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.

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.

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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...

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

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

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

Portlandland

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.

Even Hollywoodland is just Hollywood now.

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

Dallas’ unofficial motto is “Keep Dallas Boring”.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

See: d.r. Horton

Prefabs, of which there are many modern counterparts.