* Photo: Mauricio Alejo * Wander the floor of the International Builders' Show in Orlando in February and you'll see little evidence that the US housing market is experiencing its sharpest downturn since the Great Depression. Inside the hall, vendor booths will be full. A few companies will display the new-and-improved nails and engineered lumber you'd expect. But if previous years are any guide, much of the hardware at the show will seem better suited to Best Buy than to Home Depot: in-wall speakers and video for the whole house (inside and outside), wireless remotes that control lights and the thermostat, rooms wired with everything from coaxial to Cat-5, security setups worthy of Dr. No. The Builders' Show may not inspire quite as much technolust as, say, the Consumer Electronics Show, but it does offer proof that a home is the most important gadget you'll ever purchase.
Still, you'd never guess it when shopping for real estate. That charming 1920s three-bedroom craftsman wasn't built to accommodate all these new devices, much less modernized subsystems like updated electrical, solar power, or flexible plastic plumbing. Which is one reason Americans have come to prefer new homes to pre-owned ones. Check out these numbers: In 1993, just 48 percent said they hoped their next house would be newly built. By 2004, that number had grown to 74 percent.
Whether those respondents were looking for something cheaper, bigger, gadgetier, or merely free of other people's cooties, builders responded to that new demand. They built lots of homes and packed them with every new gewgaw a potential buyer might dream of. And then they built some more. Now, thanks to the housing bust, virgin homes and condos sit unoccupied in cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix, Miami, and, yes, Orlando. Of course, the desire for high tech isn't solely responsible for the bust (low interest rates and insane lending practices, anyone?), but it is surely a contributing factor. All that built-in technology on display at the Builders' Show is there because people want it, and retrofitting an existing house to replace hard-wired, screwed-in, gadgetry is a bitch. After all, houses are built to last decades; electronic hardware becomes obsolete in months. And once the paint dries inside a new Spanish colonial-style McMansion, running additional pipes, conduits, or wires necessary for an upgrade creates an ungodly mess — and a shocking bill. "It can be done, but you really need to want it," says Kermit Baker, a Harvard economist who studies the remodeling market.
So how do you reduce people's desire to flip perfectly good dwellings for shiny new ones? Start out by building homes that even 21st-century gadget hounds won't want to leave — because they're easier to upgrade. (Relying on a distant future when every technology is magically wireless is cheating — plumbing will always need pipes, and unless you think the work of Nikola Tesla is due for a renaissance, electricity will always need wires.) Architect Kevin Harris of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, routinely has builders run empty conduit inside a home's walls to accommodate whatever new wiring might be required by future generations of gizmos. Make room for changing infrastructure and all you have to swap out are cables and switch plates. Some architectural thinkers have begun to advocate adapting construction methods used for commercial office buildings to the residential housing market — dropped ceilings and raised floors allow for easier electrical and plumbing retrofits. In the Gator Tech Smart House, a project at the University of Florida, architects used a raised floor and hollow crown molding (to hold wires). At MIT, architecture professor Kent Larson is working on designs in which the bones of a house — a skeleton of studs, beams, and trusses — are like the chassis of a car or a PC, and linked components like sensors and A/V equipment slot into integrated receptacles. The builder community is famously hidebound, but if it could be convinced to change its practices, Larson's scheme would mean faster, cheaper assembly (and disassembly and reassembly). "You'd move away from conventional construction, and builders would become assemblers," Larson says.
When this bust eventually ends and carpenters resume putting hammer to nail, consumers would be better served if the industry explored and embraced ways to make homes easier to upgrade to accommodate tomorrow's technology. "Buildings really should last hundreds of years," MIT's Larson says. "But the only way they can is if they're agile enough to adapt." Maybe that will quell people's desire for a six-bedroom McMansion out in the exurbs. And for building another one after that.
Daniel McGinn (dan@houselustthebook.com) is a national correspondent for Newsweek and the author of House Lust: America's Obsession With Our Homes.
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