First Owner Fallacy

Why Americans buy virgin houses, then pay extra to survive the honeymoon period

I am a tree lover. You probably are, too. Whether your land use politics are dense mixed use or true-blue American sprawl, your revealed preference for what constitutes a beautiful neighborhood won’t vary based on housing density, but its mature trees. A sprawl hater will extoll the beauty of multi-acre suburban lots peppered with old oaks, while a suburban expansionist will be awestruck by townhomes squished together under high-crowned, straight-bole ginkgoes lining the sidewalks.

There’s something peaceful about being around trees. Just about every culture whether steppe, forest, or plains chooses the rainforest as their preferred biome, by looks alone. Maybe it’s encoded the way flowers advertise water and fertility, and we call the advertisement “beauty.” Whether trees are “essentially” beautiful or merely advertising some evolutionary fact about the environment makes no difference to our minds. We experience it as the same positive valence regardless.

If you looked at your neighborhood as a generational time-lapse, you’d see shrubs emerging into trees that occasionally vanished, and mottled between would be tiny cubes that both appeared and disappeared in an instant. They didn’t grow, and they don’t last very long. Homes are the ephemera of a nice neighborhood. Bulldoze and rebuild in a year. Trees are its asymmetric resource. Destroy one and you’re in for decades of waiting. And there is always a reason to do so.

They only survive by a generational cooperation that defies safetyism. Grandfather, father, and son must all agree throughout the long dusk of their lives—decade after decade—that the unquantifiable majesty extending skyward must outweigh the quantified risk of falling, the annoyance of leaf cleanup, the insurance premium, the neighbor who mutters about liability, and the low-grade temptation to reset the yard into something you can mow uninterrupted. Mighty oaks in a yard tell you more about a family and their priorities and values than any credit score ever could. They are a repeated vote cast against convenience.

Like a colorful wildflower, when you look up at a massive oak, is the reverence you feel and beauty you see really for the deformed shrub with gigantism itself, or for its symbolic representation of age and history, the values of the homeowner, the abundance mindset of someone willing to live with inconvenience in exchange for meaning? Is the safety you feel the shade it confers, or the implicit knowledge that if this has been here a hundred years, you are in a place where things last? Is there a difference? Would beauty be correlated with age if the actual aesthetic preference isn’t a secret evolutionary desire for consistency, stable ground, and things that don’t fall apart?

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The very nature of reality includes an odd exploit that lets you statistically peek into the future. You can guess how long something will last by how long it’s been there. It’s named for its most dramatic example—the Doomsday argument—but the intuition applies to anything with a somewhat uniform distribution that you’re observing at a semi-random point in its lifetime. You experience this on every social media site you join. For most, you arrive in the fat middle of their signups. Count how many years ago they started and double it. At that point, it’s probably a ghost town. You arrived at a random-ish point, and that confers information.

The simplest formulation is to say I have a cylindrical ball pit of fixed width but unknown depth. It could be inches deep or run to the core of the earth and out the back. All I promise is that the balls are numbered from 1 to how many that fit with no skips or duplicates, and they’re well randomized. You reach in and grab one. It says “3.”

That single draw gives you probabilistic knowledge of how deep the pit is. Under the simplest assumption—that every ball was equally likely—you are a million times more likely to have drawn a 3 from a pit with 30 balls than from a pit with 30,000,000. However you set your priors, low ranks pull your estimate downward. One sample tells you something about an unseen total.

We seem to have an innate sense of this and apply it everywhere. Why would you feel at peace in a hundred-year-old hotel lobby with boulder walls? Heuristics tell you lasting for a century means it survived severe weather, neglect, and ownership turnover. Walking in on year one hundred is like drawing ball 100. It’s unlikely 100 is the highest numbered ball in that cylinder. However, draw ball 1 for the first year of a new build home, and that should give you pause. There may not be a 2 in there at all.

It may also be behind the worldwide pressure for virgin brides in every culture for all of recorded history. Our modern sentiments want to do away with this by proclaiming it is entirely pathology—a fetish for youth, control. Those are real concerns. The cultural preference, however, may be a lot less about misogyny than mathematics.

It looks a lot like an attempt to outsmart the ball pit. If we can’t see its depth and how many it contains, what can we control? Look at it from the other end. The point of marriage isn’t to be someone’s first partner, but their last. “Till death do us part.” If they have a partner after you, the marriage failed its vowed mission.

Everyone dies having had some final number of life partners. You don’t get to see that total when you marry someone; you only see your current rank. Which partner are you in their life sequence? If you marry someone with thirty partners before you, you are betting that there will be no thirty-one. Your goal is to grab the last ball in a pit whose depth you cannot see. Choosing someone with zero or one partners and you have a much higher chance of the pit being shallow. You are trying to buy a higher conditional probability that the sequence ends with you. Counterintuitively, if what you want is not novelty but finality, then insisting on being the first is the best way to increase the chance you are last.

You need not write down Bayes’ theorem to act like a Bayesian. Culture has done it for millennia with disgust and rituals and codified it as morality. Whether selecting a mate, a neighborhood, or a vacation spot, what you’re trying to infer is a survival curve. Given something has survived until now, how much longer will it last? How big a pool was it pulled from? Different things have different hazard curves, and each one imbues us with feelings about the shape of time’s danger to it.

Many objects follow a wear-out story. Best quality at birth, then decline. New is safe. Old is rot. This is our intuition about vehicles. They are sealed products with consumable parts where age and failure track each other so closely we can guess how the market will price a used car solely from its sticker price and model year.

Other things follow an infant-mortality story. Early life is the danger zone. Manufacturing variance and installation mistakes are front-loaded. The lemon risk is highest at birth. Survivors become safer because they have survived. Some are so wary of infant mortality that they refused to buy a new car at all. The first two Honda Civics I owned were worth more after year one and two than the brand new price I negotiated. Dave Ramsey’s ilk’s aversion to unrevealed defects and imagined off-the-lot depreciation had opened the market up to arbitrage.

And there is the Lindy story. Survival itself becomes evidence of robustness. If something has lasted a long time, it is often less fragile in the ways that destroy most things, because time has already selected out what could not endure. A century-old book isn’t guaranteed to last another century, but it has already proven it isn’t the kind of book that disintegrates in ten years. Antique furniture survives not only by construction, but through a beauty that resists getting tossed when trends change.

In the real world these combine into a bathtub curve: high hazard early (defects), low hazard in the middle (stability), rising hazard late (wear-out). Age can mean deterioration, sorting, or proof—depending on which part of the curve you think you’re on. The same observation can read as rot, evidence, or a warning sign that the test hasn’t happened yet.

Apply wear-out thinking to relationships and a high count implies depreciation. Diminished pair-bonding is the pop-psychology language used to express wear-out concern. Apply burn-in thinking and a low count means “untested” while a high count looks like adaptation. Apply Lindy thinking and the signal isn’t purity at all. Decades of serial monogamy indicate someone has repeatedly survived boring middles, and may again with you.

That same fight, with the same three fears dressed in different garb, is playing out in American housing. The consequences are visible from the highway, because we build them in bulk.

Americans seem mostly fine with houses made of basically toothpicks and cardboard. We lack a visceral fear of a stiff wind or a strong kick busting through. Is it lack of severe weather? A young country that knows nothing else? A sense of essential transience and expectation of upgrade? Or is it something more humiliating, like a culture that hates hassle more than it loves dignity?

The answer is visible in how we buy, sell, and take possession of homes. Americans treat houses like cars. We speak the language of wear-out curves. New construction is “safe.” Old houses are “money pits.” The value proposition is youth plus warranty. Time is rot, so if you want carefree years, reset the clock.

But a house is not a sealed consumer product. It is a system assembled by humans in the open air, exposed to water, gravity, temperature cycles, and incentives. It contains wear-out components, sure. It also has early-life defects and survivorship selection. It is a bathtub curve wearing vinyl siding.

That contradiction leaks out in the “blue tape” walkthrough—a ritual when taking possession of a new build. “Mark all the paint imperfections you find.” A new-car walkaround transplanted into a supposedly custom-built home. Paint doesn’t matter, but paint is what you can see and all you were allowed to customize. You perform control over the surface because you have no control over the hidden joints, flashings, and slopes where the failures are waiting. If you flag enough scuffs on the drywall, maybe the roof won’t leak.

Tommy Boy spoke the truth in the movie’s turning point. A home’s warranty was never about quality. It’s the receipt for the contradiction. We preach “new is best” in the language of wear-out curves, then we pay extra to outsource the infant-mortality trough. If newness were what we claim it is, there’d be nothing to insure except accidents. Instead we insure the build itself.

The builder’s optimization target is simple. Maximize interior cubic footage per dollar, minimize time on site, variation, and liability window. The result is the D.R. Horton middle-America box: a garage-forward beige cube, a drywall balloon inflated to the legal setbacks, dropped onto a scalped lot where every tree has been erased down to a flatness so total it looks like a rendering.

The neighborhood becomes the worst of all worlds. Not dense enough to be walkable, not spread out enough to be pastoral. Just enough space so prospect-refuge theory prevents you from planting any trees. Unless everyone plants them, they block your “prospect” without giving you “refuge” from your neighbors’ spying. The front yard is a ceremonial strip of grass while the living room is a warehouse for furnishings that make Rooms To Go look metropolitan.

For houses, the signal you should be thinking with is survival, not youth. A structure that has made it through ten winters has already revealed defects a walkthrough cannot detect. The soil has moved. The water has tried its angles. The roof has met real wind. The grading has proven itself. The stupid, quiet failures like rot and drainage and detailing tend to show up early. Survivors are not guaranteed winners, but they are, by definition, not fragile in the common ways.

Wear-out is real, but it mostly lives in components you can replace on a schedule. Water heaters die; roofs age; paint fails. Our culture treats “old house” as a single aging organism, when it is a chassis with replaceable parts. We pay extra to buy youth in the parts while throwing away the only thing that cannot be replaced, a time-tested place, and the canopy that comes with it.

That’s why the canopy of old oaks puts us at peace. The stone hotel lobby with 24-foot ceilings feels like serenity. And that’s why the new cardboard box, no matter how many recessed lights it has, feels like a hotel room you’re not allowed to check out of.

If you want a beautiful place, stop buying “new” as if youth were evidence. Buy survival. Buy the house that already lived through storms under other owners. Buy the neighborhood that has already proved it can carry trees to maturity—and if that costs you a few hundred square feet, good. Trade the bonus room for the street with shade and commerce. A little noise is proof the place survives turnover.

The cube-people can have their square footage and bald landscapes. I want a place the future will recognize because the past has already tested it.

Next, if time trains our taste, why do McMansions still read as aspirational to so many.

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