How come California homes have no basement? (Sacramento, Oxnard: apartments, new home)

[Gentoo]

Originally Posted by Inthesierras

I guess it depends on where you live in Calif. I grew up in Sacramento and knew of a few homes with basements. They were older homes built in the 50s or before. I live in North Eastern Calif now and quite a few homes here have basements. My last home had a basement. It was unfinished, but a good spot to store things. It was nice because we have a good amount of snow here and our storage shed didn't hold up to the snow well. We live at the tail end of the Cascade mountains, which are well known for seismic activity.

I lived in a house in Oakland that had a basement as well.

[Gentoo]

Originally Posted by Charles

There is a huge difference between a non walkout basement and a walkout basement. Our walkout never gets above 72 in summer and never below 60 in winter (and that is without turning the basement furnace on.) We let our kids play in the basement; it is very light and cheerful there with windows plus they can make all sorts of noise and not bug us.

WikiAnswers - Is there a difference between a cellar and a basement

Sounds a lot like the basement of the house I lived in, in Oakland. There was a door to the outside that led down a few steps to get into it. It had windows which were right at ground level.. The walls were the foundation. WE kept the washer, dryer and furnace down there and there was even a extra room which we turned into a bedroom and rented out. The thing was huge, almost as big as the entire upper part of the house.

[Gentoo]

Originally Posted by Cattknap

Basements in residential homes are no longer permitted in Long Beach - I think that the underground high water level might have something to do with that. We have experienced many earthquakes while living in this house over the last 25 years. There are been numerous cracks in the ceilings in the main house that had to be repaired, cracked bricks in the chimney, etc....but absolutely no cracks or damage to the basement. To me that makes sense - the extra thick block walls are fully insulated and supported with earth all around them while the house borders on air - I'm not an engineer but I'd love to know the physics of why the basement withstands earthquakes so well.

The shaking in an earthquake increases as the height increases in a structure. The higher you are, the more amplified the shaking will be. Hold a ruler in your had and shake it slightly, not much difference from the tip to your hand. Do the same with a yard stick and the end away from your hand has much more movement, same thing happens with structures. The Basement is likely the best place to be during an earthquake.

[rah]

The house i grew up in in SF is over a century old, built in the late 1800's, but it has no basement, so not all old houses have them. I'm thinking one reason might be that it's built on a hill, on bedrock.. It probably would be extra hard to dig your way through all that rock to create a sizable basement, not to mention the farther back you go the deeper still you have to dig through it because of the rise in elevation (as well as the fact that it never freezes here). We kept our random stuff, tool bench/tools, garbage cans, and yard equipment in the garage. When leaving for vacation we'd make room to park the car in there so as not to get tickets on street cleaning days (the car barely fit with literally inches of clearance on each side, and we'd have to fold the rear-view mirrors down as well to get it in there...and that was a compact 80's toyota. I don't think many cars would fit in there these days). We also had an attic, where we kept more random junk.

My elementary school had a basement, but i never encountered them in houses until i visited family members in Pennsylvania and New England for the first time.

[askworldtraveler]

I grew up in a home in LA with a full basement - always owned homes with basements - and in my current house built in 1907 - which has a small basement when I bought it - now has a full basement - that has been converted to a studio. Many homes on my street have basements....

[wesley88p]

I Live in Queens, NY in a basement, since I've been here there hasnt even an earthquake, I was wondering if there were one what would happen to people that live in the basement?

[smoking357]

Basements are wonderful and serve so many functions and household purposes. Builders will cheap out of digging them if they think they buying public won't know the difference. In Florida, basements are too great an architectural challenge, given the high water table. That said, a few basements are found in Florida.

All things being equal, a house with a basement is worth at least 20% more than a house without.

[jbunniii]

I've been comparing house prices between the Bay Area and Denver over the past few weeks. One thing I've noticed is that Denver listings seem to include the basement in the square footage, which makes the price per square foot seem lower. I often see what look like little 1400 square foot bungalows being listed as having 2800 square feet, which would be a very large house in California.

This seems a bit underhanded to me. I would not imagine that the typical basement could really be used as "living space" and just because it can be used as storage doesn't mean it should be counted: Californians don't include the garage in the square footage, do they?

[EscapeCalifornia]

Originally Posted by jbunniii

I've been comparing house prices between the Bay Area and Denver over the past few weeks. One thing I've noticed is that Denver listings seem to include the basement in the square footage, which makes the price per square foot seem lower. I often see what look like little 1400 square foot bungalows being listed as 2800 square feet.

This seems a bit underhanded to me. I would not imagine that the typical basement could really be used as "living space" and just because it can be used as storage doesn't mean it should be counted: Californians don't include the garage in the square footage, do they?

Have you ever seen a finished basement? I'd sure count it as living space. The only restriction is that you can't legally have a bedroom down there unless you can get out through a window. No, garages are not counted in the square footage because they're not heated space. Legally finished basements do count because they are heated space. On cohomfinder.com, they'll break down the square footage between the top floor, ground floor, basement, and show the percentage of completion for the basement.

[jbunniii]

Originally Posted by EscapeCalifornia

Have you ever seen a finished basement? I'd sure count it as living space.

I guess I haven't really seen one. I picture them as dirty, dusty, dark places with lots of spiders. I'll have to check out a few open houses next time I'm looking into real estate in a city that has basements.

The bedroom issue aside, would you consider the living space in a 1400 square foot house with a 1400 square foot basement to be just as good as in a 2800 square foot above-ground house? Or putting it another way, should those two hypothetical houses cost the same, "all else being equal"?

I'm trying to compare house prices per square foot in the Bay Area versus Denver, and my gut instinct tells me that the basement, no matter how nicely finished, shouldn't be valued as highly as the above-ground part of the house.

P.S. Thanks for the link (though it seems to be down at the moment, assuming you mean www.cohomefinder.com). I've been looking at listings via Trulia and it leaves a lot to be desired.