With new houses getting bigger
and land prices rising, older,
smaller homes are biting the dust
They're called teardowns, scrapers, or scrape-offs.
But by any name, the procedure is the same: A
builder or homeowner buys an existing home —
most often in a desirable suburban neighborhood
where land is scarce — tears it down, and builds a larger,
more modern home on the resulting lot. Hard numbers on
the practice are difficult to come by, but Mark Calabria, an
economist with the National Association of Realtors, estimates
that about 5% of last year's 1.3 million housing starts
could reasonably have been classified as scrapers.
Land recycling. Steve Hamilton is a Massachusetts builder
AUGUST