Why are basements scarce in California homes?
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Also basements originate from having to build foundations under the frost line. No frost in California so no need for deep foundations that might as well become basements.
Arizona doesn’t do basements either.
Digging is slow and expensive and only done when and to the extent necessary.
as u/ikonoqlast said, you are going to find basements in the north east and northern mid west because you have to dig down below the frost line. In New York, that is like 6 ft and once you are going 6 ft, you might as well go the rest of the way and put all your utilities down there.
Whereas a lot of southern and western construction is all slab. A slab is exactly as it sounds, a flat slab of concrete that you build on.
You also have moisture problems in basements, which is another reason places like Florida don’t do them, besides having really sandy soil which is difficult to dig into. They would constantly need to be pumping moisture out since moisture passes through concrete. Which is why a lot of basements have sump pumps.
We have slab built homes in the midwest but most have basements for tornado purposes and historically for food preservation not just because of the frost line stated in some answers.
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The California population was increasing by 18% to 50% per decade from 1940-1980 compared to US population growth of 7-18%. Lots of people wanting to move to California means you need to make houses quickly for them to live!
Skipping basements speeds up the house building process quite a bit. Builders don’t need to dig up dirt and move it elsewhere and concrete is only necessary under the exterior walls for a crawl space foundation. California also has/had an excess of wood for everything above the ground (sorry ancient redwood forests).
Basements are more common in CA homes built pre-WWII. Post-war, CA had a huge population boom and it was just cheaper and faster to build over a crawlspace or slab, with the later especially popularized by [Joseph Eichler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Eichler).
I’m from southern Arizona and most houses here don’t have basements either….which is actually unfortunate imo, because having a cool basement would be amazing in the summer months and would probably contribute to cooling the entire house passively! Just one of the many ways desert construction in the US is extremely inefficient. That said, the ground is pretty rocky here and we have a sort of natural concrete called caliche in a lot of the soil, so understandable why they wouldn’t wanna dig thru that.
Very rapid modern development (basements are expensive and take a lot of time), no tornados to worry about, no need to have a dry dark place to store stuff through the winter. Also foundations/supports need to extend below the frostline, so in cold climates you might as well add a whole basement if you’re gonna be digging deep anyway. In CA that’s not an issue.
“California basements” are actually becoming more common, and are tiny basements purely to put pipes and appliances and stuff that would take up valuable space in the main part of the house.
I believe the answer to this question is far more mundane than people think. After World War II there was a building boom, and in many places building standards erred on the side of cheap (hence the terms pre-war and post-war construction). When building out suburbia, foregoing basements was simply cheaper. Since practically all of Los Angeles’ growth happened post-war, the lack of basements was most apparent there.
Someone has been watching “zodiac” recently haven’t they?
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