I think that in general for gen x and later, fewer and fewer in that cohort have the old-house gene like the original "urban pioneers" of the late 60's through 80's who had grown up in the post-war suburban "little boxes" and found the authenticity of old victorians (for detail, materials, and sq ft cost!) a strong pull.
Everything has now changed. There are very few locales where anyone would want to live where original 100-150 year old housing stock is reasonably-priced. All the good ones are taken.
The TV shows are probably just a small factor; it's mainly generational, I'm afraid.
Casey

Nineteenth Century homes in city cores have bitten the dust because they sit on land with higher and better economic uses.

But there remain an incredible number of older homes in smaller towns and rural communities.

I know several 30-something couples who have purchased old Victorian houses and who are slowly DIYing restorations.

Some young people like the fresh and new. I think that's always been the case. And some young people like the older and more traditional. Also always been the case.

As for "dead people's furniture," a lot of young 20-somethings I know are really into authentic mid-century modern furniture. Chances are, at least of of the real mid-century modern furniture on the market to day was first owned by people who are now dead.

I live in New England. There are still a lot of pre-1920 houses around, and people are living in them. I grant you, some have been remodeled in ways that do not do justice to the original building. My father watched as the Victorian house next door to him, which was a twin to his house, had the radiators removed, the oak wainscotting thrown out, the butler's pantry ripped out, a sunroom extension slapped onto the kitchen and all the original windows, including the ones with stained glass, were replaced. He did get a chuckle when the homeowner called the police because people were stealing the radiators, windows and woodwork from the dumpster in the yard. The homeowner was very surprised to find out that there was a market for these things that he considered to be trash.

The choices in my small New England city are older houses pre-1940, a small group of houses built between 1950-1980, or newer post-1990s houses, when there was a new housing boom. The newer stuff is much further out of town and most of it is not very well built. The older houses have pretty much stood the test of time, but have much smaller yards, detached garages if they have them at all, but are within walking distance of the center of town.

The old houses aren't being torn down, at least.

Reality tv is all about the ratings. "This Old House" did a good job of showing how to restore an older home. But the new shows are going for the big shock value of completely changing the interior of the house. And yes, some people see this and think it is the thing to do.

Another site mentioned that New England and the northeast have the largest proportion of older houses. Reasonable, given that it has been populated the longest. The southern seaboard was also settled early, but I don't know what quantity of old houses survives, and I don't know how dense the population was before 1920 and before the widespread use of air conditioning.

Folly

This post was edited by rosefolly on Sun, Mar 16, 14 at 17:04

The whole great room thing started way before the '80s. Our 1959 MCM has it; even a 1920 Craftsman that we own is built that way with wide open doorways between the dining and living room, and the large entry area by the front door.

But IMO the old houses people speak of have largely become areas that younger types are unable to readily afford because of location. But not to worry, because now houses from the 1940s-1960s are every bit as old as the old houses people were once fixing up so the cycle continues :)

The first wave of people who restored houses in a big way(other than those who restored true antique, first American period houses) were the people who started restoring Victorian houses in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time the houses were about 60-80 years old.

Seventy years ago now is the beginning of the post-WWII era. So the definition of what an "old house" is changes, and is always relative.

A lot of old house people would not consider my 50-odd year old house old, but it's not much younger than some of the turn-of-the 20th century houses were when people started paying attention to them.

Where I live, my pocket of houses built in the early 1960s were the newest houses in the neighborhood until the last 5-7 years, (and 100 years newer than the next-to-newest)
The renters in my house, all of whom were in their 20s and grew up in the suburbs, considered it an "old house", because it was older than a couple of their parents.

In our town, not only are the old homes more pricey, but they are being bought mostly by 30 something couples with small children. The demographics of the town are changing as the oldest townspeople leave and the younger ones come in.
Diane

I'll be honest-old houses give me the creeps. The more gingerbread, wainscoting, dark wood, the creepier.
I grew up in the early 60's, and our house was built in 1960. It was light and airy and modern. My Mom was into what she called Danish modern. I think it just meant what now we'd call contemporary. I still love that feeling, that look. Open, clean, fresh, NOW, not a long time ago.. I also creep out over dead people's furniture. In fact I can't stand dark woods at all. Give me glass ! Sleek, clean, easy and beautiful !

The modern "Open Floor Plan" really isn't the same as the 1950s Great Room. The core of the modern version is breaking down walls and merging the kitchen with the dining and living rooms. Personally, I think that is a terrible idea...if you cook fish or cabbage scent carries, if you make a mess in the kitchen during a dinner party guests in the living room can see it.

I think part of the obsession with the empty, clean, open-floor plan look is how neat it looks when the apartment is empty and being shown by realtors. However I think it's like the clothes a Super Model wears...it doesn't look as good with you in it.

I do agree the renovation shows give some distorted ideas. They have to work with an artificially short time frame, and need a result that looks very different on TV then the original. Knocking down walls makes a big change quick. For similar reasons they tend to chop down trees if they get involved in landscaping...a quick change, but not necessarily a good one, and one that is hard to undo. If you look closely, there are often decorative features that look great on TV but which I suspect would look chintzy in person.

Here is a link that might be useful: British Women Complains about American Open Floor Plan

This post was edited by edlincoln on Thu, Mar 20, 14 at 19:47

In my neck of the woods, the vast majority of the oldest housing is in neighborhoods that have declined substantially. Even neighborhoods that were once the prime addresses are now slums, really. We have some areas that have experienced rebirth (or "gentrification" as some would say.) and that mostly started in the 70's before McMansions started to be the standard that every yuppie aspired to. In the other areas, the houses will never get rehabbed; once they decline to certain point they are torn down and the city considers that the best solution.

I think that the majority of folks in the past century have always preferred new. That is why these older areas decline in the first place isn't it?

Rae, I think older areas are in decline because of automobiles, traffic issues and a kind of "snowballing" effect...once the area declines a little bit it gets a bad reputation, people with money move away, the school system declines, then no affluent person with kids will live their. This trend has been reversing in cities with good public transit and a lot of colleges. (Students like to live near public transit and some of them stick around when they become yuppies).

the latest trend is with 20-somethings buying old houses/warehouses/condos/appts in urban areas with walking distance shopping and eating establishments. These are young people who have no cars, therefore the strip shopping and malls of the 80's-2000's are useless to them. They may be reinvigorating the interiors by opening the floor plan or other means, but these are people who have adopted and promote the "reduce, reuse, recycle" approach and abhor new buildings.

Suburbs are on the way out, cities are the place to be. Cities have no available land and up and coming young people have less money to tear down and rebuild. Couple that with a more "green" approach to life and you have young people MORE - NOT LESS - aware of old buildings.

Stonehouse, from the work I do with promoting walkability and bikeability, you are correct. Unfortunately, this is leading to many people being priced out of these trendy areas. Even in our city, what we like in these areas with great older homes with great character is out of our price range unless we go with an even smaller house than what we have now (1200 sq. ft). OTOH, our current neighborhood of affordable 60's homes is becoming more attractive especially to first-time buyers. DH and I have even joked about seeing "hipster" types, which is a good sign.

I love this blog Old House Dreams. Also, what I'm seeing is that there are a lot of older homes in rural areas that are affordable. For people wondering about the South, there are a lot of homes in AL, Carolinas, GA, even Victorians in Texas. For people who work from home, they can really get great homes for a steal in many parts of the country.

In our region, we can find decent homes we like within an hour of where we live now, but it ends up being a bad commute for one of us.

Here is a link that might be useful: Old House Dreams Blog

>The few who say that they do want what they call "charm" are happy to remodel most of the charm right out of the house, removing walls and built ins and ripping down most of the wood trim in pursuit of said open floor plan

This is sooooo true. I live in FL and have been accompanying a friend who is looking for a 20s-30s vintage cottage in the one town in our area that has lots of them. Unfortunately, so far all the ones we've seen are either just about to fall down, or else they've already had a recent "renovation" which involved tearing out every bit of character in pursuit of the Open Floor Plan. They mostly had lovely little built-in china cabinets in the dining room wall, for instance, but if you want to force an ikea kitchen in, out goes the wall. It's really quite depressing. Arched doorways, old moldings, all out in the quest to make everything look all NYC loft inside.

And yeah, this is in an otherwise less than desirable area that is suddenly very trendy because you can bike everywhere you need to go.

EDIT However, the plus side is that you can find the original light fixtures and furniture for practically nothing now, in any local thrift.

This post was edited by writersblock on Fri, Mar 21, 14 at 16:52

My uncle inherited the family farmhouse (I had already bought the back acreage and built on it). He sold the 1743 farmhouse (yes, some "improvements" such as electricity, running water, a poorly-done 2nd floor apartment) to his DD whose DH is a carpenter. They ripped out everything - not that there was much fancy woodwork but there was a little in the front rooms. Wide board pine floors with square nails got ripped down to make "rustic" 4" wide trim. Plaster walls came down, sheetrock put up around the hand-hewn timbers that were stained dark, and the attic was ripped out to make a cathedral ceiling in part of the upstairs and a loft over the other part. New "handscraped" floors put in that aren't wearing as well as the old pine. New interior doors stained dark pine replaced the original painted (OK, they have small children and it was lead paint) doors with the ORIGINAL latches. French doors in place of the side entrance to the parlor, the parlor wall opened up to the (very small) entrance and original staircase (they kept that) with the mantel sticking out past the wall by 3". I could go on and on - breaks my heart to walk in there now, not that the old place was in good condition (awful wallpaper, vinyl over linoleum over pine, no subfloor) but there was so much to work with that could have been restored. But my cousin has to have everything open and airy and modern and now there's no going back...

I think modern is in style now but it will swing back. it always does. Of course some people will always prefer one or the other.
With rising heating costs the ability to shut the door to rooms when you aren't using them may come back into fashion also.
Kathy

Unfortunately, the larger cities I know are as Raee describes with urban areas sliding into slums. And yes, even once proud and wealthy enclaves are now no longer just precarious but downright scary due to the blight of the advancing onslaught of drugs/gangs/crime. Although the auto played a role in the initial flight to suburbia, around here I suspect the loss of single family home ownership to tenants along with the breaking of large homes into multi-family units created and facilitated the death spiral. Homes have so little value those who cannot afford other areas are able to buy, but often do not have the funds to maintain these often once grand, usually behemoth homes. In a switch, those with higher incomes buy in the outlying areas of the cities in the mostly post war smaller single homes of generally poorer quality. (Of course some smaller sections have nice custom homes). As long as crime remains out-of-control, there can be no way to stem the urban blight as even the outlying areas become undesirable addresses as those with enough money flee the cities altogether.

edlincoln pretty much nailed it. Suburbia reminds me of a grass fire, burning outwards as a ring with no flame in the middle. Then areas turn around some time later once new people realize they have some other desirable criteria (architecture / great commute / parks / ...)

Here in the Charleston area though there is plenty of land to go around and a large population in their 20s-30s who are generally afraid of a place over 5 years old because OMG, something might break or look a bit old and then you have scary maintenance to deal with. Modern is also unpopular except with regard to openness of the floor plan so the end result are a lot of what we jokingly call fauxlonials.

Fortunately there are enough of us who are younger and want something older (1960s and earlier) because of the location, look or whatever to keep the rehabbing alive. Downtown and areas adjacent to it are doing great. We'll handle the old, scary stuff and you guys keep moving farther out every 5 years. :)

In answer to the OP's question, I don't think the love of old houses is fading away so much as it's the old houses themselves that are. At least around here - the easy credit of the 90s-00s really did a number on them, between the flipper wanna-bes and amateur homeowners. So now when Im looking at houses and its some beige vinyl-clad thing with white vinyl windows that are much smaller than the originals, original woodwork and doors gone and replaced with thin, cheap stuff from the big box store, boring white mdf cabinets, etc. ... and way overpriced to boot, bc the owner wants to get back their so-called investment - I really can't get all that interested. It doesn't matter if it was built in 1920 or whatever if it doesn't look very appealing now. And I think that's my point, good, coherent appealing design - of whatever era - never goes out of style.

Re antiques, the prices have just come down to reflect reality, that's all. People old and young still love them and the really fine specimens of whatever era still command high prices. Once people hit their 40s-50s the bug hits, there is an attraction and comfort from things and places evocative of grandma's house and childhood and that's why 60s-70s antiques & collectibles are so hot right now. I don't see that phenomenon changing.

the larger cities I know are as Raee describes with urban areas sliding into slums. And yes, even once proud and wealthy enclaves are now no longer just precarious but downright scary due to the blight of the advancing onslaught of drugs/gangs/crime.

Very location specific. For instance, consider the revival of Bed-Stuy in NYC, where the white population has grown by 633% over the first decade of this century and an onslaught of Buppies has changed the character of the neighbourhood.

And in the inner Canadian cities, which I am most familiar with, even at their nadir in the 1960s, they were paradises compared to the US inner cities.
*******
Since my personal memories go back to the 1940s (Yikes!), it's hard to think of homes that age as "old". Yet, I recently saw some slides of our "new" 1958 home, replete with Danish modern furniture. How hip we were then--just 50 years early.

This post was edited by worthy on Sat, Mar 29, 14 at 14:14