What’s old is still old

I felt this Atlantic piece deep in my core. As a person who sought out new construction time and time again because of the pain in the ass factor of maintaining an older home, I never understood the romanticization of old homes. Old electrical systems, failing plumbing, weirdo drainage, lack of insulation, no weatherization…hardest of passes. Highlights:

[A] housing market in crisis: Americans are paying ever more exorbitant prices for old housing that is, at best, subpar and, at worst, unsafe. Indeed, the real-estate market in the U.S. now resembles the car market in Cuba: A stagnant supply of junkers is being forced into service long after its intended life span.

In housing circles, one hears a lot of self-righteous discussion about the need for more preservation. And many American homes doubtless deserve to stick around. But the truth is that we fetishize old homes. Whatever your aesthetic preferences, new construction is better on nearly every conceivable measure, and if we want to ensure universal access to decent housing, we should be building a lot more of it.

And when you put it this way:

In the meantime, we’re stuck with a lot of old housing that, to put it bluntly, just kind of sucks. A stately Victorian manor in the Berkshires is one thing. But if you live in a Boston triple-decker, a kit-built San Jose bungalow, or a Chicago greystone, your home is the cheap housing of generations past. These structures were built to last a half century—at most, with diligent maintenance—at which point the developers understood they would require substantial rehabilitation. Generally speaking, however, the maintenance hasn’t been diligent, the rehabilitation isn’t forthcoming, and any form of redevelopment is illegal thanks to overzealous zoning.

…

Much of this flows from our national prejudice against new housing, especially if it’s billed as “luxury.” Attend a hearing for any given housing proposal and you’re sure to hear baseless speculation that new housing is shoddily constructed or unsafe.

The fact is that those much-lamented cookie-cutter five-over-one apartment buildings cropping up across the U.S. solve the problems of old housing and then some. Modern building codes require sprinkler systems and elevators, and they disallow lead paint. New buildings rarely burn down, rarely poison their residents, and nearly always include at least one or two units designed to accommodate people in wheelchairs.

Before you protest and point to your gut renovation as proof that old homes are fantastic you essentially have a new home.  You’ve stripped everything old out of the home to make it livable.  As pointed out, none of those Sears catalogue cookie cutter homes were built to last.  They were made to be easier to install and cheaper than the competition.  They’re not special because they’re old.  They’re just old.  And we shouldn’t allow the, as the author put it, fetishizing of old houses to stand in the way of building homes that can heat and cool efficiently, be appropriately sized for families of all shapes and sizes, and be accessible for differently abled people.