05-24-2010, 10:48 AM
nachoman Wrote:A note about basements - I was told the reason some areas of the country favor basements has to do with the age of the community. Before electricity, houses had the furnace in the basement and depended upon convection to heat the house. Now with forced air heating, the furnace can be about anywhere and the heat "pumped" to where it needs to be. In places where basements were common for heating reasons, the tradition was carried on (houses without basements probably don't sell as well). In places that never had basements for heating, the added expense of a basement probably doesn't add much value to the house (unless the buyer is a model railroader). In Arizona, basements aren't common. Most of the development occurred after electricity, and with a warmer climate many houses simply used fireplace heat. Popular myth says that our ground is too hard to dig, but that is BS. My neighbor's house was built in the 1930s, and has a basement that can only be accessed from outside. She says it used to have an oil fired furnace down there, but has enough space to stand and store things, and remains dry despite her yard being flooded with canal water every other week. Of course, Florida an New Orleans are different situations
Members from the cold country know more about this issue than I do. I only lived in the Northeast long enough to realize that I don't like snow except on a mountain where it makes a pretty picture from my yard near the beach! I was told that most houses in New York had basements as a way to bring water lines that had to be buried below the frost line to avoid freezing, into the house in winter without freezing. My wife's family is from Long Island. Long Island has a much more moderate climate than the rest of New York, so developers built housing using slab on grade like the southwest instead of with basements. The only people who would buy that type of construction were "newbys." Anyone who lived in the Northeast for any length of time considered a basement an absolute necessity.