187: Deconstructing American Houses – Building Better

Today’s episode of Still To Be Determined, we’re going to be talking about building trends, standards, and the lack of change in the U. S. context. Hey everybody. Welcome to Still to be Determined. As always, I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids, including my most recently released The Sinister Secrets of Singe, which is available in bookstores now.

And with me as always is my brother, Matt. He’s that Matt of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And this one’s hitting close to home for Matt. Literally. Oh. Oh boy. Here we go. We’re already off and running. There you go. Matt, how are you doing today?

I’m

doing good. It’s good. It’s actually been really a beautiful weather here until this weekend. It’s been kind of fun enjoying the new house. And kind of like starting to get settled in and starting to enjoy it and starting to feel like this is home now, where before it felt like I was staying in somebody else’s house, like I was in some kind of like Airbnb.

Yeah. It doesn’t feel that way anymore.

It didn’t feel lived in.

It felt fake. How about you?

Uh, it’s been a pretty wild weekend already. The weekend, I mean, Friday was yesterday, so it wasn’t officially part of the weekend, but. Uh, this major storm that we have had on the East Coast came in, uh, in the early morning hours here in New York City.

And I don’t know if our viewers or listeners have been getting images on the news. I think it did make national news because we just got a call from my, our mother who was checking in on us. Um, yeah. And. Yeah, the streets were running with deep water. There were sections not too far from me, just a few blocks from me, where the water was two or three feet deep on the street.

Uh, here at my home, we have a backyard patio, which has a drainage system, which works well as long as you don’t have a leaf covering. A drain. And then the moment a leaf covers a drain, the backyard fills up with water and it comes in under our back door because our back door is located about two feet below ground level.

So it just siphons all that water right to the door and then it comes under the door. So yesterday morning, uh, my partner and I, we woke up, we went downstairs to check on the basement. There was a little bit of water, which my partner initially was like, Oh, that’s good. There’s just a tiny bit of water.

But as I looked up, The back door, I recognized this is going to get worse. There was something already brewing. And within a few minutes, water was starting to pour under the door. And in an act of, you know, in Superman comics where Clark Kent sees there’s danger and instantly rips off his shirt and he’s in a Superman outfit, I immediately ripped off my pajama bottoms.

And then ran into the backyard where I was now in a torrential downpour of cold water and squatted in my underwear and squatted over the drain in the backyard and was ripping leaves off of the drain and throwing them literally over just over my shoulders like just Chucking them. Currently there is a wall, a, uh, one of the walls in our backyard is covered with leaf debris which is just stuck to the wall like,

like an

ape throwing, like an ape throwing poo.

I, and I, in hindsight, as soon as I was done doing this, I thought I must have looked like an angry chimp from Planet of the Apes cause I was. Literally squatted down and throwing things over my arms, and I probably looked like I should have been going, Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! And

the moment I stripped off my underwear and opened the door, my partner was like, Water’s gonna come in. And I looked at her and I said, And this is a phrase that I think should be put on my tombstone.

This is what has to happen.

This is what, wait, this is what has to happen is what you said? This is

what has to happen. And then I ran into the rain in my underwear.

I hope neighbors saw me doing this. I hope neighbors saw me. I do not want this

to be That’s like something you see in a WW2 movie you as somebody’s about to like charge the hill,

you’re not gonna make it back. This is what has to happen.

Yes.

So how has, how has my weekend been? There you go. As usual on This show, we like to revisit some comments from earlier episodes, and I wanted to share a few comments from the previous episode, episode 185.

This was Matt’s long form discussion with Matt Reisinger from the Build Show. This conversation, the long form conversation, a lot of people really enjoyed it. They really got into the context, and it will lead directly into what we’re talking about here in this most recent episode of Matt’s. Uh, Channel Undecided.

There were comments like this from Don’t Follow Zim who wrote in to say, It’s not that high performance homes cost too much, it’s that our idea of a fairly priced new home is based on a history of houses that meet an embarrassingly low performance benchmark. This is a quote from Matt’s episode. Zim then adds to this to say, Except even those homes with embarrassing performance cost way too much right now.

It’s absurd. And this connects directly to the following comment that I found, which was from GLD, who wrote in to say, Is it easy to get materials in the U. S. if you want to build a house like this in Europe? All the factories and suppliers probably aren’t on the American market, so the builder to get the materials and learn to use them isn’t that convenient, I believe.

Also, Required for new homes is a rainwater tank that you have to place underground that fills up with rainwater from your roof and terrace so you can use that water for your garden and toilet. Is the rainwater tank something they use in the U. S. or is it used only in parts of the U. S.? So I think this is, these two things went together for me.

It was the one argument of access to building materials, access to the ability to build a house like they build in Europe. And then even if that’s not the case, housing prices here in the U. S. are remarkably high and they’re a barrier to most people being able to ever own their own home. So we’re currently, like right now in New York City, we’re in the midst of a major housing shortage.

But even with that, like the suggestions of, here’s how you build a smarter home. Somebody like me, this is all academic. I hope people build homes like this because I want homes across the U. S. to be smart homes. But for me, I’m in an environment where it’s, okay, I live in houses and buildings that were built in the 1930s or sometimes even older.

They’re never going to meet these standards. What do we do about that? What is the… What is the potential for being able to help cities that are old meet some of these new standards?

That, that is, that’s one of my responses to this is, uh, you have to look at what this video is about. It was about homes, building new homes, but it was not dealing with, uh, like retrofitting homes or older homes.

And it’s also very focused on homeownership and homeownership is only half the population. And as you pointed out, many commenters pointed out, there’s a huge disparity that’s been growing between. Being able to even afford to do that is becoming insurmountable for a huge number of people. The thing I would want to kind of highlight is that these techniques are not unique to just single family homes.

They can be applied to any building, any building of any size. And so it’s like… You could make apartment buildings like this. You could renovate older buildings like you’re in just like this. The problem is how do we incentivize that to make landlords and building owners want to make those upgrades, to want to make those improvements, because it’s going to reduce the operational costs and maintenance of those buildings, which could in theory save those landlords money over time.

And it makes a more comfortable living experience for somebody like yourself that’s living in an apartment. It’s not unachievable and there are areas around the world that are doing it. I was just in Vancouver and Vancouver, not a great example because Vancouver is like one of the most expensive places to live in North America, but the number of buildings that have been renovated to be this, to be passive house standard or to be green buildings.

kind of blew my mind how many buildings and it’s like hotels and apartment buildings and condos it’s like it was not just single family homes it was massive structures and the city is helping to incentivize that and make that change so we can see that happen at a city level and a local level and that’s what we need to see more of in more places because yeah it’s i i don’t think we should be tying the Build better to home ownership, we should be doing build better for every kind

of building.

It doesn’t matter what it is. This is, yeah, we very quickly, because of the comments that I, I spotted and the discussion, we’ve already segued directly into discussion of Matt’s most recent video. This was the episode that dropped on September 26th, 2023. Why do American homes suck? Uh, A very blunt title. A very, yeah, I didn’t pull punches.

You didn’t pull punches in this case. And it’s, I mean, it, a lot of the times on this channel, it feels like we’re, we’re clarifying, like, we’re not talking about apples to apples here. We’re talking about finding the right tool for the right job, blah, blah, blah. This one really does feel like you were talking apples to apples.

Like the simplicity of this is a home. This is a home. Why is this one better? And. It becomes, um, just, like, hard numbers, like, to demonstrate things. One of the things that came up in some of the comments was… You provided some numbers without providing enough context to be able to interpret numbers. There was one place where you said your energy use will be around 5, 000 less than your neighbors.

And a commenter pointed out per day, per hour, per week, per month, what is that? It was per year. So yeah, so this is the kind of, when you have this kind of apples to apples comparison, I’m Astounded, like for me, the 5, 000, I was like, that’s per year, like I instinctively just went to a per year, but I’m astounded.

That’s

actually part of the reason why I didn’t call it hours per year, because it was just like my head was in the mindset of, oh, it’s per year. It’s like, it just felt obvious, so I didn’t state it and I should have stated

it. If it was 5, 000 per month, um, geez, wow, good job, uh, but it was, if nothing else, just that number alone.

Like if that’s the only metric you use to compare these things, that demonstrates something. Are there other metrics that you would like a list of two or three other metrics other than dollar that you would say this is clearly evidence of a better built home?

That one’s hard because you start to venture into the quality of life.

Side of things and that’s where it becomes very subjective and squishy and some people are not going to put emphasis on some of those numbers or statistics but just from my personal experience being in my new house, it is way better to breathe the air in here, it’s much more comfortable, it feels fresh and clean in this house where my old house didn’t feel that way.

I had air filters running in every room in that house and it was nice, it was clean, it kept the particulates down, but there was always that kind of like A little bit of that old house smell that just was like, you know, in the house that was just imbued into the building. And this house, because it has ERVs and it’s constantly doing an air exchange 24 hours a day, seven days a week in a very controlled manner, this quality of life here is so much better.

Um, and then also the air tightness and the insulation levels, the temperature range from room to room in this house is like, you wouldn’t notice. My old house was, you walk in my den, it feels like you’re in a, in a hot lodge. And then you go out to the kitchen and you have to put on a sweater. And then you walk into the living room and it’s like, oh God, it’s hot again.

So it was like, it was always room to room, very wildly. And then in the middle of the day, like the living room would become. Like a sweat lodge, and then in the evening it would become the coldest room in the house. It was like all over the place because of how inconsistent insulation was and how air was seeping through the walls or under doors.

Even though we had done our best to try to make it airtight, this house truly is airtight. And so it’s like, it does a great job of being consistent no matter where you are. So you’re kind of comfortable in every single room of the house. You can’t put a number to that. Like, I mean, you can’t put numbers, but it’s hard to make it not subjective.

It’s kind of this quality of life aspect. Yeah.

Although I do think that saying to somebody, you know, regardless of what temperature they find most comfortable saying to somebody, would you prefer that you’re living? Environment be consistently the same temperature from room to room. I find it hard to believe that somebody is out there saying like, Oh no, I really like to sweat in the kitchen and then freeze my butt off in the bedroom.

It’s like, it’s like an old house and there might be a, sometimes no joke, a 10 degree difference between the hottest room and the coldest room. In this house, I’m noticing one to two degrees. So it’s like everything is much, the band is much narrower. It just makes for a more comfortable living

experience.

I’m jealous because I live in a house where this, the range of temperatures, no joke, I’m thinking is probably about 25 degrees between where my kitchen can get during the winter and where my bedroom gets during the winter. Uh, we’re talking about one room can hit 85 to almost 90 and the other one’s probably covering somewhere around 60.

So um. If you want to get sick, come hang out and live with me for about five days, and you’ll, you’ll have a head cold in no time. So, big picture, we’re talking about a mindset that led to short term savings with long term costs, and other places chose differently based on, I loved Reisinger’s explanation in the long term interview about, During the energy crisis of the 70s, the U.

S. and Europe had two different solutions. The U. S. solution was to cozy up to the people with the oil. And the European solution was… To lessen how much oil they needed to use.

Well, one was like, like the pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. That was kind of a European approach. And the American approach was the, hey, pal.

Yeah. It’s kind of backroom deal to get cheaper prices. What’s

fascinating is that here in the US, we market it as if it was the opposite. We market it as if, like, oh, we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps when reality, in reality, there’s this, the, the imaging of Carter putting solar panels on the White House and Reagan taking them off,

you want to talk about bootstraps? Like solar energy would have been the bootstrap response, but no, it was, it was not the path they took. They took my question to you there. One of the comments that we had on this was, um, from, um, Osflip, who from Australia is saying, don’t sweat those building standards in the US, in Australia, they suck even more.

My question to you is, in your research, were you finding, like, we’re, we’re always pressed with the, okay, what is the, what is the comparison we’re making? Uh, we’re not trying to compare the US. To a country with a standard of living that is far below or far above what the U. S. context is. Were you spotting, you were looking a lot at France, England, uh, Norway, Norway, Germany.

Were there other countries with a similar standard of living that you found where it was obvious that they were at the U. S. level or potentially even worse? It,

it, we didn’t really, to be honest, we didn’t focus on that because the clear comparison for us was the EU, which size wise and population wise is very similar to the US.

We’re kind of economy based and size based and population, we’re all, we’re fairly equivalent. So that was kind of the main focus is looking at those regions. And not looking at something like Australia, sorry, Australia, but it was a very different, uh, it’s a smaller population. It’s some, it’s kind of off on its own doing its own thing.

Um, so I didn’t really do a deep dive and my team didn’t do a deep dive in Australia specifically. So when those comments did spring up, I did some digging of like, like, what did we miss? And it was like, oh, whoa, we, we, we kind of missed a bunch. So we probably could have highlighted that Australia is kind of, you know, an interesting kind of like litmus test.

That could potentially be looked at as worse than the U. S. in some cases. So, yeah.

Unfortunately for Australia, Australia is almost like another planet in so many different ways. First of all, they have animals there that don’t exist anywhere else. And the meme is that everything’s going to kill you.

Everything will kill you. But like from an energy production, energy use, uh, perspective from an internet. Access perspective, cost perspective, like, things cost a lot more there, uh, contextually than, you know, in other parts of the world, just because everything is being shipped such vast distances, um, it’s really, it’s really an interesting context.

Some other comments that popped out to me included this one, and this is… I’m sharing this from the perspective of, is Matt just creating this debate on his own? Is he just like comparing these things and, and creating a comparison that other people wouldn’t see? Uh, Darian Richmond wrote in to say, I’ve been working as a residential energy rater in the U.

S. in the Southeast. For about seven years now, I would never buy a production house in the U. S. From inadequate local codes to builders trying to maximize profits, it’s a nightmare out there for any prospective buyer. Someday when I have enough money, I’ll build my over engineered masterpiece of energy efficiency and climate resilience.

Keep the great content coming. This is somebody who does it professionally. This is somebody who’s out there at, that’s, this is their job, uh, to look at residences and say, how is this doing? And from his… Personal and professional capacity. He is saying these houses are not great.

Um, yeah, this is, this is something I’ve heard a lot.

And on top of which, when I reached out to Matt Rissinger to see if he’d be willing to kind of give me his own insights into this, this issue. Uh, cause I know he’s very passionate about this. Uh, He, when he responded, he was like, Oh yeah, we should actually talk. We should actually do a podcast together. We should actually like just have a whole conversation.

And so we jumped into it when I proposed what I was going to bring up. He’s like, well, what are you thinking of? And I said, well, I’m actually working on an episode that I’m thinking of titling. Why do American houses suck? And you should have seen him laughing, his producer laughing. It was like, all of them were just like, Oh yeah, yep, yep.

Okay. And it’s like, they were all like nodding in agreement. Like, yeah, that’s a good one. You know, talking about the policies and stuff like that. This is a huge issue here. Yes. So here it comes from a guy who’s got decades of experience in industry as well saying the same thing. And then Ted Benson, it’s the guy who owns the company that actually built my house, say, saying a lot of the same things.

So it’s, it’s definitely not me just trying to stir controversy. It’s, it’s something that is kind of well known in the industry that production homes here in the U S. They suck. They

absolutely suck. One more comment I wanted to share and then from this I wanted to jump off into a kind of um, green industry kind of question.

Uh, Andre John Moss wrote in to say, one other thing I’ve noticed is that without stronger regulation it can be harder finding the right products on the local market. Few businesses will invest in a product that people won’t buy due to potentially increased price, personnel knowledge. or contractors who have learned how to work with the product.

Making the regulations stronger gives businesses a motivation to take the risk in a more efficient method and product. This is a thing that we constantly butt up against in our conversations, which is when you allow the market to drive adoption, you’re waiting potentially decades. If not even longer for something to be worth somebody’s time and money to become the norm.

When you use regulation, you can spur it on and you can use regulation and tax incentives and other forms of financial support. To help prime the pump. We’ve seen that with solar. And Matt just recently had his episode in which, holy cow, everybody kind of like, palm to the forehead. Who knew solar would suddenly become what it’s become?

Where it’s, it’s, it’s no longer a also ran, it is a leader in energy production. So the question here is regulation and access to product, These are two things we’ve talked about already on this front. Do you see a potential for changes to regulation which could actually incentivize and improve access to jobs, access to homes?

Are there things that are not being done which if regulation forced them to be done would create whole new versions of industry around home building? That would become a positive to economic and social impact. Think

about it this way. I know there’s a lot of people that are going to be very anti regulation, but when there’s standardization and it’s not tiny pockets of groups that are trying to use the better practices and the better building materials.

When you do mass production and you’re starting to sell things in scale, prices drop. That’s just the way things work. Prices will drop as things become more commonplace. So if these materials that are expensive, a little more expensive today because they’re a little more boutique. Imagine there’s a standard where it’s not just, you know, tens of thousands of homes being built by the standard, but millions.

It’s going to drop those costs of those materials because it can become more prevalent. So if we had better regulations across like specifically the U. S. where it was not literally city by city making alterations or state by state, but more kind of regional, because of course you don’t have to build a house in Texas to the standard that we’re building them here in the Northeast because they don’t have the winters down there.

But if we had more kind of climate zones. Kind of regulations in the U. S. that were standardized. It would not only help with training because everybody in that huge area would all be on the playing on the same playbook. The materials that are used and the techniques that are used would be so commonplace, it would become quicker, easier, cheaper to procure those materials.

Which would keep the costs down, but because they’re so boutique right now, and some things are being imported from over in Europe, and there’s all these kind of hodgepodge of things happening, it’s creating this situation where we can’t get out of this loop. So regulations, in my opinion, are key to breaking this, um, and it doesn’t mean that we have to build houses more expensive.

And I want to call it back to like on the build show with Matt Reisinger’s YouTube channel. He’s had several episodes where he’s highlighted there are builders in the U. S. that are really pushing things forward on building affordable, high performance homes using materials that are readily available, like at Home Depot, but they’re changing how they go about constructing the house just to make it.

A little better and to achieve that airtightness that normally the way you’d build it is one way, but they just changed the way they built it and it created the situation which made it easier to tape and made it easier to make it airtight with the same exact materials that they’re using today. So it’s one of those education is the other side of this.

That’s kind of a big sticking point, which is one that brings me back to the regulations. If it was more standardized across the board, more people would know how to do this stuff and it wouldn’t be this little pockets of people. It would be more. Tens of thousands of workers that know how to do this, not just a few hundred.

So it’s, to me, regulation is the key.

And we’ve seen it work with solar, and we’ve, we’ve, we’re now seeing the, the positive impact in that field. And I think this ties in directly to infrastructure building, um, the idea that you put money where you are instead of forcing people to go scramble and look elsewhere.

Um, there’s a new microchip manufacturing plant being built in Ohio. The reasons behind doing that, to me, seem almost identical to the reasons behind making regulations in home building, like you just described. You build it here, and so it’s reinforcing everything here, for everybody here, and it’s a positive impact that spirals out from that.

But listeners, viewers, what do you think? Let us know in the comments, as you can tell from our discussion. We like to go back to the comments, both here and on Matt’s main channel, to find Points of interest to talk about. So jump in there. All of that really does help drive the content of this and Matt’s main program.

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