A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses | Hacker News Reader

A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

searshouseseeker.com

93 pointsdavetron500062 comments

Love the original catalog index of homes. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm

You can click on the pictures to see the original home ads in the Sears catalog, with prices (e.g. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1911_011...) $1062 for the parts to a beautiful American Craftsman style bungalow ($34,394.38 adjusted for inflation)! Some assembly required :)

On a tangential note: Sears killed the mail order catalog in 1993, just as the Internet was starting to take off. They could have been Amazon. Now, even their landmark highrise, the Sears Tower, has been unceremoniously renamed Willis Tower.

I still like the idea of mail order house parts & plans though. Someone should start a startup to make and build them.

You can still buy house plans and bundles of parts similar to what Sears used to offer, Menards sells them.

Home Depot also has some prefab units but they're all very small.

To buy an equivalent house like the ones in Sears catalog in a desirable neighborhood can easily set you back half a million.

> in a desirable neighborhood

land value =/=house price

The Red Dead Redemption 2 video game which takes place in 1899 has a story arc about buying a house from a catalog, receiving the parts and assembling it.

Agreed but worth it to note that since then building standards have gone up by a lot. It was much easier to offer cheap homes based on old-growth planks and lead paint.

Saying "Willis Tower" in Chicago is akin to saying "Voldemort" in Harry Potter, it's not done without gasps and dirty stares.

>> Sears killed the mail order catalog in 1993, just as the Internet was starting to take off. They could have been Amazon.

That's like saying Ford could have been Tesla, they just needed to make an electric car in 2012.

Sears did have an internet store on Prodigy (an AOL competitor) in the early 90s it went nowhere... a lot of these megacompanies weren't going to turn it around even if they were first movers.

I mean, GM came kinda close with the EV1. It was essentially as good as a Nissan Leaf was, in the 90s! It was more of an organizational failure than a technical one that killed it.

When folks say things like "Sears could have been Amazon," I feel like they don't quite see the whole picture.

They adopted digital tech earlier than most other companies.

Sears co-founded the Prodigy dialup service eons before "The Internet" was a household name, and they were selling hardgoods on the web (for delivery or free in-store pickup) when Amazon was still mostly a cheeky book store.

Sears died mostly because of corporate raider tactics that made it impossible for them to survive.

[Company A] killed the [business], just as the [trend] was starting to take off. They could have been [Startup B].

Here are my values:

Google ... online news Reader ... social media ... Global Media Inc.

I don't know how to stress Google's dominance and ability in literally crushing the entire media world. Google News, Google Reader, Blogger, Read-it-Later, Google Books, Google Podcast, YouTube ... were all part of a big conglomerate of information extraction + information production.

Of course, the curse of antimonopolistic eyes, M+FAANG competition, and media envy would have followed.

I got excited when I found the link to https://www.searshouses.com/national-list

But...

> Do we share our national database? We largely keep our database private, for the use of our research team, but will certainly answer questions from homeowners, historical societies, press, or the general public, about specific information we have collected.

I wonder why?

I would very much love to see a map of Sears houses in the SF Bay Area.

Here's a guess: maybe they're worried about people bothering the residents of those homes? It might be that people who talk to their researchers specifically ask them not to share their addresses, and not publishing a list is the best way to get homeowners to voluntarily talk to them.

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and I didn't realize how weird the term "Chicagoland" was until I started traveling around a bit. I'm not aware of any other city in the world that tacks "land" onto the name to describe the surrounding area. Do this with any other city and it sounds like a weird amusement park: Dallasland, Indianapolisland, Seattleland, etc.

Dallas’ unofficial motto is “Keep Dallas Boring”.

This is our strategy to hide from real estate speculators and homeless millionaires from California.

It was a particular housing development and not a whole city AFAIK, but what first comes to mind is Hollywood(land)

https://www.theeastsideagent.com/history-hollywoodland-story...

Every time I hear "Chicagoland", I think of the douchebag television exec from Wayne's World played by Rob Lowe.

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and nobody says "Chicagoland" in conversation. It's only used by newscasters, and car dealers in their commercials.

Even dumber is "Chicagoland area."

My copyediting professor (who worked at the Chicago Tribune) loved to mock this dumb term, pointing out that nobody says "Detroitland" or "New Yorkland" or "Indianapolisland."

Growing up in Chicago, I only ever heard the term on TV or radio.

> It's only used by newscasters, and car dealers in their commercials.

When I was growing up in Southern California, “the Southland” was used in the same way to mean the Los Angeles area. I heard the term only in the mass media, never directly from a person in conversation.

A little googling turned up this list of media-only geographical terms:

https://www.cyburbia.org/forums/threads/nicknames-for-metrop...

I noticed this phenomenon when I moved to Chicago in 1978. I liked the city, but I thought that “Chicagoland” sounded stupid.

Ha, I moved to L.A. from Chicago and immediately noticed "the Southland" used in exactly the same way.

Another WTF is "the inland empire," also used for some nebulous part of the L.A. area by newscasters only, as far as I can tell.

But then CA absolutely loves meaningless names for stuff, like the perennial "red flag warnings." So... we're being menaced by red flags? Why do we fear them?

And "sigalert." Whatever, man.

People say "Tristate Area" and "Metro Detroit"? Don't necessarily need to tack "land" on there but there are colloquial terms for these large metro areas.

There seem to be lots of "tri-state" areas, and "metro Detroit" is probably the least dumb way to include an entire metropolitan area. I wouldn't even call it colloquial.

"Frisco" anyone?

No?

"The OC" anyone?

Also no.

Well hasn't the term chicagoland invented to sound like the Legoland theme park in the first place? I guess if another large city name was terminating with -ney its metropolitan area would also be called in a similar way.

Etymology. Chicago +‎ land. Generally thought to have been popularized by Robert R. McCormick, editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, first using it on page 1 of the July 27, 1926 issue, although it may have been coined much earlier.

Even Hollywoodland is just Hollywood now.

My stepmom from Torrance pretty commonly referred to LA as Lalaland in jest.

FWIW, it's not specific to her. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_La_Land_(disambiguation) lists it as a nickname for LA, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/La-La_Land#English gives a 1958 citation in TV Guide, and it's the reason the 2016 movie "La La Land" got its name.

Switzerland has a whole Canton named after the surrounding area of Basel: Basel-Landschaft, which is often called "Baselland" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel-Landschaft

Münsterland - https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnsterland#Q7920 - with Münster as the largest city.

Portlandland

It's probably because of two reasons:

1. Most of northwest Indiana (Lake County) is considered part of Chicagoland, but is a different state. For example: Growing up there, I remember my parents crossing the state line on Sundays to buy alcohol, which was not legal to sell on that day in IN. But NWI had all the same radio and TV as Chicago.

2. Outside of of said Chicagoland, Illinois and Indiana are very different, especially the more south you go in both states.

I first heard it from a co-worker, who found that it took less explaining than to say that he was Valparaiso, Indiana.

On the theme of pre-fab (albeit not mail order): I'm in western Ohio and we have a few Lustron houses[0] left around. These were a post-WWII product. Once you know the design features they're easy to spot.

In the town where I live we also have the Hobart Steel Houses[1] that were a quirky proof-of-concept by a local manufacturer. My daughter's first school is located in one of these houses. Being able to stick magnets in nearly any surface in the house is bizarre and cool. The school uses this property to great effect. I don't see how they would have ever been economical, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustron_house

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart_Welded_Steel_House_Comp...

Those houses are cool. There's two next to each other near where I grew up. I noticed them in High School I think. I never knew what they were until a couple years ago when I watched a video about them. They look quite unique with the smooth panel looking tiles for the exterior.

I'm really impressed by how timeless these homes look even today.

Why are kit homes not a thing today ? What replaced them ?

Prefabs, of which there are many modern counterparts.

Builders pumping out 100 identical, low quality, garbage houses in a development.

See: d.r. Horton

As opposed to a catalog company pumping out identical houses...?

Right. The end result is arguably similar, but the builder is typically putting up a whole development including streets, water and sewer connections, etc., sometimes including concessions required by the municipality, like new parks or schools. They're also typically taking on a lot of the risk.

It just typically makes more sense in 2023 for a home buyer not looking for a custom build to get a piece of land with a house on it where they can walk in and turn on the lights and faucets than to buy a parcel of land, order a container full of lumber, and start individually dealing with permits, construction financing, grid interconnections, contractors, etc.

There was a lot of variety in the catalog, so lots of duplicates nearby would probably be the owner's choice rather than one developer doing the whole neighborhood.

A. Identical houses that aren't directly next to each other are far less obvious, and generally look better for the simple fact they look unique in their setting.

B. The fact the houses are identical is less the issue than sub-par materials and most importantly, as you'll find in all of the DR Horton lawsuits, sub-par construction. They're not just pumping out 100 houses, they're doing it as fast as humanly possible with crews of questionable experience.

I'd MUCH rather have a mail-order Sears house put together by a crew that actually cares about what they're doing than a company that just hires any crew they can find to pump out houses as fast as possible so they can move on to the next development.

Where are you going to get this ‘crew that cares’? How much of a premium does making them care cost?

When you’re hiring a crew to build one house, what’s their incentive to do a great job? You’re not likely to build another house soon.

I don’t understand why people romanticize Sears houses like this.

It’s like saying ‘I’d rather have an IKEA table assembled by a person who cares than a piece of furniture made by a craftsman who makes the same table design again and again’.

>Where are you going to get this ‘crew that cares’? How much of a premium does making them care cost?

I can name three GCs off the top of my head who have reliable crews. If you have never had any construction work done, you pull up google or your search engine of choice and look for GCs in your area then ask for some references - or just ask a friend?

>When you’re hiring a crew to build one house, what’s their incentive to do a great job? You’re not likely to build another house soon.

Some people just take pride in their work? Referrals? Future work on upgrades to the house they just built? The money to build the house in the first place? It's not like you give them payment on the entire project up front... What's your incentive to put out effort day to day?

>It’s like saying ‘I’d rather have an IKEA table assembled by a person who cares than a piece of furniture made by a craftsman who makes the same table design again and again’.

No, it's like saying I'd rather have an IKEA table assembled by a person who cares, than a pre-assembled piece of garbage from China made of even less actual wood put together by someone working 18 hour shifts in a sweatshop.

I don't know on what planet you think DR Horton is equivalent to a "craftsman who makes the same table design again and again" but that's very much NOT the case with 90% of "big builders" - it's cut as many costs as possible, use the cheapest components possible, and move on to the next one as quickly as possible. Because the average person has no idea that yes, they should be able to plug in a vacuum and a blender at the same time without popping a breaker because it was cheaper to run half the main floor off a single circuit.

You’re obviously right. Nobody has ever hired a general contractor and regretted it. Housing would be better if it was all sold flat pack by a mail order monopoly and assembled by local contractors.

It's not so much that they were replaced but that the logistics of delivering an entire house's BOM to a single location didn't make sense. What made it work at the time was the railroads. The lumber would be dropped off at a freight yard to be picked up by a local contractor. (Although the homeowner could have done it themselves if they wanted the actual work was typically hired out to tradesmen.) But as the country shifted to highways, houses were being built in places that weren't accessible by train.

What's your source on that? Freight yards are plentiful.

For what it's worth, my house was shipped a few thousand KM on two lorries. It was about €8,000 for shipping but a lot of that cost was related to it being in the middle of Covid and needing to use a roll-on-roll-off ferry.

Postwar planning laws and building codes made them a lot less viable. You're now always going to have to hire an architect and a licensed electrician and a plumber and so on - to the point that you probably have to hire a building crew rather than project managing it yourself - and at that point they have their suppliers and can handle that at a B2B level rather than it making sense for you to get one house's worth of everything in a package.

You can still buy kit homes today: https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/the-project-...

Construction permits and significantly increased regulation have made them difficult though. You get economies of scale not just in construction, but more importantly in permitting, electrical and sewer connections etc. Then consider than desirable urban areas are already built up leading to land costing much more than the structure.

They are a thing, I had one built. But dealing with meddling biddies in the local council who wanted to tell me what my house should look like (not to mention that the only real house is one made of crumbling concrete blocks) put up a lot of barriers.

Example: https://www.palmatin.com/

I honestly think a lot of the problem comes down to having people in positions of power who view affordable, commoditized housing as a threat.

People don't build their own houses like they used to.

One of my grandfathers, and both of my wife's grandfathers built their own home at least once in their life.

Re-modeling a bathroom is about the limit of my abilities, plus I work an 8-5 so I'm not sure when I'd have time to build a house.

The whole of Chicago is just Sears houses every direction you face. Whole streets filled with them for miles at a time on the South Side especially.

I love seeing all the small variations and modifications people have made, either when they were building them or later owners.

I grew up on the South Side and I had zero awareness of this. I can appreciate that they want to protect people's privacy, but now I'm so curious!

For those interested in kit houses - Sears houses are fascinating but they were not the first houses you could order and have shipped. To give one random example, this house in San Diego was built in Maine, sent by ship to San Francisco, but then sold (and assembled) en route in San Diego when it was clear the bust after the gold rush meant there might not be a buyer in SF

https://gaslampfoundation.org/

Looking at the pictures I instantly recognize them as house designs from my neighborhood. Unwrapped a layer of history I didn't know about, very cool.

Galveston, Texas still has some of these. My friend lived in one for several years before the real estate market (and new job in Houston) forced their hand.

99% Invisible had a good podcast on Sears Homes: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-i...

I live in a Sears house!

This is very cool, I did not realize how common they are.

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