Why I hate building booms

We are now in the midst of a national building boom. You can't find gypsum board. Signs are set up at building sites asking for help. General contractors look harried and stressed, and subcontractors are driving new trucks. Architects are frustrated with disinterested builders. Their clients are angry at the budget increases and the realization that a project slated for next year might not be completed until the year after next year.

But these reasons are not why I hate building booms. I hate building booms because bad buildings are built. By bad, I don't just mean ugly. I also mean buildings that have no ethical underpinnings.

How can buildings have ethics, you ask. In truth, they don't, but their designers and builders should. When those ethics are predicated on the "make hay while the sun shines" morality of maximizing profit, the buildings that are produced are as shortsighted as their makers. When architects are overcommitted, they opt for easy answers. When availability of materials means more than their quality or suitability, buildings suffer. Whether cheaply rendered, predictably designed or gratuitously expeditious in material choice, buildings suffer in times of over-the-top demand.

This fact has been made painfully clear to me over the past couple of years. I do all the site-observation work at my architectural office, and we typically have between 10 and 15 jobs under construction at any given time. I drive more than 30,000 miles per year throughout the Greater New York area. Not only do I visit my own sites, but I also visually absorb the frenzied level of construction that I see all around me.

Look for details that don't fit

You can see the building-boom mind-set in residential details that should be on warehouses. Building plans designed for flat sites end up straddling 15-ft. drops over their 40-ft. lengths. Other examples of this quick and dirty approach are the 8,000-sq. ft. bloatburger houses that have 4-in. colonial ogee gutter as the sole eave overhang. Better yet, cheap vinyl siding on a $600,000 "estate home." Or, the classic in every building boom since World War II, the center-hall colonial that is too wide to fit the width of the available infill lot so its oblong form is set sidesaddle. The gaping maw of the garage doors ends up facing the street while the centered, formal front door faces into someone else's kitchen window.

Perfectly useful and sometimes even beautiful homes become tear-downs to facilitate new and bulkier construction, a phenomenon that used to be limited to coastal communities or dense urban situations.

Statistics from the National Association of Home Builders tell an interesting story. In 1991, single-family house starts dropped to 840,000, down from more than 1,000,000 for each year in the previous decade. In 1998, the total climbed to its highest level (1,200,000 units) since 1978, and 1999 projections stand at over 1,300,000. What industry can absorb 50% growth in seven years without costs skyrocketing? If you are available and have a sign, you'll be asked by someone to look at a job or two. Availability is consequently valued more than performance or cost.

I find a rising portion of my time is spent telling clients why a budget that was good for 1998 simply doesn't hold water in 2000, and why a project that should take six months to build will now take 18 months. Subcontractors who were signed up early on don't show up and "better-deal" the general contractors for fast cash somewhere else. All this unpleasantness will pass. Those who do this work solely for the money will leave when there is not enough of it to be had.

Good times will be followed by not-so-good times, so just hang on

My only solace is that having entered the architecture profession in 1978, I have been through two full-blown recessions and two recoveries. I know the next recession is going to happen. Then those shiny trucks will be dented and scratched and have for-sale signs on them. The full page of home-improvement ads in the local newspaper will become the dozen small entries in the right-hand corner they occupied in the early '90s.

I also know good buildings are being built amid all the cacophonous background noise, but it's hard to see the quality when the quantity is so overwhelming. I know that good people are often underemployed even during average times and that families truly suffer during busts. But no one is well served when poor design, incompetent craftsmanship and high costs create the grotesqueries that now abound.

Yes, my firm does have more money, but it's spent to upgrade the hardware in our office and to pay some overdue raises and bonuses to loyal employees. As the principal, I am more liquid but not greatly enriched. All the general contractors and architects I know are in a similar situation. I bill only when I am actually working on a project, and I can work only so many hours in a day. Because I don't want to have partners, my firm can be only as big as I can manage. Accordingly, we have a cap on what we can earn, and in truth, I have resisted raising my rates for the past five years because I don't think it is fair to take advantage of a situation that I know is transitory.

So as you look out onto the sea of new pickups and backhoes and instantly deforested lots that sprout arbitrary building masses, as you listen to pretentious 20-something-year-old architects say how everything is going "Just great!" and see frowns on all your clients' faces, realize that if your heart is in the right place, your business will be in the right place once all this insanity is over. It's nothing that a good 2,000-point drop in the Dow or a 3-point rise in interest rates won't cure.