms into a study, and it is simply a mess. Is that what you mean?
I lie awake nights trying to design small, efficient houses in a community setting, with services close at hand and a spot of dirt for growing food. I am such an old hippie.
You know the fictional community that I considered the perfect community, if not for the zombies? The Walking Dead. One group of survivors took residence in Alexandria,VA. EVERYONE pitched in with whatever talents they had, whether it be defense, scavenging, growing food, or distributing it fairly to EVERYONE. They had no monetary system. Everyone pulled their weight and received their fair share of the food. Of course, there were other groups of survivors that had a more authoritarian system, and would make war on the peaceful communities. It was a great graphic novel series, and a great TV series. And it WASN’T really about the zombies; it was the way people either pulled together or fell apart.
I never read the graphic novels, but I quit watching it when they let Neegan live.
Actually, I like Neegan. Not at first. But his was a story of redemption. AND I read the graphic novel that provided his back story. Yeah… am a geek….. The graphic novel was way more… graphic… than the series. I HATED him when he killed Glenn. Let’s just say that he redeemed himself in the long run, after spending a few years in that jail cell. I could have lived in Alexandria… except I doubt that I would have survived the initial zombie apocalypse. My contribution to their society would have been cooking and canning.
On a similar note, when Twin Peaks was around, Paul stopped watching it when they had a scene of the father (I forget his name) killing Laura Palmer. But then, we watched it again, and he enjoyed the show. Sometimes you have to know the ending to get through the middle part.
I’ll keep that in mind.
Every fellow old lady I know imagines we’ll all live some day in a pod of tiny houses with a communal kitchen and shared investment in Cabaña Boys, electricians, and the occasional nurse.
Yet, we never seem to make it happen.
My friends and I have been talking about this since we were in our 20s!
We slightly upgraded the plan to include a 25 year old environmentalist last week.
I don’t think he understands yet how many hippy grandmas he’s gonna have!
This is part of a trend, it seems to me: laws are for the people who follow them, and norms have been tiktokked into the vapor. Like driving, where the rules of the road are now anybody’s guess. It’s all just nose position at intersections. Shoot, where I live, there aren’t enough cops or highway patrol anymore to make driving without a license risky, and nobody needs a license to carry, either. We’ve no glue to hold this many people together, so we thumb our noses like your builders and developers do when they nail a fragment of siding to a post. Libertarianism has slud into anarchy.
Libertarianism always wanted to do that.
Totally. Libertarianism is the assertion that “freedom” and “freedom to destroy” are indistinguishable. The definition my son uses is “the belief that humans are not social animals.”
OO! I like that!
They are mining the last of the old Northern White Cedar stands here in northern Maine. The excuse? “Well, ya see that dead branch on that one Cedar there? That means the whole Stand will be dead within the year… better do a salvage cut.
If you ever want to get really, truly depressed, read Annie Proulx’s “Barkskins.”
I’m in favour of building codes too. Here in Aus. each building stage can’t be added until the previous one is checked by an inspector and found to be up to code. Even if they are only “adding on”.
The new build there does look nice at least. Just huge.
It isn’t the least attractive big house I’ve seen. They did have to cut down one tree. And usually these are duplexes at least, but this one is single-family.
I cringe every time I see a forest of trees cut down here – and it happens nearly every day. We really do need another shopping center, apartment complex or town houses (Priced so high no one here can afford them). Do you see the sarcasm there? We are on every “Best place to live for…….” list in the country, it seems, so every day, we get 50-100 new residents. every builder is in competition for them, it seems. Where does it end?
Guess what? We’re losing population here in Portland now! Of course it had nearly doubled in a few years’ time. But still.
Apparently there are a lot of “unfinished” houses in Greece as a way to avoid taxes. So, they leave some minor bit incomplete and get away without paying tax. It’s one of the reasons why the Greek government has trouble with debt.
And speaking of development…we enjoyed a forest behind our house for about 8 years, now houses are going up after two years of blasting and rock hammering. On the plus side, I’ve had an unlimited supply of rock for garden walls, steps and paths! I guess it is easy to fall into the NIMBY mentality when we get to a place first and don’t want it to change.
Gee, I’d never have to pay taxes! I never quite finish things. Even now, I think there are a few wall outlet plates missing from the work 25 years ago. “I should get one of those,” I think, but never when I’m somewhere I could get one. Yay for garden rock. I’m a huge fan. But I have to go fetch it off our volcanoes.
I love this blog, and it’s comments. The content of Murr’s writing, while interesting and entertaining, seems to be a springboard, for comments that fly off or go down like Alice into the realms of the ‘this could happen, if….’
I lived in Alaska for some years, starting back in the early/mid 70’s, and came to know a guy who lived down on the Kenai, past Soldotna, in a house he’d started not long after he moved up there in 1928. Over the years, he gained a family, kids, and the house grew like topsy. From the outside, it looked like a early version of real life legos…most of the additions were box-like, or growths.
He was also a correspondent of Bucky Fuller, and I got to read some of the hundreds of long letters they shared. Both were people of the ‘I got this idea, let me see if I can build it’ school.
Anyway, I guess this is a takeoff on whatever this blog was about. I forget….
Well you’re way off course, Mike. I started with house demolition and then I think we went quite a ways into the zombie apocalypse. On the plus side of your ledger, you made me look up “grew like topsy” and I thank you. That’s how houses in Maine grow.
i’ll try to adjust my compass. Apologies.
No, keep going. I’m pretty sure we’ll be veering into the signs of the Rapture next.