We had a recent thread on what we hate in new residential construction.  My contribution was >3 irrelevant gables on the front facade.  I have before me plans for what I hate in new residential construction.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m site development / underground utilities.  We build subdivisions, dirtwork and lay in the water / sewer / storm.  A lot of what we do is pretty neat stuff and I enjoy.  But it’s cold, guys are laid off, and we’re doing work to keep busy.

This particular job is for a high-volume production builder who advertises along the lines of “More Square Feet – Lessssss Money!” and does a pretty ahem production quality of work.  Lots of slab-on-grade.  Their problem is that around here everybody has a maximum density per acreage of units and a minimum quantity of common area in a new development.

So what they’ve done is make the lots as narrow as possible to save money on utilities and asphalt (big $$’s).  Square lots take more footage of these things than rectangular.  But because of the maximum density the lots are really deep.  To save money on not building bigger lots around the radius’s (sp.) of street turns, all the streets are straight with 90 degree turns.  No nice, rolling streets. 

So the result is:  38′ wide lots.  5′ lot line to building, so 10′ between 2-story houses! No money for alleys, so these things sit 120′ deep in the back yards – long, narrow, privacy-fenced in (eventually) back yards.  And when you build like this, all you have space for on the front facade is entries and 2-car garages.

So you drive down the street and see a monster edition of – garages!  Good god I hate seeing garage doors facing a street.  And the very worst thing is, to meet their common area requirements for the kids to play, they put in these turn-arounds.  Like on a straight street it’s a little turn around blister where there is maybe a 15′ radius of grass in the middle.  This grass counts as the common area for the kids to play.  But the design of the edition puts a lot of traffic turning around right there to avoid the narrow streets.  uggh.

These houses are selling $150k here – midwestern city.  A similar edition in an upscale neighborhood is up in arms because they were described as trailer trash.  Which – they are! You buy junk, you live in junk.  These editions are 100% vinyl sided and Will Not hold their value because you cannot side a 2-story house in vinyl without it waving up the side the next day.  It’s tacky, terrible, built by cheap labor (we have huge pool of illegals here, holding prices down.  Masons are getting the same $ they got 10 years ago). 

thanks for the rant forum

remodeler