Cheaper Living in a Hole

In response to my Hobbit Hole post Ruth brought up the fact that building underground can be more expensive than building above ground. While this is true for the upfront costs I would like to show why it makes sense in the long run. First why is it expensive to build underground? In order to have a basement (or anything underground) you must first dig a hole. Then you have to make sure that it is moisture proof. All of this costs more than just building on top of the ground. Checking around a couple of places online most people said that it cost them about $10,000 to build their basements. For this argument lets say that since the entire house is going to cost $20,000 or even $30,000 more than a typical house.

Now lets look at why you want to spend that much more initially. First it would eliminate your heating and cooling bills. According to the Energy Star website that is about $1,000 dollars a year. So over the period of 20-30 years the house has already made back every penny to originally spent. And that is assuming that you live in an average place. In places where summers are really hot (Arizona) or the winters are really cold (Michigan) the energy bills could be even higher which means the house would pay for itself even faster.

Second if we were to build below ground then we could be building on smaller lots with the same size of house. Now land prices vary greatly by location so this is a variable that may or may not save a lot of money. Looking at a few places here in my area I found that even on the cheap end a lot of land is about $50,000. Now when we are building underground en masse we could easily build two houses on a quarter of an acre or even a eight of an acre. So now the cost of land has dropped in half. That savings alone basically covers the cost of building underground.

Third is the fact that if this was done en masse it would be easy to reduce the cost of building. For example if a builder decided to build his new subdivision all underground he could easily excavate the entire area, build the houses knowing that they would be buried (which would definitely take a different set of construction techniques). Then as the houses were finished each one could be covered back over with soil and the project would be done. I do not know how much this could save but it should definitely reduce the costs.

Those I guess are just a couple more thoughts about why we should be building underground. I am sure that my argument is not perfect or the numbers completely accurate. That was not the point of this post. The point was to just look a little past the initial costs so that we all can realize how worth it some of these initial investments can be.