Comments by "JI80" (@ji8044) on "Why Are Modern Homes Built to Fail? The Rise of Planned Obsolescence in Homebuilding" video.

No they are built to sell, not to fail. The reason we think houses built 100-200 years ago were so much better than today is because only the well built and more expensive ones have survived.
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@ThisHouse But the majority of new city housing after the Civil War were row houses and none of them were built by the people who occupied them. You can't build a row house by yourself. I do agree that would be the case with some of what we call today single family housing. In Baltimore they have the uniquely English common law ground rent rowhouses, which I don't think are found elsewhere in the US. thank you for the replies. .
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@ThisHouse We probably have different ideas of what constitutes the working class Ken. For instance I doubt they were owned by anyone who worked in the stockyards. Good discussion though. Many of the row homes still standing today were never owned by their occupants back in the day. They were built by developers to rent. My grandparents lived in Philadelphia row houses all their lives, but only as renters. The homes they lived in weren't sold to occupying owners until the 1960's and 70's. Home ownership in the cities is a post WWII phenomenon for the most part.
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And you didn't even mention things like asbestos or lead paint issues.
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