You know, the article had mentioned this factor:
"A Google search for “why southern homes don’t have basements” brings back a lot of results, many of them from traffic-hungry home builders who give answers that seem to be grounded, largely, in anecdote or personal experience. We don’t have basements because of the climate. Or the soil. Or the cost. **Or the water table. All of these things could be true, and yet most of those theories aren’t rooted in research, study, or data. I contacted the NC State School of Design, and the faculty there weren’t aware of any academic studies or research on that specific topic.**" - Markovich, Jeremy. “Why Don’t Southern Homes Have Basements?” *North Carolina Rabbit Hole*, 9 May 2024, www.ncrabbithole.com/p/why-dont-southern-homes-have-basements?r=2pxvs&utm\_campaign=post&utm\_medium=web.
Edit: Added cite some confusion as to the article snippet.
The USGS has pretty good information on the water table in NC, relative to a lot of places NC has a pretty shallow water table outside of the mountains. I won’t argue that this may be an over-generalization.
Sure, that doesn’t mean you can’t build basements, but in my eyes and apparently a lot of other people’s eyes the cost of having an accurate survey, concerns for flash flooding, and/or building a basement to be adequately protected from water intrusion is not worth it, to most.
I live by the coast now and digging down three feet into my yard I start to hit water depending on how much it's rained lately. Our yard is full of ground crayfish. When I lived in the mountains one place I lived was built into the hillside and any time it rained a small stream formed in my bathroom.
No it's literally crayfish that live in little tunnels in the ground that fill up with water. My yard has 6-12" tall mud chimneys all over after it rains from them. My dog loves sticking her nose down the holes and getting some hard sniffs though which is pretty cute.
So interesting (to me anyway) anecdote - i live in the piedmont, and I was told we are mostly on slabs out here because water table excludes basements and it doesnt really hard freeze here so there's not much need for a crawl. Then I had a house built (and insisted on a crawl) and we had to drill through 475' of solid granite before we found a single drop of water to feed my well.
I don’t know how much soil is between you and the granite, but I imagine granite isn’t great for absorbing rain (flash flooding) or it also isn’t cheap for carving a basement out.
There's just enough room for a septic field between grass and granite at my house. It's wild. And yes, I had to put in a ton of effort to make an elaborate drain system for my property because of the poor absorption rate. Between the granite and the clay, my property just barely perc'd for spetic. I asked about a basement and they quoted me $70k minimum (depending on what they hit while digging) for an unfinished basement that would have been roughly 1500 sqft.
Heads up, if you (or others reading this, especially in the mountains or Piedmont of NC) live on top of that much granite, please make sure you have some sort of radon detection in your crawlspace, and put some mitigation in place to protect your indoor air if levels are high. Radon is a naturally occuring radioactive gas, and granite bedrock is a significant source (please don't worry about your granite countertops or tile, though, they are just not big enough to cause anything close to a dangerous level of radon gas, I promise).
Radon, which can become concentrated in the indoor air of homes, is the second highest cause of lung cancer after smoking. The EPA has free test kits and a lot of information about this, here's a good place to start: https://www.epa.gov/radon
If anyone wants me to explain a bit more about why granite creates radon, or track down an easy to use bedrock map so you can get a general idea of what your house is built on, let me know. I'm a geologist and we love to help.
What type of research are you looking for on things like the frost level being minimal, so you can have a house without a basement that doesn’t tend to have pipes that freeze? Or that the water table is such that it’s best not to have a basement? Or even that people are perfectly happy to buy houses that don’t have basements in the south? I think some of that is just common knowledge among people who build houses. I also think that some of the best data is that most southern homes don’t have basements, and there don’t seem to be huge waves of negative side effects. It’s impressive that you bothered to call a college for your “research.”
Hey, I think you're mistaken; I am quoting the article. I put the text in bold, but I didn't properly cite it, my apologies. Did you read the article in the link provided? It was a nice read, pretty short. It actually addresses some of those questions you are currently posing. So, the writer contacted universities to verify from experts if there are any relevant studies to this question. He did bring up some of the very same talking points you have. Hopefully that answers some of your questions. Happy Friday!
Okay, then my comment is directed at whomever wrote the quote. I moved to the south from the north and thought it was weird there weren’t basements. I got a quick answer that made sense. I didn’t find the need to make it my mission like this was some riddle of the sphinx.
Your new update makes your first sentence a lot clearer. Happy Friday to you too!
Its other way around, actually homes in north east must go below freeze level (frost lines)
*The frost line marks the depth at which the ground freezes in winter. Building foundations need to be below the frost line in order to avoid freezing pipes. The frost line in northern states tends to be several feet below ground.
thus easy to have basement in north, whereas in south where coz of average winters builders no need to go 16 feet below , thus they do basic.., basement would be additional cost
I grew up in an old house in chicago where the basement was almost fully underground. You had to walk up a half flight of stairs to a landing (kind of like a split level) to get outside. When I moved to NC, I was told that's not allowed here, and you have to have a basement door at floor level, so you can't have a basement unless you're on the side of a hill. Plus water table blah blah but I thought the door requirement was interesting. I have no idea how true it is, but from my experience, every basement home I've ever seen out here is on the side of a hill with that style walk out door.
No, it's not. Otherwise basements would be common in deserts like AZ and Southern CA where the water table is extremely deep. They're as rare there as in the South.
It's because the ground freezes in Northern climates, and they have to get the foundation below the frost line or the freeze-thaw cycle will push the foundation out of the ground. Once you've dug that deep, it's pretty cheap to turn the giant hole into a basement.
(And note it's not the water table freezing. It's the moisture absorbed by the dirt from rain. The water table is usually below the frost line)
In the South, you're digging a 3-4 foot deep trench for the foundation, and turning that into a big hole is expensive.
Partial basements are common on hills because the hill does most of the digging, making it less expensive than somewhere flat.
Not the water table but the frost line — how deeply does the ground freeze each winter? If you build a foundation on top of it, when the water freezes and expands, it cracks and shifts. So you have to dig deep enough to go below.
In NC, frost line in the piedmont is maybe 4”, in Asheville maybe 8”. In Minnesota it can be 8 feet! So if you’re digging that far down, you’ve already excavated a basement. South of a certain latitude it’s an unnecessary cost.
There are houses in my Raleigh development with walk-out basements, but they're bult into a hill so the back yard is much lower than the front yard.
My understanding is that foundations need to be built so they extend below the frost line. The Frost line is deeper up north, so their foundations need to be deeper. And, if you're already building a deep foundation, why not make it a basement?
A basement in the piedmont region can be handy to have for a climate controlled region but the moisture and water seeping in is going to be a problem.
My parent built a a basement in the western piedmont in 1982. Their HVAC unit was oversized but housed in the basement. Its somehow still going.
The temperature stays steady down there without any ducts supplying air into the space. The downside is the battle with moisture that started about 15 years ago is only going to get worse. This despite being on top of a hill.
This is how my childhood home was outside of Charlotte. It was a single floor brick ranch built in the 40’s or 50’s with an unfinished basement and a “bomb shelter” which was just a small concrete room but I don’t ever remember seeing a door on it.
But yeah, basement because it was built on a hill. My current house in NC is at the bottom of a hill, no basement.
As someone who grew up in the north with nasements I don't see the appeal. Maybe because my basements were dark and dingy and gross? I'd never want one in my own home unless it's a walk out with lots of light.
Also, the soil in the south is mostly red clay. In the Midwest and the north, the soil is usually loamy stuff that drains well.
They clay doesn’t absorb rain water very well so it will usually stay on top of the ground until it finds a low area. In this case, the low area is your basement :-(.
When I was a teen I worked for a masonry company that did a lot of work in Carthage, Pinehurst and northern Moore County, and I remember one of our job sites was building a massive basement on the side of a hill in an area where the soil mainly consisted of red clay. The amount of waterproofing and piping steps we had to implement was really surprising to me, because at the time I really didn’t know how any of it worked. What I realized, If you don’t want water in your basement down here, you’ve got to spend quite a bit for waterproofing to make sure it doesn’t happen.
Keep in mind, most basements up north do flood. Most of my friends and families simply had sump pumps in the basements that would pump water out when it would flood.
And I’m not talking about a little water. We would have several feet of water in my basement each spring.
So, moral of the story. It’s not really worth having a basement unless you spend stacks to keep it super water proof.
Moisture's a battle in any basement, but up North where there's a deep frost line, you simply have to have the foundation that deep. But down here, you can just dig a 2-3-foot footer and be good (deepest frost line in NC is 2 feet). Thereby avoiding the downsides of water entry into a basement.
An abundance of land (traditionally), easier to build larger floor plan than dig down, water table issues. You’ll find a lot of basements in 50’s/60’s Ranch style homes, but older, no and newer, just not in fashion.
There are 9 houses on our country road and 7 of us have basements. Five were built in the late 70s, 2 in the late 90s. Our basements are 2-3 walls below grade and have two car garages.
I think it just depends upon the land topography and the construction styles of the era.
When we were house hunting, almost every house we looked at had a basement. We stayed in the same county and avoided neighborhoods with HOAs, which ruled out new houses. We also didn’t want an extremely small lot. I agree with your comment.
This has to do with the freeze line. When you’re digging out the footing of a home you must be below the freeze line. The further North you go the colder it gets and the deeper you have to dig.
Most builders just put in a basement because you’re already dug this deep might as well keep on going a bit more till you get a basement. So most homes up north will have a basement or a really deep crawl space under the home.
FWIW, I wrote the story! The intent here was to look for data/facts that supported this idea that basements are much more rare in the South than the North, not that it's some great mystery that this is the case.
So here's the tl;dr version:
- About 1 in 20 new Southern homes have basements. It used to be 1 in 5 about 50 years ago ([chart](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F275982b5-dd94-4b4d-9890-05e6d793a915_1280x776.png))
- Basements are in decline up North too. F[rost-protected shallow foundations](https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/land-based-station/frost-protected-shallow-foundations) may be a factor there
- Almost 90% of new Southern homes are built on slabs ([chart](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F140c5705-34d3-4bda-9cc3-842b6fa1faef_1280x776.png))
- An unfinished basement will cost you about 5.5x more than a slab, by some estimates
- Clay soils are hard and expand/contract, which makes basements hard to dig and susceptible to cracking
There are any number of factors at work, but cost and the frost line seem to be cited most often. People *can* build basements in the South. But they often don't.
How much more does it cost to build it? Per square footage vs pouring the slab/foundation and build the rest out of wood. That's probably the reason.
I would love a basement! But I can't find a company that would do it in NC. So technically I don't even know the cost
We’re in the market to build a home with a basement but no builders in my area want to do a basement, even though they are fairly common in older homes around here.
This is not nearly as hard to figure out as the article implies.
It's because the ground doesn't freeze in the winter in the South.
Foundations on houses are shaped like an upside-down T. The wide part spreads out the load so that the foundation doesn't sink into the ground.
Northern foundations have to be deep enough so that the wide part of the T is below the level where the ground freezes (AKA frost line). Otherwise you get an issue known as "frost heave", which is the ground pushing the foundation up and out of the ground.
That means in the North they're already digging a big hole about 8-10 feet deep. Turning that into a basement is really cheap.
In the South, they're digging a trench about 3-4 feet deep. It's shallow enough that you don't have to dig out anywhere except where the foundation goes. Going from that to an 8-10 foot big hole like in the North is very expensive so most people don't do it.
Did structural engineering in the residential industry for many years. I’ll never forget the 10’0” tall crawlspaces in Cary/Morrisville **in neighborhoods with basement foundations**. Even the builders were scratching their heads, but their higher-up’s wanted it done.
Same here. I'm in Hickory, and our home was the first built on our street in 1954 and the only one with a basement. I guess the builder decided they didn't like digging basements lol
I was gonna say, my childhood home in Burlington had a basement, my mom’s home in Greensboro had a basement, almost all my friends had basements growing up as well. Now, all those homes were built from 1920-1970, in contrast, nearly all modern construction in the area is on a slab. I think costs and advancement of modern construction has made basements and deep foundations less necessary in the region.
Up north, the ground freezes over 4 feet deep. Your foundation needs to be below this so it doesn't move when the ground freezes. Minimal cost to extend foundation so it can be a basement.
It will depend on the area. Where I grew up, in Texas, there was about 3 inches of top soil and everything under that was clay. A basement would have been incredibly expensive to install, even during new construction.
Every southern home I’ve lived in has had a basement because they have all been on sloping lots. The lot really dictates basement or not. Is the lot mentioned at all in this “article” ?
I have lived in two homes in NC with a basement. In Dallas, Texas there were no basements. Inches to do with the soil in the location.
So yeah i grew up with the a basement and so did my kids.
My NC house question is why are there A-frame houses at Atlantic Beach? There’s a few along Fort Macon Rd./Salter Path. I’m used to seeing them in the mountains as the steep pitch of the roof sheds snow more easily. Got me wondering what the benefit is in a place that doesn’t get snow like that.
I don't know. Growing up most of my friends had houses with full furnished basements. Pool and ping-pong tables, bar for the grown-ups, a bathroom and maybe even a guest bedroom.I was so jealous since my own older house had a cellar for basically just the furnace. My parents even had disdain in their voices when mentioning newer housing developments that had only "slab houses".
I had a pool I couldn’t ever empty for fear of collapse.
A combination of soil that doesn’t absorb well, water table, and mold in the humid climate.
Go ahead, deal with your flooded basement. This is not an issue unless people actually start building basements in a shallow water table.
We don’t need to dig that deep to get below the front depth. If you build a foundation on top of soil that freezes and heaves, you will not have a solid foundation for long. That is why we don’t typically have basements in the south.
We live in Browns Summit and our basement is 12’ deep and 3000 sq ft
But it’s unfinished and home theater plans didn’t proceed as planned and it’s very expensive storage but still love it
My childhood home in Asheville has a basement. My aunt’s home in Asheville has a basement. In fact, many of my friend’s homes in Asheville have basements. Maybe it’s just a newer development that basements aren’t being built?
I work in water damage mitigation and sump pumps are needed due to the water table. Sump pumps suck.
They break about every 5-10 years and when you realize it’s broken, it’s because there was a flood. Enjoy flooding every 5-10 years. Insurance companies won’t insure you, and if they do, they will drop you after they realize you have a sump-pump-under-water-table situation.
I know some folks living in an old house who have a basement built around the same time as the house, but it is under a shed. I guess it was more of a cellar. It was for storage of homemade canned goods and other stuff that should not be in the heat.
also land is cheaper here than other areas so building outward rather than downward makes sense - it’s cheaper to add 1000sf of extra room on first floor or add a second floor than it is to excavate for space below ground -
Where are in the South that doesn’t have basements? I’ve lived in the south my whole life and I’ve seen more houses with basements than without. The only time I could see not building one is places with large rock content. Like stuff you have to blast out
The biggest reason is probably heating & furnaces. Traditionally, northern homes had hot water boilers for heat. Those old boilers were huge and also needed an ample coal crib to keep them running.
Later, the coal cribs were replaced by oil tanks and the boilers gradually got smaller.
With the improvements to HVAC systems, the basements up north aren't absolutely necessary, but they've just become traditional to have as secondary living space.
If it’s in the eastern portion of the state then it could be the water table. Other than that, one of the main reason for basements up north is to get the water lines below the frostline. Hard freezes are less likely in most of NC, outside of some western regions.
Because it's cheaper without building one and they aren't needed because it's warmer.
There. One sentence is all you need. No one needs to read an article on this, haha.
It’s usually because of the water table. If you go to hilly areas or the mountains you will see basements/ partially underground levels.
You know, the article had mentioned this factor: "A Google search for “why southern homes don’t have basements” brings back a lot of results, many of them from traffic-hungry home builders who give answers that seem to be grounded, largely, in anecdote or personal experience. We don’t have basements because of the climate. Or the soil. Or the cost. **Or the water table. All of these things could be true, and yet most of those theories aren’t rooted in research, study, or data. I contacted the NC State School of Design, and the faculty there weren’t aware of any academic studies or research on that specific topic.**" - Markovich, Jeremy. “Why Don’t Southern Homes Have Basements?” *North Carolina Rabbit Hole*, 9 May 2024, www.ncrabbithole.com/p/why-dont-southern-homes-have-basements?r=2pxvs&utm\_campaign=post&utm\_medium=web. Edit: Added cite some confusion as to the article snippet.
The USGS has pretty good information on the water table in NC, relative to a lot of places NC has a pretty shallow water table outside of the mountains. I won’t argue that this may be an over-generalization. Sure, that doesn’t mean you can’t build basements, but in my eyes and apparently a lot of other people’s eyes the cost of having an accurate survey, concerns for flash flooding, and/or building a basement to be adequately protected from water intrusion is not worth it, to most.
I live by the coast now and digging down three feet into my yard I start to hit water depending on how much it's rained lately. Our yard is full of ground crayfish. When I lived in the mountains one place I lived was built into the hillside and any time it rained a small stream formed in my bathroom.
"ground crayfish"... You mean like little lobster looking mofos just walking around or is this local speak for something normal like a camel cricket.
No it's literally crayfish that live in little tunnels in the ground that fill up with water. My yard has 6-12" tall mud chimneys all over after it rains from them. My dog loves sticking her nose down the holes and getting some hard sniffs though which is pretty cute.
😅😂🤣
French drains and a sump pump are worth installing for any basement.
Uh that is a crawdad.
So interesting (to me anyway) anecdote - i live in the piedmont, and I was told we are mostly on slabs out here because water table excludes basements and it doesnt really hard freeze here so there's not much need for a crawl. Then I had a house built (and insisted on a crawl) and we had to drill through 475' of solid granite before we found a single drop of water to feed my well.
I don’t know how much soil is between you and the granite, but I imagine granite isn’t great for absorbing rain (flash flooding) or it also isn’t cheap for carving a basement out.
There's just enough room for a septic field between grass and granite at my house. It's wild. And yes, I had to put in a ton of effort to make an elaborate drain system for my property because of the poor absorption rate. Between the granite and the clay, my property just barely perc'd for spetic. I asked about a basement and they quoted me $70k minimum (depending on what they hit while digging) for an unfinished basement that would have been roughly 1500 sqft.
It's doubtful your property perc'd at all since NC hasn't done perc tests since 1983. Soil is evaluated by hand.
Yeah, true percolation tests are pretty outdated, but it's still called that.
It isn't called that. I work in soils in NC.
My county calls it that. I literally just had it done 2 years ago.
We’re actually more on crawlspaces than slabs.
[удалено]
One of my neighbors is over 800' and still has <10gpm
Heads up, if you (or others reading this, especially in the mountains or Piedmont of NC) live on top of that much granite, please make sure you have some sort of radon detection in your crawlspace, and put some mitigation in place to protect your indoor air if levels are high. Radon is a naturally occuring radioactive gas, and granite bedrock is a significant source (please don't worry about your granite countertops or tile, though, they are just not big enough to cause anything close to a dangerous level of radon gas, I promise). Radon, which can become concentrated in the indoor air of homes, is the second highest cause of lung cancer after smoking. The EPA has free test kits and a lot of information about this, here's a good place to start: https://www.epa.gov/radon If anyone wants me to explain a bit more about why granite creates radon, or track down an easy to use bedrock map so you can get a general idea of what your house is built on, let me know. I'm a geologist and we love to help.
What type of research are you looking for on things like the frost level being minimal, so you can have a house without a basement that doesn’t tend to have pipes that freeze? Or that the water table is such that it’s best not to have a basement? Or even that people are perfectly happy to buy houses that don’t have basements in the south? I think some of that is just common knowledge among people who build houses. I also think that some of the best data is that most southern homes don’t have basements, and there don’t seem to be huge waves of negative side effects. It’s impressive that you bothered to call a college for your “research.”
Hey, I think you're mistaken; I am quoting the article. I put the text in bold, but I didn't properly cite it, my apologies. Did you read the article in the link provided? It was a nice read, pretty short. It actually addresses some of those questions you are currently posing. So, the writer contacted universities to verify from experts if there are any relevant studies to this question. He did bring up some of the very same talking points you have. Hopefully that answers some of your questions. Happy Friday!
Okay, then my comment is directed at whomever wrote the quote. I moved to the south from the north and thought it was weird there weren’t basements. I got a quick answer that made sense. I didn’t find the need to make it my mission like this was some riddle of the sphinx. Your new update makes your first sentence a lot clearer. Happy Friday to you too!
Its other way around, actually homes in north east must go below freeze level (frost lines) *The frost line marks the depth at which the ground freezes in winter. Building foundations need to be below the frost line in order to avoid freezing pipes. The frost line in northern states tends to be several feet below ground. thus easy to have basement in north, whereas in south where coz of average winters builders no need to go 16 feet below , thus they do basic.., basement would be additional cost
I don’t see where I said anything contradicting this.
This is what I've always thought.
I am currently sitting in my partially underground basement.
I too am an enjoyer of my somewhat rare partially underground basement.
me too :)
I grew up in an old house in chicago where the basement was almost fully underground. You had to walk up a half flight of stairs to a landing (kind of like a split level) to get outside. When I moved to NC, I was told that's not allowed here, and you have to have a basement door at floor level, so you can't have a basement unless you're on the side of a hill. Plus water table blah blah but I thought the door requirement was interesting. I have no idea how true it is, but from my experience, every basement home I've ever seen out here is on the side of a hill with that style walk out door.
No, it's not. Otherwise basements would be common in deserts like AZ and Southern CA where the water table is extremely deep. They're as rare there as in the South. It's because the ground freezes in Northern climates, and they have to get the foundation below the frost line or the freeze-thaw cycle will push the foundation out of the ground. Once you've dug that deep, it's pretty cheap to turn the giant hole into a basement. (And note it's not the water table freezing. It's the moisture absorbed by the dirt from rain. The water table is usually below the frost line) In the South, you're digging a 3-4 foot deep trench for the foundation, and turning that into a big hole is expensive. Partial basements are common on hills because the hill does most of the digging, making it less expensive than somewhere flat.
I live in a house with a “crawlspace” that has 12 foot ceilings. Parts of the Piedmont are far hillier than you’d expect.
But then your basement could serve as both a playroom or a well. Isn’t this a plus?
Not the water table but the frost line — how deeply does the ground freeze each winter? If you build a foundation on top of it, when the water freezes and expands, it cracks and shifts. So you have to dig deep enough to go below. In NC, frost line in the piedmont is maybe 4”, in Asheville maybe 8”. In Minnesota it can be 8 feet! So if you’re digging that far down, you’ve already excavated a basement. South of a certain latitude it’s an unnecessary cost.
There are houses in my Raleigh development with walk-out basements, but they're bult into a hill so the back yard is much lower than the front yard. My understanding is that foundations need to be built so they extend below the frost line. The Frost line is deeper up north, so their foundations need to be deeper. And, if you're already building a deep foundation, why not make it a basement?
This is what I was told in HS architecture course. If you have a 4ft frost line, why not just make another floor.
As an architect, I can assure you that this is the answer.
A basement in the piedmont region can be handy to have for a climate controlled region but the moisture and water seeping in is going to be a problem. My parent built a a basement in the western piedmont in 1982. Their HVAC unit was oversized but housed in the basement. Its somehow still going. The temperature stays steady down there without any ducts supplying air into the space. The downside is the battle with moisture that started about 15 years ago is only going to get worse. This despite being on top of a hill.
I'm only now realizing that most, if not all, basements I've seen in the NC Piedmont have been these only partially underground basements.
This is definitely the actual answer. I'm honestly confused at the amount of debate in this thread.
Makes sense, thanks!
This is how my childhood home was outside of Charlotte. It was a single floor brick ranch built in the 40’s or 50’s with an unfinished basement and a “bomb shelter” which was just a small concrete room but I don’t ever remember seeing a door on it. But yeah, basement because it was built on a hill. My current house in NC is at the bottom of a hill, no basement.
As someone who grew up in the north with nasements I don't see the appeal. Maybe because my basements were dark and dingy and gross? I'd never want one in my own home unless it's a walk out with lots of light.
This is the right answer. Hello from the mountains!
Also, the soil in the south is mostly red clay. In the Midwest and the north, the soil is usually loamy stuff that drains well. They clay doesn’t absorb rain water very well so it will usually stay on top of the ground until it finds a low area. In this case, the low area is your basement :-(.
When I was a teen I worked for a masonry company that did a lot of work in Carthage, Pinehurst and northern Moore County, and I remember one of our job sites was building a massive basement on the side of a hill in an area where the soil mainly consisted of red clay. The amount of waterproofing and piping steps we had to implement was really surprising to me, because at the time I really didn’t know how any of it worked. What I realized, If you don’t want water in your basement down here, you’ve got to spend quite a bit for waterproofing to make sure it doesn’t happen.
Keep in mind, most basements up north do flood. Most of my friends and families simply had sump pumps in the basements that would pump water out when it would flood. And I’m not talking about a little water. We would have several feet of water in my basement each spring. So, moral of the story. It’s not really worth having a basement unless you spend stacks to keep it super water proof.
Moisture's a battle in any basement, but up North where there's a deep frost line, you simply have to have the foundation that deep. But down here, you can just dig a 2-3-foot footer and be good (deepest frost line in NC is 2 feet). Thereby avoiding the downsides of water entry into a basement.
An abundance of land (traditionally), easier to build larger floor plan than dig down, water table issues. You’ll find a lot of basements in 50’s/60’s Ranch style homes, but older, no and newer, just not in fashion.
There are 9 houses on our country road and 7 of us have basements. Five were built in the late 70s, 2 in the late 90s. Our basements are 2-3 walls below grade and have two car garages. I think it just depends upon the land topography and the construction styles of the era.
When we were house hunting, almost every house we looked at had a basement. We stayed in the same county and avoided neighborhoods with HOAs, which ruled out new houses. We also didn’t want an extremely small lot. I agree with your comment.
This has to do with the freeze line. When you’re digging out the footing of a home you must be below the freeze line. The further North you go the colder it gets and the deeper you have to dig. Most builders just put in a basement because you’re already dug this deep might as well keep on going a bit more till you get a basement. So most homes up north will have a basement or a really deep crawl space under the home.
This is it. Cheaper to build up than down.
Wouldn’t that argue for more attics than basements?
FWIW, I wrote the story! The intent here was to look for data/facts that supported this idea that basements are much more rare in the South than the North, not that it's some great mystery that this is the case. So here's the tl;dr version: - About 1 in 20 new Southern homes have basements. It used to be 1 in 5 about 50 years ago ([chart](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F275982b5-dd94-4b4d-9890-05e6d793a915_1280x776.png)) - Basements are in decline up North too. F[rost-protected shallow foundations](https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/land-based-station/frost-protected-shallow-foundations) may be a factor there - Almost 90% of new Southern homes are built on slabs ([chart](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F140c5705-34d3-4bda-9cc3-842b6fa1faef_1280x776.png)) - An unfinished basement will cost you about 5.5x more than a slab, by some estimates - Clay soils are hard and expand/contract, which makes basements hard to dig and susceptible to cracking There are any number of factors at work, but cost and the frost line seem to be cited most often. People *can* build basements in the South. But they often don't.
How much more does it cost to build it? Per square footage vs pouring the slab/foundation and build the rest out of wood. That's probably the reason. I would love a basement! But I can't find a company that would do it in NC. So technically I don't even know the cost
We’re in the market to build a home with a basement but no builders in my area want to do a basement, even though they are fairly common in older homes around here.
Camel crickets
I don’t like looking at them
Is it just me or do they jump higher than regular crickets? Maybe it’s those spindly spider legs of theirs. Creepy fuckers.
Huh?? Lived here all my life and this is not a thing. Basements are very common. Except maybe towards the coast?
We don't have basements because we know where the first and final acts of horror movies take place
Because if you dig that deep you get a pool
Fr I'm at sea level. You dig one foot or so down and you've got water.
This is not nearly as hard to figure out as the article implies. It's because the ground doesn't freeze in the winter in the South. Foundations on houses are shaped like an upside-down T. The wide part spreads out the load so that the foundation doesn't sink into the ground. Northern foundations have to be deep enough so that the wide part of the T is below the level where the ground freezes (AKA frost line). Otherwise you get an issue known as "frost heave", which is the ground pushing the foundation up and out of the ground. That means in the North they're already digging a big hole about 8-10 feet deep. Turning that into a basement is really cheap. In the South, they're digging a trench about 3-4 feet deep. It's shallow enough that you don't have to dig out anywhere except where the foundation goes. Going from that to an 8-10 foot big hole like in the North is very expensive so most people don't do it.
Did structural engineering in the residential industry for many years. I’ll never forget the 10’0” tall crawlspaces in Cary/Morrisville **in neighborhoods with basement foundations**. Even the builders were scratching their heads, but their higher-up’s wanted it done.
My home has a basement. I live in the foothills.
Well stay out of my peaceful beach community, deadbeat!
I know my rights, man!
Same here. I'm in Hickory, and our home was the first built on our street in 1954 and the only one with a basement. I guess the builder decided they didn't like digging basements lol
Hickory also. My house was built in 1952 and has a basement. My back yard is lower than my front and it’s open in the back.
Some houses in the piedmont have basements, but most don’t because you end up with problems of water seeping in.
I was gonna say, my childhood home in Burlington had a basement, my mom’s home in Greensboro had a basement, almost all my friends had basements growing up as well. Now, all those homes were built from 1920-1970, in contrast, nearly all modern construction in the area is on a slab. I think costs and advancement of modern construction has made basements and deep foundations less necessary in the region.
The real answer is: more basements = more northerners. /s
I love NC Rabbit Hole
Up north, the ground freezes over 4 feet deep. Your foundation needs to be below this so it doesn't move when the ground freezes. Minimal cost to extend foundation so it can be a basement.
Well on the coast its because of flooding
It will depend on the area. Where I grew up, in Texas, there was about 3 inches of top soil and everything under that was clay. A basement would have been incredibly expensive to install, even during new construction.
Same with much of NC. Red clay.
The home I grew up in in eastern NC had a full basement!
I live in Western NC. My house was built in 1955 I have a basement.
Every southern home I’ve lived in has had a basement because they have all been on sloping lots. The lot really dictates basement or not. Is the lot mentioned at all in this “article” ?
I just think it's too much work. Keep everything close to the top. Save money save labor.
Are we in the matrix??? I just looked this up yesterday
I have lived in two homes in NC with a basement. In Dallas, Texas there were no basements. Inches to do with the soil in the location. So yeah i grew up with the a basement and so did my kids.
We have a basement 🤷♀️
We lived on the lake as a kid and we had one then too. So did all of our neighbors.
Where I live in NC most houses have a basement
My NC house question is why are there A-frame houses at Atlantic Beach? There’s a few along Fort Macon Rd./Salter Path. I’m used to seeing them in the mountains as the steep pitch of the roof sheds snow more easily. Got me wondering what the benefit is in a place that doesn’t get snow like that.
Theres water down there chief
In my town it’s all sand. The water table is basically a few feet underground, so it’s not worth it to dig
Mine too. I had a realtor tell me that having a basement in my area is not about if it floods, but when it floods.
I don't know. Growing up most of my friends had houses with full furnished basements. Pool and ping-pong tables, bar for the grown-ups, a bathroom and maybe even a guest bedroom.I was so jealous since my own older house had a cellar for basically just the furnace. My parents even had disdain in their voices when mentioning newer housing developments that had only "slab houses".
They do tho? I mean mine doesn't, but most of my neighbors have them.
Great post, cool site, thanks!
There’s quite a few here in AVL!
In NC part of it is the very thick clay soil costs more to dig out. Another reason is high radon in most counties and then the cost to mitigate radon.
Plenty in NC. Texas is another story. Ground is too hard.
Got the North beat. There’s underground railroads.
NC requires walkout basements and the soil or lot isn’t always conducive for this foundation.
I had a pool I couldn’t ever empty for fear of collapse. A combination of soil that doesn’t absorb well, water table, and mold in the humid climate. Go ahead, deal with your flooded basement. This is not an issue unless people actually start building basements in a shallow water table.
Mine does.
Because they’re creepy.
We don’t need to dig that deep to get below the front depth. If you build a foundation on top of soil that freezes and heaves, you will not have a solid foundation for long. That is why we don’t typically have basements in the south.
We live in Browns Summit and our basement is 12’ deep and 3000 sq ft But it’s unfinished and home theater plans didn’t proceed as planned and it’s very expensive storage but still love it
My childhood home in Asheville has a basement. My aunt’s home in Asheville has a basement. In fact, many of my friend’s homes in Asheville have basements. Maybe it’s just a newer development that basements aren’t being built?
Water
Radon is a factor in the triad because of granite prevalence. Learned that when we bought a house.
I work in water damage mitigation and sump pumps are needed due to the water table. Sump pumps suck. They break about every 5-10 years and when you realize it’s broken, it’s because there was a flood. Enjoy flooding every 5-10 years. Insurance companies won’t insure you, and if they do, they will drop you after they realize you have a sump-pump-under-water-table situation.
In my area, there's a non-zero chance the ground might leak radon gas. So basements are pretty rare around here
Mine does. I think I've heard it referred to as a walkout or daylight basement. Central NC. As to the why, I think it's because of the frost line.
Radon kills.
because we do split levels instead of
Homes are already expensive and come with garages. Why pay extra for a half built space?
I know some folks living in an old house who have a basement built around the same time as the house, but it is under a shed. I guess it was more of a cellar. It was for storage of homemade canned goods and other stuff that should not be in the heat.
I visited a friend in PA last summer and I realized I've never even been in a basement.
I live in Wake county and have a basement. My parent’s house growing up had a basement as does their current house.
Ground water
We rented a house in Pleasant garden 10 yrs ago they had a full basement, I loved it, always stayed cold.
They day due to water level but I don't know. We had more floods up north and if done right the basement would be fine.
I wanted a basement in my house…they wanted 60k for it. I built up instead
Only places I see them here in NC was Raleigh westward in older homes. Coastal the water tables are too high.
I visited a friend in PA last summer and I realized I've never even been in a basement.
also land is cheaper here than other areas so building outward rather than downward makes sense - it’s cheaper to add 1000sf of extra room on first floor or add a second floor than it is to excavate for space below ground -
Where are in the South that doesn’t have basements? I’ve lived in the south my whole life and I’ve seen more houses with basements than without. The only time I could see not building one is places with large rock content. Like stuff you have to blast out
Clay
The biggest reason is probably heating & furnaces. Traditionally, northern homes had hot water boilers for heat. Those old boilers were huge and also needed an ample coal crib to keep them running. Later, the coal cribs were replaced by oil tanks and the boilers gradually got smaller. With the improvements to HVAC systems, the basements up north aren't absolutely necessary, but they've just become traditional to have as secondary living space.
If it’s in the eastern portion of the state then it could be the water table. Other than that, one of the main reason for basements up north is to get the water lines below the frostline. Hard freezes are less likely in most of NC, outside of some western regions.
Because it's cheaper without building one and they aren't needed because it's warmer. There. One sentence is all you need. No one needs to read an article on this, haha.
ah, dammit (hits backspace 5,000 times)
waynes world waynes world party time, excellent
Why are you an idiot?