The Owner Builder magazine

Over lunch today I was reading the current issue of one of my favorite publications: The Owner Builder—"The Australasian Home Builders Magazine." You can get a taste of the magazine (which is much better looking than its website) from their Sample Articles page. In publication since 1982, the first 25 issues have just been released on CD. I'll be wanting to get one of those. As somebody whose brain still reels with imaginative possibilities years and years after discovering books like Handmade Houses and Shelter, I've got soft spot for the art of building with what's on hand. (Hard to do with an office building or hospital campus, of course, but there are ways of thinking them in—special places, sacred places. This may not initially seem related.) The psychological benefits of using non-industrial materials are resurfacing in trends like biophilia, while the practical benefits of using local materials are beginning to make ever more sense. As David Eisenberg noted in an EBN feature,

"As we run up against the end of cheap, abundant oil, a lot of the things we think are normal are going to become incredibly expensive, difficult, or impossible." Eisenberg sees an increasing need for local solutions using old skills and techniques—some of them married to newer technology and information. "[While right now] natural building looks like a little tiny niche movement that's about sort of quirky stuff, I actually think it's about some of the most important, fundamental things we need to relearn and reinvent."

In the first issue of The Owner Builder magazine, its founders noted that "Commonwealth figures show 18,328 owner built homes under construction at the end of March 1980 compared with 19,822 contractor built houses"—almost neck-and-neck. I found that astonishing, and wondered what the U.S. numbers looked like. Turns out that in 1980 there were 852,000 single-family housing starts (permitted starts) counted in this country. I'm not really sure how they did the breakdown (the numbers don't add up), but 149,000 were termed "contractor built," while 164,000 were called "owner built." Then there's a third category, and the biggest one by a long shot—"built for sale"—that has 526,000 in its column. Surely almost all of those were spec houses built by developers. Even so, it seems that upwards of 20% of the 1980 housing starts, just 25 years ago, were by owner-builders—not counting ones that went under the radar "without the benefit of codes," or in places where permits weren't required for single-family homes. In 2005, there were 1,716,000 permitted single-family housing starts—197,000 contractor built; 129,000 owner built; 1,358,000 built for sale. Besides the number of starts being doubled, note the changes in the ratios. Not at all surprising... but a little disappointing for the romantic in me.