A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!