PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Speaker: Triangle's population, boom, continues. Census data out today shows almost 20,000 people have moved counties in the last…
Anisa Khalifa: I live in the triangle. It's a rapidly growing metropolis in Central North Carolina. And that growth is fueling a building boom.
Speaker: In fact, you can see this long row of newly built homes, and there are also lots for new homes.
Anisa Khalifa: If you drive through the suburban sprawl of cities like Raleigh or Durham, you'll see dozens of subdivisions each with rows of boxing, new homes, sometimes the same home, over and over and over. And at times it can feel like you don't really live anywhere at all.
Frank Harmon: Yes, you could buy the same house in Mando, North Carolina. You know, the same shape, design, colors, roof shape that you can buy in Montana. And so people have lost the notion that a house belongs to its particular place.
Anisa Khalifa: I am Anisa Khalifa. This is the Broadside where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week we ask a simple question. With a not so simple answer, what exactly is a southern home? What do you think makes a southern home?
Jeremy Markovich: Um, boy, that's hard to pigeonhole.
Anisa Khalifa: This is friend of the podcast, Jeremy Markovich. He writes the North Carolina Rabbit Hole newsletter, where he explores the quirky and often baffling culture of my home state.
Jeremy Markovich: I feel like. I lived in a very southern home when I lived in Charlotte, and it was a one story house built in the sixties and it had an attic fan. And I was like, oh, that's so cool. 'cause this house predated air conditioning. And we had air conditioning when we lived there, but somebody was telling me, oh no, this house was designed to have an. Attic fan, and you open all the windows and you turn on the fan and then it pulls all the air through the house and it circulates it, and that's how you cool your house. And I was like, wow. That's amazing.
Anisa Khalifa: As you can hear, Jeremy gets excited about the tiniest details. So when we started working on an episode about the things that make up a quintessential southern home. We knew he would have some stories,
Jeremy Markovich: and one day I was like, I should turn on the attic fan. I don't know if it's ever been turned on in like, you know, 30 years or something like that. Like this is gonna be some moment. I won't need air conditioning anymore. It's gonna be bliss. And I turned it on. It was so loud and rattling, and I was like, it's gonna burn my house down. I need to turn it right back off. And I never did it again.
Anisa Khalifa: Now Jeremy clearly has stories about attics, but I wanted to get to the heart of what makes a southern home. The foundation, if you will. And in the south, that lowest level of a house is defined by what? It doesn't have a basement. Jeremy is a big fan of the subterranean room. When I asked him what his favorite basement was, he didn't miss a beat.
Jeremy Markovich: Uh, it's the Wayne's World basement.
Speaker 5: Yes. Oh my gosh.
Jeremy Markovich: It's the Wayne's World basement.
Speaker 5: I love that.
Jeremy Markovich: because it's got the wood paneling. It's got two dudes down here who are just messing around because like, I feel like nothing serious happens in a basement.
Anisa Khalifa: Totally.
Jeremy Markovich: If you wanted to do something that was important that you wanted people to see, that was an activity that was pristine and you, you, you would invite people over to your house, you would do that upstairs.
Anisa Khalifa: Right. And this has considerable cultural implications. For Southerners, all of our embarrassing hobbies are treadmills, are Christmas decorations. They go elsewhere. And because of that, Jeremy says We also miss out on some majorly quirky architectural features.
Jeremy Markovich: Have you heard of the Pittsburgh toilet?
Anisa Khalifa: I have not heard of the Pittsburgh toilet.
Jeremy Markovich: Okay, I will describe it to you, but you have to Google it for full effect. Okay? It's fine. You could do it at work. It's fine. The Pittsburgh toilet is a toilet in a basement that has nothing around it. It's not in a bathroom. In fact, in a lot of cases the toilet is just sitting in the middle of the basement with nothing around it. And so then you say, well, who uses the Pittsburgh toilet? Like in the middle of the basement? What do you need with this?
Anisa Khalifa: Like Yeah. Freestanding toilet with no privacy.
Jeremy Markovich: Yeah, with no privacy at all. And the answer is actually, it's a plumbing thing. It's the lowest part of the house. So like when the water goes out, if it backs up, it keeps it from backing up. It's kind of like a, like a backflow preventer in, in a lot of ways.
Anisa Khalifa: So right about now, you're probably wondering. Why does this man know so much about basements? Well, about a year ago, Jeremy went down a rabbit hole while writing a piece called Why Don't Southern Homes have Basements? But when he started his research, he didn't actually know if that was true.
Jeremy Markovich: So I thought to myself, this is such an anecdotal thing that everybody seems to know. That southern homes don't have basements. And I figured there's gotta be some kind of academic study that has looked into this trend, right? Like it feels, you know, like an architecture thing, but also kind of cultural, right? Like, what, what is going on here? Um, I could not find any. And then I called up the folks at, you know, the NC State School of Design and were like, can somebody talk to me about this? That's like, looked into it and they were like. Nobody's looked into this. And so I was like, well, how do you take it from sort of like, I feel this is right, right?
Like there's, you know, anecdotally this feels like it's valid, but may, is it just me or am I not seeing it? And the one place that you can actually look it up is the US census. So the US census keeps track of population, but they also keep track of all sorts of other things about. People and how they live and where they live. And they track the percentage of new homes with basements. They have tracked this,
Anisa Khalifa: oh,
Jeremy Markovich: since 1971.
Anisa Khalifa: Huh?
Jeremy Markovich: So you can, you can look this up and they do it by region.
Anisa Khalifa: Sure enough, in the Northeast and the Midwest, the vast majority of new single family homes have basements.
Jeremy Markovich: Then you have the south and the west and the south and the west are very low. Um, in fact, you know, if you look at the west, maybe about 20 some percent have basement. And the south, it has steadily declined to like maybe 5% or less. Actually, there used to be more and it's gone down. And the reason why is fairly straightforward, like it makes sense and that it's cold up north and it's not quite as cold down here.
So when the ground freezes, it freezes. To a deeper degree mm-hmm. Than it does in the South. So in order to build a house to build a foundation that you don't want to just crack because the ground is heaving and going up and down because it's getting frozen and unfrozen. You have to dig below the frost line.
And the frost line is just deeper in the north. So if you're gonna go ahead and dig in the north, a couple of feet maybe down, then why not just keep digging a couple more feet and build yourself a basement, right? Like actually get some use out of this thing. And the south, that's not actually necessary. You don't have to go down six feet, five feet, whatever. You could just go down one foot, maybe two feet, and then you get the same effect.
Anisa Khalifa: Because of that, in much of the south, especially in older homes, you see crawl spaces, the dirt floor filled with mold and dead animals, you know, stuff of nightmares. But building technology has improved a lot in recent years, limiting some of the fears around freezing. So increasingly, folks just dig a foot down. And fill it with concrete.
Jeremy Markovich: Uh, 'cause slab are really cheap. In fact, that is the biggest thing. And the other factor is scale. So if you are a modern home builder, excavating costs a lot of money. And so if you're building a house and you're a builder and you wanna make as much profit off of it as you possibly can. But you want to keep the cost as low as you possibly can, you're gonna opt for a slab,
Anisa Khalifa: and that has led to a fascinating development nationwide as a proportion of overall homes, the basement, along with its scary southern cousin, the crawl space is rapidly declining and it's basically all our fault.
Jeremy Markovich: The one thing that's actually dragging the whole basement industrial complex down is the fact that like a ton of homes. Are being built in the south, like so many people are moving to the south. So many homes are being built in the south. In fact, more than half of all the new single friendly homes being built in the United States in 2022 were built in the South. So wow. Since none of those homes have basements, or I should say hardly any of those homes have basements, it kind of drags down the whole basement thing across the country. If you don't like sum pumps, if you hate sum pumps, then come to the south. We got more slabs in the undertaker,
Anisa Khalifa: but the building boom, that's killing off the basement and the crawl space. Is also threatening other elements of regional home building. Mass production and cookie cutter design means that you can't just look at a house and tell where it lives anymore. Coming up after a break, we chat with someone who can explain what we're missing out on and how we can reclaim a little bit of our sense of place.
Good morning.
Frank Harmon: Hi. Hello, come in.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm Anisa.
Frank Harmon: Oh, hi.
Anisa Khalifa: architect. Frank Harmon knows homes, especially Southern Homes.
Frank Harmon: Well, you know, Southern architecture is a huge experience. I.
Anisa Khalifa: While he's worked on projects around the world, Frank spent most of his illustrious career in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Frank Harmon: You know, I've designed houses for clients for over 40 years,
Anisa Khalifa: and because of that, I recently showed up on his doorstep to ask the big question, what makes a southern home?
Frank Harmon: A real southern house belongs to its place. Wherever I've built, I've always tried to pay attention to the place. I start with that.
Anisa Khalifa: Frank has carried this deep sense of place throughout his work and he's been thinking about the way architecture fits into its environment since he was a kid.
Frank Harmon: I looked out the window in the eighth grade in Greensboro, North Carolina. It was an English class. Uh, miss Dickinson was my teacher. I saw a really interesting building across the street, and it was the first time I had ever thought to myself that interesting building. Had to have somebody who thought about it before it was built, and I got very interested. Mm. By the way, Mrs. Dickinson threw a piece of chalk at me because I was looking out the window.
In the mornings, at this time of year over next to that wall is good because it's sheltered from the wind.
Anisa Khalifa: I got a tour of Frank's home, which he designed 35 years ago on a lovely spring morning.
Frank Harmon: Yeah, it's a small suburban lot, and as you can see, we built a house over here underneath these oak trees.
Anisa Khalifa: The sun was shining just right on the beautiful building and the garden that surrounds it, the lot is embedded in a bustling neighborhood next to NC State University in the heart of Raleigh, but you wouldn't know it standing in Frank's yard.
Frank Harmon: Our home is our Oasis. It's our one private place that we feel totally comfortable and it belongs to us.
Anisa Khalifa: That's so true. Yeah. Like a sanctuary almost.
Frank Harmon: Yeah, a sanctuary. I like that.
Anisa Khalifa: On the outside, the house has a quintessential modernist look. It's a rectangular structure with a flat roof and is lined with tall windows, some reaching from the floor to the ceiling. But Frank says there's a lot more to this design than meets the eye.
Frank Harmon: It doesn't look like a typical southern house, but it's actually built like a southern house. A characteristic of a good southern house is that it has. Deciduous trees on the south side. These are trees that lose their leaves in the winter so the sun can warm the house. But in the summer, the leaves shade the house. So on the south side of this house are three 75-year-old, uh, oak trees.
Anisa Khalifa: Then there are the windows. Each room has windows on at least two sides.
Frank Harmon: That means you can open the windows on two sides and get natural ventilation. It also means that you have very good daylight so that you can see each other clearly.
Anisa Khalifa: And running through the house is a central hallway designed for yet more airflow with rooms lining the corridor.
Frank Harmon: That's a plan that has been repeated countless times in little farmhouses plantation houses and homes in cities for 200 years. So, although our house looks very modern, it's made of steel and concrete, and it has big windows, it's built on traditional southern principles.
Anisa Khalifa: Those southern design principles in many ways are driven by our hot climate. And that leads us to the one element that immediately comes to mind when I think of a southern home,
Frank Harmon: usually has a porch.
Anisa Khalifa: The southern staple you can see from New Orleans to Norfolk. But where exactly did the porch come from? Frank says, most of the homes of wealthy white families in the 17 and 18 hundreds did not have grand porches.
Frank Harmon: Most of the early buildings in the South were built on English precedents. They're often made of brick. They have big windows. They don't necessarily pay attention to where they are. But if you look at the enslaved people's cabins, they were usually made of wood, which is a much more satisfactory material to build with in the south. And they usually had porches.
Anisa Khalifa: The porch was often positioned on the south side of the cabin, helping enslaved people keep cool during the summertime,
Frank Harmon: but that would allow the sun to come in and warm the house in the winter. So ironically, the slave owners were in their brick mansion suffering from the heat because brick is gonna absorb the heat during the day and radiated into the house at night, so you can't sleep.
Anisa Khalifa: And then there's perhaps the most famous design feature of pre-Civil War architecture.
Frank Harmon: Two story white painted houses with columns. That's mostly a fantasy in our imagination.
Anisa Khalifa: A few biggest states featured those ornate Greek revival style columns, but for the most part, phony says Frank. In reality, most antebellum architecture was Victorian in style.
Frank Harmon: With lots of ornament, many colors of paint and tall windows, very unlike what people think of now as Antebellum architecture,
Anisa Khalifa: and unlike what we see in movies like Gone With the Wind. But when it came to Southern authenticity in 1930s, Hollywood,
Rhett Butler: frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.
Anisa Khalifa: In the post reconstruction era, these Corinthian columns became another myth of the old South that before the Civil War, this was the quote, proper look for a wealthy family's house.
Frank Harmon: There was a movement to restore the dignity of the south by building mansions that looked stately. And they often had tall columns with Corinthian capitals and they were painted white. And the architecture was, in a sense, a kind of propaganda.
Anisa Khalifa: Hmm. So pivoting a little bit to more recent times. Once homes started being mass produced in the 20th century, did this start to see the disappearance of a lot of these southern aesthetics in homes?
Frank Harmon: Yes. You could buy the same house in Manteo, North Carolina, you know, the same shape, design, colors, roof shape that you can buy in Montana. And so people have lost the notion that a house belongs to its particular place, largely because when you mass produce homes, that's the most economical, which is to say cheapest way to do it.
Anisa Khalifa: So thanks to mass production and some architectural myths. A traditional Southern aesthetic is harder to come by in contemporary homes, but I wanted to get a little more specific. So I asked Frank, what about a North Carolina aesthetic? Is there even such a thing as a North Carolina home?
Frank Harmon: No. There are many kinds of homes in North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: And that makes sense. One of the wonderful things about our state is it's eclectic geography. A house in the mountains is gonna need a different design than one on the coast, but even without a state specific brand of architecture, Frank says, building a home in North Carolina. Can be an opportunity to live in harmony with our surroundings.
Frank Harmon: If you're of modest means, you have to pay attention to what you're doing. A farmer, when he built his farmhouse, had to use what he had very carefully. He and his family would use local materials. He knew which way the wind was blowing. He knew where the sun came from.
Anisa Khalifa: Frank is no farmer, but he took on a similar philosophy when he built his own house decades ago.
Frank Harmon: The house we're sitting in today, we didn't build a house for two years after we'd bought the lot. It was an empty lot.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh, wow.
Frank Harmon: cause we wanted to get to know what the neighborhood was like. If you can get to know the neighborhood and where the house is in it or the countryside. Try to find out as much as you can about that first, and then other things will fall into place.
Anisa Khalifa: Now, clearly having the ability to be really intentional with a house can be hard to come by. It's challenging enough just trying to buy a home today, let alone designing it from scratch. I don't own a home and many of us rent or live in apartments, but my conversation with Frank left me inspired to reclaim my living space. In new creative ways, even if you didn't design your home yourself. Just getting to know the land it occupies and working with it, not against it can be a distinctly southern act.
Frank Harmon: I think everyone deserves a good home, whether we get it or not, not all of us get it, but we all deserve a good place to live where we feel comfortable, where we can open the windows and enjoy the fresh air. Grow a tomato or two. I think it's a fundamental need to have a place that feels like our own and for that place to be as nice as we want it to be.
Anisa Khalifa: If you'd like to see photos of Frank Harmon's beautiful home, check out this week's show notes. You'll also find a link there to the work of Jeremy Markovich at the North Carolina Rabbit Hole. This episode with Broadside was produced by Charlie Shelton Ormond, and our editor Jared Walker. Our executive producer is Wilson Ser.
The Broadside is a production of WNC North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend. I am Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.