Editor's note: Information contained in this article has been adapted from information in the book "Environmental Psychology for Designers" written by DAK Kopec, Ph.D, CHES to be published in fall 2005 by Fairchild Books, a division of Fairchild Publications, Inc., New York, NY.

Many of us have been watching the proliferation of housing developments that arrive seemingly overnight. Miles and miles of once virgin land is scraped and developed into instant housing communities. Throughout much of North America, this building fever is burning strong. The result is cookie-cutter homes as far as the eye can see.

Our population is growing by about one person every 11 seconds, and even faster in some parts of the United States. With such a demand, the cost of housing has skyrocketed, thus eliminating many would-be buyers. In these circumstances, the cookie-cutter home provides the only viable option for ownership. However, uniform building on such a large scale brings with it a host of other problems that may not be considered by the communities caught up in this building fever.

The first issue has to do with monotony. Over the years many researchers have proven that a level of mystery and surprise is needed to capture and maintain one's interest. As many of us have seen in southern California, Tuscan-style homes have all but replaced the California Craftsman homes. This trend of a singular architectural style is dominating mass developments all over North America. These monotonous homes come in large, and larger sizes with slight variation in floor plan options, often no more than a flipping of identical plans.

Clearly there is an issue of cost. It is much cheaper for a developer to purchase just a few architectural drawings and reuse them over and over like a cookie cutter, and also much cheaper to purchase mass quantities of supplies that can apply from one development to the next. Sadly, it is also cheaper to scrape the entire development site bare of all vegetation so that the completed houses look totally devoid of life.

While we cannot fault these developers for making good business decisions, city councils should be more proactive in choosing what types of developments are added to their communities, i.e., they should be recruiting a variety of development styles. Unfortunately the urgent need for more homes in an economy that supports developments will find many city council members caught up in the panic to build now. The result in many warmer climates is a sea of Tuscan style developments.

Another issue rarely considered is the lifespan of such developments and accompanying infrastructure. Depending on the quality of the products used, and work performed, these homes, roadways and other infrastructures will degrade over a shorter or longer time. Ergo, many of the homes in a given development will all need new roofs at approximately the same time. What will happen when entire developments start to decay at the same time? Will every owner in the development have the financial resources to repair the decay? Odds are that only 25 percent of them will be able to maintain these homes as things start to fall apart. The result will be most homes needing major repairs, which will translate into lower real estate comps and hence lower property values for the whole development.

The need for home repairs will likely coincide with the need for roadway and other infrastructure repair. Since this will all happen in the future, city revenues from those properties will unlikely keep pace with inflation, which means that the cost of infrastructure repairs will be unaffordable. Not only do we need sewage, roadways, electrical supply, etc. for these mass developments, we also need schools. More people mean more wear and tear, which means more maintenance, which means that local schools will be in need of repair around the same time as the infrastructure. We must keep in mind that while everything is new there is little financial output, but when things start to decay the financial burden will be high simply because of the sheer magnitude. This of course will affect those cities that embraced simultaneous mass developments throughout their community.

Developers are in the business of making money. This means reducing costs wherever possible. City council members, on the other hand, are elected officials whose job is to ensure our best interests. But the councilors are humans too, which means that they also get caught up in panic and "group think."

Therefore is it everyone's responsibility to take a step back, and evaluate our actions to ensure that developments in our community are diverse in architectural style, temporal spacing (built at different times), size, and options of housing stock. If we do, we can be relatively sure that our communities will have a long and prosperous future. However, if we continue at this slash and burn rate, many communities in about 20 years will look rather rundown.

Published: March 10, 2005

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