Postwar building techniques raised household energy demand by design choices

Evidence

The new techniques of mass building also increased the amount of energy needed to heat and cool homes. To speed the work of site preparation, the typical subdivision builder cleared away every tree in the tract, so millions of postwar homes had no shelter against bitter winter winds and brutal summer sun. Though basements helped to moderate the extremes of temperature in the central and northern states, the number of new single-family homes with basements fell from more than 50 percent in 1940 to just 36 percent in 1950. To avoid the cost and trouble of digging holes in the ground, the building industry began to use the concrete slab foundation. The percentage of multistory homes also fell, as builders sought to save time and money by avoiding staircase construction – and to satisfy a new demand for the one-story ranch or rambler. Again, the result was to increase the use of energy for heating and cooling, since a one-story house has more exposed surface area per square foot than a one-and-a-half or two-story house. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 243

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the reader’s trees-as-infrastructure angle; the mass clearing of trees for subdivisions is a concrete instance of lost natural regulators.
• XREF: Slab foundations, no basements, single-story sprawl map onto the energy-intensity point that fuels the environmental-regulation origin story. — connects to: Mass-production homebuilding homogenized house design and spiked energy use nationwide — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 34; Cheap energy and mortgage pressure defeated energy-efficient postwar housing design — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 214; Energy efficiency conflicted with postwar taste for glass and open layouts — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 248 (+6 more)
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Tract housing’s design deficiencies directly generated residential energy demand #corroborates (0.90) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 264
• Energy efficiency conflicted with postwar taste for glass and open layouts #expands (0.85) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 248
• Postwar modernist building choices were driven by cost and technology, not style ideology #contradicts (0.80) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 468
• Cheap energy and 1950s consumer culture defeated the conservation ideal #qualifies (0.75) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 246