I recently linked this piece in Washingtonian magazine, on two “perfect,” “revolutionary” houses—brand new and priced just under $2 million—that turned out to be shoddy junk.

It’s a sobering read, and while those houses were almost uniquely awful, new construction in general gets a lot of criticism for supposedly being of poor quality. Years ago as a kid, when my parents had a contractor doing some work on the house, I remember him saying the new houses were so poorly constructed that you could grab the edge of a wall, like on a doorway, and shake the wall loose from the rest of the structure.

I rather doubt that anecdote—maybe it happened once—and new construction tends to come with warranties to cover things like that. I don’t really know how true it is that “they don’t build them like they used to.” There are obviously a lot of sturdy, high-quality buildings from past decades, but then, the shoddy ones are mostly no longer with us. I’ve heard, for example, that soundproofing in modern buildings is much better than it used to be. But my wife and I live in a condo building from the early 1970s with very thick, sturdy walls and pretty good sound insulation.

Nolan Gray, an urban planner, author, and Twitter character, wrote an interesting piece early this year in defense of new construction. He wrote that “new construction is better on nearly every conceivable measure.” Probably, that’s true as a general matter, but it’s not the same as saying that every new building is better than every old building, which obviously is not true.

Anyway, this is all to introduce a short experience I had with recent construction in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area. My verdict? Eh. This is the type of building it was.

This neighborhood was built around 2004. Zillow identifies this structure as a “townhouse,” but it’s more like what the homebuilding industry calls a “villa.” They’re essentially the opposite of the tall, narrow detached house that some people call a “detached townhouse.” A villa is an “attached detached house,” kind of like a huge duplex. It saves a marginal amount of space and cost over true single-family, but the unit itself is closer to a single-family house than any other floorplan.

This was the view across the street; I believe those apartments are even more recent.

The inside of the townhouse/villa is nice enough, but it feels like it’s been lightweighted, i.e. engineered to be as cheap as possible while still functioning (the same feel as a budget appliance, say). Our condo’s walls have a solidity to them, while this structure feels sort of hollow and a little fragile. The backsplash on the bathroom wall behind the sink was some kind of panel that had some give to it. Stuff like this.

I also noticed a handful of odd design or installation issues. They’re not deal breakers, but they make me wonder how many such corners were cut in the more important, invisible systems. Take a look at this, which doesn’t strike me as a sign of good workmanship:

Here’s another funny one. The air vent in the main bedroom was placed right under the window and against the wall, meaning that this happened to the curtain every time the air came on:

Finally, there was the placement of this electrical outlet—right in front of where you could have guessed the nightstand would go. When anything is actually plugged in, you can’t fully open the nightstand drawer.

Old buildings can have all sorts of quirks and defects too, not to mention larger issues like poor handicap accessibility, outdated and potentially unsafe electric panels/breaker boxes, etc. But I found this recent, outwardly pretty nice building to just feel cheap, poorly designed, and underwhelming inside. It doesn’t make me enthusiastic about new buildings.

On the other hand, these are starter homes or maybe middle homes, and those cost-cutting measures translate into more folks actually being able to afford a home at all. These buildings are not bad by any means, and maybe they’re no different than the median structure from 1970 or 1980.

I’m curious what you think. Is this middling level of quality typical of new buildings? How does it compare to older buildings? If you can answer that, or have a related thought, leave a comment!

Related Reading:

What Housing Crisis?

Against Black Boxes

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