Roxane Gay on HGTV, small town racism, and “who deserves to own a home”
Image: Graphic: Natalie Peeples TV Features Joyride
Roxane Gay is an icon in part because she is many things. She’s an author, podcaster, and professor. She’s a public figure, a commentator, and an outspoken advocate for radical honesty and examined nuance. She’s a fan of all manner of media, from open, personal, and autobiographical books about growing up outside cultural norms to TLC’s juggernaut of a franchise, 90 Day Fiancé. (She has said the latter is “accessible and terrible and absolutely the show of the decade.”) She also possesses a laser-like ability to explore difficult issues, from fatphobia’s racist history to what our love of horrible protagonists on television says about us as a viewing public.
Like millions of American viewers, Gay has a love-hate relationship with HGTV and home renovation television. She’s become fixated on the comforting warmth of one-hour home makeovers, like many of us who are happily sit home and judge the marriages and relationship dynamics of couples looking to buy a bland forever space on House Hunters. (When the show featured its first throuple last February, Gay was all over it.)
But Gay has also pushed beyond just blankly absorbing what’s being presented on HGTV. She’s synthesized theses about how economic forces, racist undertones, and questionable relationship dynamics are all at play on the network. She’s written essays about what Tiny House Hunters says about Americans’ increasing inability to purchase a home, and frequently speaks publicly about her ongoing fascination with the flimsy commercialism of a lot of what’s on the network.
With all that in mind and with an eye to our recent Why We Love about home renovation television, The A.V. Club talked to Roxanne Gay about what she loves—and loves to hate—on HGTV.
The A.V. Club: How did you get into HGTV, and into home renovation television?
Roxane Gay: I think I got into the genre accidentally. My mom watches a lot of HGTV and a few years ago I broke my ankle and she came to take care of me for the first couple of weeks. HGTV was on all the time, and I was immobile. I was held hostage, and there is a very specific narrative arc to these shows. They are designed to keep you watching. I just always found myself really interested in seeing how they would take a disaster of a home or a room and make it into something really… well, most of the time, really beautiful. I’ve been watching HGTV ever since.
AVC: What shows do you find yourself watching the most?
RG: I watch a lot of House Hunters just because it’s absurd. You always have these people with strange jobs who somehow have $800, $900,000… $3 million dollar budgets. Actually, to be fair, House Hunters does show houses from $100,000 to $5,000,000. So they do generally offer a broad range.
You know, I’ll watch whatever is on. I watch a lot of Home Town because I think that they’re the Chip and Joanna Gaines replacement. I watched a lot of Fixer Upper.
Sometimes I watch Property Brothers, but they’re just exhausting with all of their schtick. Sometimes I just think, “Okay guys, we get it. You’re fucking brothers and you have this routine. Thank you very much.”
It’s hard to say what’s my favorite, but I watch a lot of Beach Front Bargain Hunt, Caribbean Life, Mexican Living… or something like that. All of these little shows where people go to buy property in exotic locations or on the water.
AVC: The houses are always so bad, though. Tile floors and bad plaster treatments on the walls.
RG: It’s very cathartic to judge people in their bad taste… The thing is, the shows are all a facade. Having seen what good construction is and having bought a house that was flipped, that was done well, it takes a long time to do something well and it takes money. The idea that you can renovate a house beautifully under ridiculous time constraints for a really minuscule budget and then end up with a good product is just ludicrous. Like Flip Or Flop, who would buy those homes? Every time I see them, I just think, “Oh my god. Don’t buy that piece of shit.” It’s totally a terrible house, even though it looks cute.
AVC: Flip Or Flop houses, you also know they might look good for maybe two years and then they’re going to look dated. It’s like when you see a house from the Trading Spaces era of television, you instantly know that design was from the early 2000s.
RG: Yeah, a lot of the designs simply don’t hold up. One of the big problems with Flip Or Flop is that they don’t have good taste, but they act like they do. And then they just go to an emporium where they can get the cheapest goods and they slap it up and they’re like, “oh, design.”
I have no design skills, but I also don’t pretend that I have any design skills. I know my lane and they don’t know their lane. They really genuinely think that they’re these amazing real estate and design experts. And HGTV allows them this delusion for some reason.
AVC: One thing you rarely see on Flip Or Flop that you do see on other shows is them saying, “We have to rewire this whole house because it’s dangerous.” You do see that on shows like Property Brothers, which is why I now know the phrase “knob-and-tube.” It feels like everything they do on Flip Or Flop is cosmetic.
RG: They do sometimes on Flip Or Flop say, “We have to redo the foundation. We have to put in a new electric panel.” They seem to at least be aware. But you never see that with Chip and Joanna and the Home Town kids.
When you buy a 70, 80, 90-year-old house for $20,000, perhaps there will be some issues there. Just a guess. So it would be really useful if they would talk about that.
The thing about those shows is that they make you think, “I just need to go to Home Depot and get a couple of tools and some wood and I can renovate my home,” and, you know, I get that. It’s like Jeopardy! It makes you think you’re smarter than you are. These shows make you think you’re more capable than you are. That home renovation is within reach, but not really. Contractors exist for a reason.
AVC: There’s some argument that the foreclosure crisis was fueled in part because of people watching networks like HGTV and thinking “I could flip a house and have rental income” without realizing the amount of money that would take. Then, when the bills ultimately came due, because it wasn’t their actual house, they just walked away and left abandoned flips. What do you think about that idea?
RG: I think that it’s unfair to put all of that responsibility on HGTV. A lot of it was more on American culture and American greed and the idea that home ownership and real estate investment is the golden key. There’s a lot about this culture that encourages people to own homes, and I don’t think there’s enough conversation around how difficult homeownership is yet. The buck stops with you. You’re responsible for everything. I bought my first house two years ago, and I had never been in a position where I could buy a house before that. And I would never understand how people bought a house because it’s just so hard in L.A.
The first day I lived [in my new house] the toilets exploded and I just thought, “Wow, I really, really made a mistake.” Because I had to figure out how to call a plumber, and then I had to clean it all up because there’s no landlord that’s coming to save you. And so I think there’s just not enough attention paid to the realities of owning a home. It’s just more of the excitement of flipping it and decorating it and getting it.
The shows certainly do gloss over the pain in the ass that is homeownership, as well as the cost. You don’t hear about maintenance costs and taxes, which are never talked about. I had no idea. And part of that is my own ignorance, but nobody really talks about these things. When you hear, “property taxes,” I don’t think it really registers like, oh, you might be paying $30,000 a year just to own a home, in addition to your mortgage every month.
So, there are a lot of people who can be held responsible for that. It can’t only be HGTV.
AVC: I have a friend who bought a house in a market that ultimately exploded, and now his taxes have more than doubled on his house to the point where he might not be able to afford them. It’s like, “Cool, I made money on this house, but I might have to move out of this area—the town I meant to lay down roots in—because I can’t afford my space anymore.”
RG: It can be really overwhelming, and I don’t think enough people sit down and really plan out what the house is actually going to cost them over time. And then, of course, contingency.
I put the responsibility on banks because they give people money. I think if there’s one entity that should be blamed other than banks, it’s Airbnb because they really made it seem like, “Hey, just go buy that house over there and flip it and earn all of this income.” But nobody ever imagined what would happen if Airbnb were to collapse. What would happen if there was, for example, a pandemic where people stopped traveling? Now we’re seeing a lot of people who are about to be foreclosed on because they bought one or three or five properties that they used as Airbnb income properties and they’re over leveraged. I have some real empathy for those people, but I also just think, “Why did you think you could own five homes and and carry it like that?” What’s the contingency plan here? I don’t know.
AVC: What are your thoughts on towns like Waco, Texas and Laurel, Mississippi that have become the focal points of shows like Fixer Upper and Home Town? In some ways, it’s great, because it’s giving these towns a new zap of life, but in others they’re basically making these towns into these weird sort of model home communities.
RG: Again, I think people don’t inform themselves. I’m from the middle of nowhere and I’ve lived most of my life in small towns. I think that people think, “It’s going to be ‘aw, shucks’ glamour.” One thing that Home Town does very well is make it seem like Laurel, Mississippi, is a place where you might want to live and get to know your neighbors, even though I think they’ve maybe had two black couples on their show…
AVC: And one of them was an actor from Los Angeles who was just buying a home to rent out.
RG: Yeah, and that’s in Mississippi. I think it’s just so different that it’s dishonest, but they really do make it seem great.
It’s the whole “here’s a local artisan and here’s the couple that owns a bar. Here’s a guy moving back to be the town doctor.” It’s really manipulative and it taps into this nostalgic idea that if we just get back to small town values, everything is going to be okay for white people.
Chip and Joanna [Gaines], I think, are hilarious. I’m actually writing a book about this. Joanna is the brains of that operation. She is a barracuda and very ambitious and, you know, respected, I guess.
The challenge with Chip and Joanna is that they have wildly changed the value of the homes in Waco, which has left the people from there, the working class community, behind. They have priced out the working class in their own community because they’ve made Waco a destination. It’s a problem. It’s a mess. And I think it’s well and good, like “yay, capitalism!” But at what cost?
That this entire town basically now exists to serve the egos of the Gaines family… that’s something. If they were just “aw, shucks,” this couple with four or five thousand children, it would be one thing. But they’re also Evangelical Christians, which is their right—I actually have no problem with people’s faith. But their pastor is extraordinarily homophobic and even though HGTV is one of the more diverse networks, I don’t think we’ve ever seen a queer couple on the show.
On the show, they make it seem like they’re all inclusive. But outside of the show, they put their time, energy, and money into a very evangelical way of thinking and seeing the world. They clearly believe in the prosperity gospel. It’s a lot to take in. And I feel bad for the people in Waco who are just like, “I just want to live here and forget about David Koresh.”
HGTV is very good at making you think that what they put on the screen is the whole of the story, and that’s not the case. One of the shows, Windy City Rehab, [the host, Alison Victoria] is facing several lawsuits for crap construction. Her houses sell for a million or more because it’s Chicago and she buys these pretty large homes and you would never know what’s going on.
AVC: When we talked to the Property Brothers for Why We Love, they said that before COVID they were working on something like 50 houses a year, and I remember thinking that there’s no way they’re ever there. It’s just when they’re on-screen. They can’t even have their hands in a lot of the designs, really.
RG: They’re not even doing a 20th of the work. No, even that is too generous. They come in, they do their thing, and they leave while the actual work gets done. If I was one of those construction workers, I would be pissed.
There is only one house person on these shows, and he’s not on HGTV. He’s on DIY. It’s Mike Holmes. Mike Holmes is the guy. He actually talks about the nuts and bolts of home construction and he fixes problems. He doesn’t really focus on design. He just fixes homes. It’s just so addictive, because he’s got that soothing Canadian voice and you just feel like, “If my house is fucked up, Mike Holmes is going to fix it.” I get the entertainment value of some of these other shows, but I wish more shows would have some of [Mike Holmes’] gravitas because he has a good sense of humor.
AVC: It seems HGTV the network really thrives on really bland individuals.
RG: It’s people that you can project some shit onto.
AVC: Even when we see quirky people, it’s like “Look at me! I’m rockabilly!”
RG: It’s always that type of specific family with alternative children who are into Wicca. It’s like, “Yeah, good for you.”
AVC: Even the throuple that was on House Hunters…
RG: That was awesome.
AVC: It was awesome that people were getting to see what that meant in some sense, but it was also a very specific safe-seeming kind of throuple, and they were using very specific, kind of safe-for-the-general-public terminology. It was like a sanitized version of what it means to be in that kind of relationship.
RG: Right. Anyone who’s hung out with polyamorists knows that’s not representative of the community at all.
AVC: That’s why, to me, I’m almost more interested in what we’re not seeing on HGTV. Why aren’t certain couples cast, and why are we only seeing what we’re seeing?
RG: Again, I don’t think this is just an HGTV problem… [But] HGTV is not only trying to sell us a vision of home ownership and the like, it is also trying to sell us a vision of who deserves to own a home, and that is generally someone who is physically fit and conventionally attractive and thin and who has good enough credit to buy a home. And then has money for renovations.
AVC: If you were to design a home renovation show, what it would be like?
RG: Part of me thinks that I would have a show for people like me who don’t know anything about construction and have very little interest in construction and/or interior design, but also have very strong opinions. It would be “How does someone like me go about renovating a home or a room when I am not of this world?” And then we’d talk about the real costs, because, you know, [home renovation shows often] do this glossing over of the budget where they’ll say “My budget is $115,000 for renovations,” and [the hosts will say] “The bathroom is $25,000 and the kitchen is $25,000 and…”
Fixer Upper is notorious for doing that, and I always look at it and think, “Wait, what?” What did the costs actually break down to? How much is labor? How much is material? What do the materials cost? I would just love to see that, but I don’t think people really want to watch that. Another part of me just want to see whole home renovations. I’m tired of only seeing, like, two rooms. Show me what the fuck else is going on in this house, thank you very much. Because Chip and Joanna actually renovate the whole house, but they only put three rooms on the show.
AVC: They also fill the house with Magnolia Homes furniture that they probably then just take back.
RG: You can buy it from them, but if not they take it back.
AVC: Sometimes on Home Town, for instance, they’re using some of the peoples’ furniture, but I want a show that says “Cabinets and countertops and appliances are going to be $30,000. If you want chairs under that island, you’re going to have to pick. Do you want the $99 chairs or the $300 chairs or the $700 chairs?” I want to know how much people are paying for their couches.
RG: Exactly. Go to IKEA once in a while, like most of us. There is no shame in IKEA.
[Chip and Joanna Gaines have spun Fixer Upper off onto their own HGTV sister station, the Magnolia Network, scheduled to launch sometime this year. New episodes of Fixer Upper: Welcome Home are now available on Discovery+—Ed.]
132 Comments
Roxane Gay is amazing. That is all.
Laurel, MS is certainly not a place that most people want to live.
As a very gay very NYC dude, I’d be afraid of getting hatecrimed anywhere within 1000 miles of that town. No thanks!
I live about 45 miles away. As a very gay dude, you’d have no problems here. It’s the very NYC dude part that would get you in trouble.
Well, to each his own!
I’d worry about living somewhere where you can still legally be fired for being gay, youth conversion therapy is still legal, the majority of residents oppose marriage equality, and you can still use the “gay panic” defense to legally get off from murder charges as long as you can prove you thought they were gay as you murdered them. I’m sure the rent’s a lot cheaper, though!
Home Town has had quite a few diverse buyers, including LGBTQ couples. And they do address structure issues as well as not decorating in the hideously trendy style of so many of the others. And they certainly never pretend Laurel is anything other than a small town with issues. No one should buy a house from Flip or Flop. You know that’s a pig done up for RuPaul. All the rest of the critique of these shows is spot on.
Adding: Richard T. Jones and his wife bought a house to fix up and SELL to a low income home buyer. They didn’t make any money – just fronted the cash for the purchase and renovation. Home Town is one of the few I don’t get irritated at for being completely out of touch and lily-white cis (and all surface ‘fluffing’). Ben and Erin seem remarkably progressive for a Southern white, married Christian couple.
Yeah, I like them a million times more than Chip and Joanna, who just irritate the hell out of me.
I want to punch him literally every time I see him anymore. What an obnoxious twat. I’m not nice.
Yeah, and what is up with Joanna’s obsession with shiplap?
Joanna gets a lot of guff for shiplap, but it’s an inexpensive, easy to install material. Since it’s already in many of the houses they work on, that can take the cost down to free. It’s a little like exposed brick in an industrial loft: it’s texture, it looks rustic and it’s free. Why wouldn’t you?As soon as it caught on as a part of her brand, she really ran with it. I’m seeing less and less of it in her newer jobs, to be fair.
I know, I was kinda kidding…the shiplap isn’t as bad as that same giant Magnolia brand clock in every other house. 😀
Decorating with platitudes is their worst offense.
Yes, AND, they didn’t know the final owner when they designed the house, then a big tornado came through town, damaged the house before the owner could move in and they fixed it up a second time, re-designed with him in mind. Hometown is definitely the best of the bunch. Their designs don’t seem all exactly the same, they care about the character of the houses, and I do think that Erin does have decent taste.
Yeah, I like Home Town because they do cover those issues. Gay is full of shit with that comment. They discuss problems that they have in the renovation and deal with actual construction issues. I mean the show actually shows them replacing/renovating plumbing, rebuilding porches, repairing holes in floors. And as you noted, they said on the show the house was going to be for a low-income buyer. I don’t think the author or Gay has actually watched the show. Man, the AV Club writers are some lazy hacks. Another good thing about Home Town is that they also don’t make a fake dramatic “will we get this done” like Property Brothers. Property Brothers is the worst: You’re buying a fifty year old house; let’s spend your total budget amount. And then the buyer’s shock, SHOCK, when there are problems with the house.
It took me a while to warm up to Home Town because i was turned off by Erin’s terrible paintings, but the cast really won me over in the end. Like, you just want someone to love you the way Mike loves floors.
I was on their store’s website a few days ago and apparently you too can own a super basic watercolor portrait of your house for only $350!https://www.laurelmercantile.com/products/custom-house-portrait(The portrait giftings really are the worst part of any Home Town episode.)
Woof. Well good for them if someone wants an Erin original and is willing to pay that much for it. I appreciate the hustle honestly. But those things are terrible, and yes the worst part of the ep.*Erin pulls painting out of the drawer, says spiel about this is now your house. Homeowner is like, thanks, let’s leave that in the drawer please
I have watched the show. I believe it was rent-to-own, which is why I went that way.
How dare you criticise an ‘advocate of examined nuance’, whatever the flying banana that means. And why is so much of the unintentionally hilariously pretentious intro blurb underlined? It’s like some kid has gone through it with a marker pen. Rather more on topic, can I commend the UK’s Your Garden Made Perfect? No digging, just virtual imagery.
Yes. Granted I think I’m predisposed towards Ben and Erin because they’re from Mississippi and watching Home Town feels like an hour long phone call with my family back home. But their show feels very Mississippi in a good way (there are plenty of bad ways) – the contractors and subs aren’t caricatures (Mike’s teeth aside) and the couples who are featured feel like real people and families. (The young queer couple could have been any queer girl I went to school with.) Ben and Erin are religious but they do seem to have that good Methodist quality of letting other people do their thing.But also I have fond childhood memories of driving through Laurel, and it really is nice to see it come back into prosperity. I hope it doesn’t end up pricing people out of that town though.
Also hopping in on the Hometown love: Ben and Erin are adorable and their happiness makes me feel happy, which is an odd sensation because I’m an edgy shitposter bent on freaking out the squares. He’s a big grizzly bear but a total sweetie in her hands. Daaaaw.
They got me through a terrible case of Covid – I watched ALL of their shows again and anything new or the “fake” new shows where they comment on them – I remember thinking if the virus killed me I’d want to come back as their kid. I may have been feverish at the time. Couple goals. Really.
Grats on your survival! I just got vaccinated last month, but I’m still mega paranoid about getting infected. I’m trying so hard to stay safe, but it feels like my whole town doesn’t give AF anymore, and want things to go back to normal. Kids having parties, co-workers traveling to Florida and Vegas, a stupid push to reopen movie theaters. Other people have written of it more eloquently than me, but I can’t believe how badly we’ve failed ourselves as a country on the individual level.
Just going to put this out there – it might depend based on what market you live in, but Airbnb operators deserve zero sympathy for being overextended now. They swooped in, took a bunch of properties off the rental or residential market, because it was more profitable for them. If COVID means any properties have to be liquidated cheap, and it ends with someone actually living in it, at least a tiny bit of good will have come out of this.
And it’s not airbnb’s fault either.
Well now I want a House Hunters International marathon with Roxane Gay (the clearly superior variant which went unmentioned). It’s the best of both worlds: actually-sometimes cool houses in desirable cities, and the most infuriating people you’ve ever seen on television. It’s almost worth hearing the most basic woman on Earth dismissively say “hmm, it just doesn’t have that Paris charm” (Really? You’re moving from DAYTON, OHIO) to see inside three lovely Parisian apartments with super-high ceilings and expansive windows. Roxane! Hit me up.
Oh man, my favorite is when white people move to SE Asia to “follow their bliss” and then complain about how small/non-western the spaces are.
“Our kitchen in Texas is bigger than the living room!” To be fair, most of the dialogue is prompted by producers, which is why every episode is a carbon copy of the last. Like, it strains credulity when every couple boils down to identical “I want this!” and “he wants this!” narratives knowing that 99% of the time they’re already living in one of the places they’re looking at. And yet! And yet I watch, and frequently scream at the TV.
Yeah, I know that House Hunters/HHI is heavily produced, and they’re looking for some kind of conflict in the couple, who already have a place picked out/under contract. But you can still see people’s personalities shine through a lot of the time, and you can tell which couples are gonna end up divorced within 5 years.
My husband and I would be the perfect HH couple, because while we love each other very much and agree on pretty much everything that’s actually important in life, we have absolutely astronomically different taste when it comes to aesthetics. i.e. I have taste; he has none but seems to think he does.
I do this for the couples that aren’t married yet and are buying a house together.
My favorite part of any HGTV show is when you get a glimpse into the couples’ dynamic and get the sense that quibbling over crown moulding maybe isn’t the real reason they’re being short with one another.
I want to believe that it’s not all a show, and that the producers of every single series have a Shoah-length supercut of couples touring homes or looking at renovations while not making eye contact, passively sniping at one another, until somebody finally says “I don’t want to have this conversation on camera.”
I mean, you’re starting with people who have enthusiastically volunteered to be on television, so the pool is already kind of … icky. But yeah, it sure seems like a lot of couples really f*cking hate each other!
“I don’t know, John. Those stairs look like you could easily trip and fall.”“Well, as long as Steve from your work isn’t around so you accidentally land on his dick again, Carol.”
There was a House Hunters International on last night, specifically one where the couple in question (who’d moved to London) looked back at the show they did 3 years ago … and it turned out they’d split up! And oh MAN was it awkward and hilarious to watch – he was super salty and making passive-aggressive comments and she was getting emotional. And they had that British pseudo-real-estate-agent guy on too, and he seemed really uncomfortable.
“Why is the washer/dryer in the kitchen?”
There’s a British show (A Place In The Sun or something) that has the worst of what we Aussies call “Whinging Poms” – xenophobic, arrogant, small-minded trash who somehow see themselves as citizens of the world – move to Europe and just spend all their time bitching about the local customs and design of the place they chose to move to. “What d’you mean they’re not comin’ in to build my pool today? What the hell kinda holiday is St. Augustine’s Day? Who ever ‘eard of St. Augustine’s Day?! That’s not a holiday!” Anyway, the one good thing about Brexit is that Europe is going to have to put up with these types less, I guess.
I wouldn’t want a wet room bath or a kitchen without a stove, but I at least know enough not to be surprised by them in SE Asia, or by a door in the kitchen in Europe. If you ask for local living, you should at least look up what local living is. (E.g. if there’s both a wet kitchen and a dry kitchen you’re supposed to hire someone to keep the wet kitchen.)
I also love “the fridge is so small!” complaints.
It’s weird that Americans consider a fridge part of the house.
*shrug* appliances usually come with the house in the US, and so especially in the kitchen it’s part of what sells the house – an updated kitchen with new appliances goes a long way.
Yeah, House Hunters International is so much more interesting than the original. I don’t give a shit about some asshole buying another McMansion in Texas. I want to see culture shock!
I tend to watch House Hunters when it’s taking place near where I’ve lived or someone that I’ve been to. I guess then I feel like I have an idea of the real estate in that area. One of the House Hunters Renovation shows was practically a stone’s throw from my house, and I never knew about it while it was happening. I recognized the house behind the house being fixed, which was a teensy bit fun.
I do enjoy the Chicago/Chicagoland shows; there was one memorable one where a woman who’d been living on Michigan Avenue complaining that the house in Lincoln Park was “practically the suburbs” and my husband and I just died laughing.
I hate House Hunters International because of this. I can’t believe these people are letting themselves be this dumb on tv. My favorite iteration of that franchise is House Hunters Renovation because I get the best of House Hunters and they show you all the stuff they’re fixing without doing all the drama of a surprise crumbling foundation.
It may just be availability error, but it seems like International has more regular agents than Domestic, so they have more experience dishing on their clients which I think is the best part. It’s annoying when the couple complains about each other, but it is excellent when the agent is like “Have you two ever met?”I just watched the episode where they revisited the clients from a previous episode in London where the guy proposed at the end of the episode, and Richard Blanco was like “I should have expected it wouldn’t last right there”. The guy, who was the one who originally wanted to move to London, has since moved back to Canada without the woman that he moved to London with.The agent in Paris is also a regular, and she is always like Why are you even in Paris if you don’t want anything Parisian.
Also, it seems like the insufferability is of a different type on International than Domestic. International clients seem more naively clueless while Domestic are aggressively clueless. But many of both should not be allowed out of their house by their parents.
Nothing on HGTV is remotely realistic to the real world of home purchases, renovations, or maintenance. I’m a real estate agent and its sheer torture to watch five seconds of the network. By the way, just about any article online that provides information about real estate is absolute crap. Those “What your Realtor doesn’t want you to know!” ones are laughable. It makes me realize just how wrong every other aspect of entertainment and media (even hard media) must be about just any other subject (business, medicine, science) that I’m not intimately familiar with.
Every time a new homeowner pulls up some shitty-ass carpet to find the house originally had cypress floors, I call bullshit. Mostly because that never happened to me. But also because it happens in EVERY. SINGLE. EPISODE. of EVERY. HOME. RENOVATION. SHOW.
To be fair, it does happen in real life on occasion. Our house was built in 1941 and desperately needed a kitchen reno. We pulled out the kitchen tile fully believing we would be laying down another tile, but lo and behold underneath we found original Heart Pine floors. We sanded those down rather than putting new tile.
WHAT FUCKING MONSTER TILES OVER HARDWOOD FLOORS!!!!?
What I’ve heard (anecdotally) is that in the old days in Florida, longleaf pine was abundant. Heart pine floors were considered “cheap” flooring and thus it wasn’t a big deal to tile (or carpet) over them.Now it is sought after because logging rendered longleaf pine nearly extinct.
I’ve pulled up old carpeting to find refinishable hardwood floors in two houses, and once rolled up and stored decent new carpeting to expose the hardwood in an apartment. It happens.(I’ve also pulled up old carpeting and popped up misbegotten old tiles and so forth to find nasty subflooring or just swirls of old mastic, of course…)
One of the more amusing things I once saw in a house (can’t quite remember where) was laminate over carpet, which is just nuts.
When I painted my daughter’s room I discovered that the previous owners had painted over wallpaper. So I started to take the wallpaper down, only to find another layer of painted wallpaper. I decided to burn the house, because it was obviously cursed.
I have a 100 year old house with wainscoting. I thought it was original. Then we redid the bathroom and discovered that it covered some hilarious layers of wallpaper – one was bright orange faux tiles.I also discovered that someone patched a leak from the upstairs shower with a newspaper.
“Holy shit this house is just constructed out of painted wallpaper, don’t take that section out, it’s a load bearing floral print”
(I’ve also pulled up old carpeting and popped up misbegotten old tiles and so forth to find nasty subflooring or just swirls of old mastic, of course…)That’s the part I’ve never seen on one of these shows…
I don’t understand carpet – as in ‘just don’t get it’. It’s literally the filthiest thing in a home; there’s no getting away from it. It’s like a dirty diaper, especially if you have pets (and kids).
It’s soft and showed the world that you could afford a vacuum.
When you live in a climate that gets cold, carpet just makes a home more comfortable. I don’t want to walk around on cold floors in January in Chicago. Sure, area rugs are a thing, but they need to be vacuumed just as often as carpets! Also, we take our shoes off at the door, so nobody’s tromping outside dirt onto our carpet (well, except the dog I guess, but he’s small and low-shedding and we wipe his feet off).
The very funny think about wood floors is it’s usually pretty easy to tell if the floors under a carpet are going to be wood or ply wood just by how they feel under your feet and the height of the carpet. It’s also very easy to pull up a corner to see beforehand. House Hunters single handedly led to a huge number of buyers, regardless of budget, thinking they needed an “open concept kitchen”. Try being a regular cook in an open kitchen, and see how the rest of your house smells.
Yes! Huge fan of isolated, closed concept kitchens.
It’s like how Antiques Roadshow or Storage Wars will convince you that everyone’s grandma was best friends with young Picasso or really into Fabrege eggs. It turns out most people have a pile of worthless crap collecting dust, but that doesn’t make for good TV.
What, you don’t start out with a sense of drama by showing your clients three or four houses that don’t meet their clearly stated criteria for size, location, and price?(Yeah, we’re lookin’ at you, Love It or List It… and meanwhile, I don’t think most experienced renovators ignore the entire concept of schedule and budget contingency so that every hidden problem becomes a crisis either.)
What I usually try to do is show them exactly what they asked for, and then they tell me they decided to go to New Jersey or Connecticut instead.
I will say that once a client renovating their home found a rot issue (not really discoverable during the inspection) after purchasing, which did hit the budget pretty hard. It felt a little like a Love it or List it moment. But nobody in the history of ever has had that weird three person conversation with their designer in the road, just down from the house.
There’s a whole pop culture thing where people who don’t want to answer questions about their jobs (sex workers, but also anyone) joke about saying they’re accountants, because they think no one outside of that field will ask questions or kniw anythubg about it. It just proves that they’re not as clever as they think they are, because whenever someine hears I’m an accountant they have a million questions for me. I had to explain the recent stock market thing a mullion times (it’s actually a bad thing to sink hedge funds that state teacher pensions are invested in! Everyone who had a cute hot take was wrong about what was really going on). This is a tangent but yeah, pop culture people often think they have other jobs alllll figured out and it results in a spread of a lot of misinformation.
Love it or List always gets me, there is always a problem that the need to find 5000 dollars for but yet they have to have new furniture and granite countertops. I’m sure they are cheaper options for somethings.
I really enjoy Good Bones, and I’d love to see Roxane’s take on that (I’m also a big fan of hers). For those who haven’t watched it, it’s a mother-daughter team in Indianapolis who buy the shittiest houses they can find and renovate them for the neighborhood — they seem truly invested in restoring neighborhoods and are focused on ensuring the houses are first and foremost affordable and renovated well, not just pretty for the cameras. Obviously it’s possible there’s some performance there and I don’t know how much hands-on work they do when the cameras are off, but I appreciate their mission.
Very much same. I live in rural Indiana. As much as I love the dynamic between Mina and Karen (who reminds me so much of my late mom it’s almost hard to watch sometimes), I do worry they are rehabbing parts of Indy out of the price range of the people who kinda need them to stay cheaper neighborhoods. Every time they say “this is an up and coming neighborhood” I worry about who’s getting left “down and going.”
They do seem to take the neighborhoods into account, though — they’re not building $500k homes in a $150k neighborhood. Which is not to say they’re perfect or that they aren’t unintentionally driving values too high.
I kinda liked the older seasons of Great Designs just because they weren’t shy about admitting that building your own home is costly, time consuming, and doesn’t always work out.When you see a family of five living in a mobile home while the wife looks about 2 seconds away from murdering her idiot husband who decided to gamble their life savings, that’s realism right there.Also, I live in Waco, and yeah the property prices here are frustrating as heck. Great for everyone who already had a house, but everyone else is looking at houses that now costs twice as much as they should. Which stinks cause we all know it won’t last so you’re guaranteed to get bent over if you buy now and plan to move.
I think that it’s unfair to put all of that responsibility on HGTV.All of the responsibility? Sure, that’s unfair. A substantial share of the responsibility? Completely fair.
Maybe the responsibility falls 100% on the people who buy houses and can’t afford them, and don’t do any homework on what it actually takes to own a house?
GTFOH with that “people make decisions in a vacuum” mentality. HGTV sold the idea that “anyone” can turn 75k into 200k and then 200k into 500k etc. with their house flipping shows. When people are consistently bombarded with bad information some of the responsibility falls on the presenters of that bad information.
If someone truly believed that “anyone” could do that based on a show on HGTV…that’s some Grade A stupidity right there. No one is forcing anyone to watch HGTV. C’mon man.
Lol.
This is one of the best things I have read on here in awhile. So much of this is true! Small towns suck for the most part! Home ownership scares the shit out of me! I would read a Hitchcock/Truffaut version of this.
I understand that it can be frustrating to watch people shop for $2 million houses in such dire economic times.But, there are HH episodes that feature some young couple looking for a ranch in the heartland with a $200k budget. Watch two of those – they’re so boring – and you’ll be begging for the spectacle of rich people with questionable taste.
This is absolutely true. These shows are selling the fantasy. I don’t want to watch a couple pick between three crummy houses that look just like mine. I wan tot make fun of rich people and their bad taste.
It’s exactly why I never go Zillow Shopping for 250K houses. That shit is boring. I want to see how super rich people are living and then make myself feel better because I have better taste than them.
This ALL DAY. Those episodes are just the worst! And there are plenty of them.
What I’ve learned from House Hunters and from visiting my in-laws during their brief time living in Florida is that EVERY nice house in South Florida looks the same. They all have Spanish tile roofs and huge entry ways and that cold tile floor everywhere and a screened in lanai/Florida room of some size, are almost all ranch/one-story, and they’re all boring.
From time to time I look at mansions on Realtor.com just to mock the people’s taste. I don’t know why it makes me feel better, but it does.
On a related note, if anyone can explain to me the huge range hood with scrolls on the side, I would appreciate that.
Presumably *wooden* scrollwork at that!
I believe it means either, “I want you to think I’m old Money!” or, “My interior designer can do whatever they want as long as it shuts my spouse up”.
Ornate range hoods and a blacksplash with lots of crevices = “I do not know how to cook and I am never going to actually use this range for anything other than heating up canned goods”
Porous backsplash, no less, if that’s real sandstone. Though, let’s be honest, it’s probably a mildly flammable resin.
Every time I see a kitchen with a stone backsplash like that, I think “you don’t cook, do you?” At least with ceramic tile you can spray that shit down, but how the hell do you get tomato sauce and grease out of stone like that?
On a related note, if anyone can explain to me the huge range hood with scrolls on the side, I would appreciate that. I think it’s to make the Thomas Kinkade painting in the living room “pop” more…was that too mean?
Definitely not too mean.
Definitely not too mean.
I really liked the unfortunately named show “Rehab Addict”. I hope Nicole Curtis has gotten help for her addition to rehabbing. She seemed like a nice lady.
I think you folks would love the British daytime TV staple Homes Under the Hammer, (mostly) low budget fixer-upper which is a tad more eccentric, if no less mercenary than shows like Fixer Upper.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/feb/14/big-dreams-and-basement-flats-how-homes-under-the-hammer-conquered-daytime-tvMy wife obssessively watches Fixer Upper, in part just to be gobsmacked at how much real estate you can get. 5 bedroom, 3 bathroom, detached house for $80,000. You’d be lucky to get a one bedroom bedsitter for that in most of the UK.
Next January, DIY Network is becoming the Magnolia Network. I hope that Mike Holmes will move to HGTV or at least, Discovery+. My brother was going to be on Lakefront Bargain Hunt, but the previous owner of the house died in a car accident a few weeks before closing so the timing didn’t work out.
Quick question about the throuple. I didn’t see that episode but how is it that,“Anyone who’s hung out with polyamorists knows that’s not representative of the community at all.” ?
Most of my poly friends (or really, my wife’s poly friends) seem depressed and kind of unhappy, would that be better to show rather than people who seem happy, apparently?
There’s always one person who wishes it could just be a couple, and it gets messy if any of them start wanting kids, which tends to involve only two people on a biological level.
I don’t know a ton of poly people, but I did get kind of uncomfortable vibes from the people on the show – the third who got added to the existing couple seemed like she was being othered a fair amount and I felt bad for her.
I would totally watch a series in which Mike Holmes goes through the houses featured in certain other renovation shows and shakes his head sadly while pointing out every place where they cut corners or made a bad decision or papered over some infrastructure issue and now it has to be re-done…
I think that was a thing on This Old House, or at least on their website.
Mike Holmes is a drama queen. He goes down to the studs for every fucking thing. Sometimes he rips those out and puts in treated (WHY??). Then he spray foams everything. Meanwhile millions and millions of people live happy lives with marginal or less-than-ideal setups. That show is so dumb.Basically, Mike Holmes is like someone who has a $1000 Steam gift card and buys all the DLC at once. It’s not needed and nobody fucking lives that way.
Mike Holmes lead to many home buyers becoming deathly afraid of the slightest problems in the house they were buying. Every single house has something, it’s part of being a homeowner.
On the other hand, I’m grateful to have the right language to curse out the drunken inbred idiots who built my kitchen.
That actually happened in an episode of “Rock the Block” from a year or so ago. It’s a series where 4 HGTV designers competed against each other by redoing identical houses. Mike came in and reviewed everyone’s kitchen remodel, and his critiques were great. But yeah, I’d watch him do that every day.
So you had a conversation with a friend you hold in high regard. That makes her an “Icon”? I guess its all relevant to our own individual world. This article is just random banter between friends. Just like my comment for all of you, the woman above will be forgotten moment for me.
Icon = a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol or as worthy of veneration. I guess everything is debatable. An icon though?
You’re fucking brothersSo you get the twincest vibe too?
Eesh.
I thought it meant they were fucking OTHER brothers.
“I don’t think there’s enough conversation around how difficult homeownership is yet. The buck stops with you. You’re responsible for everything.”OMFG. This is YOUR LIFE and yes indeed you are responsible for it. I’m not a Trumper but this shit is what gets conservatives into a froth. Pre-Internet you could blame things on “I didn’t know”. But for 15 years now, nearly all information is free. People can get angry at the banks all they want, but that’s not going to stop them from buying a house when they shouldn’t. People need to take shit more seriously. Less binge watching and more hitting the fucking books. Less worrying about getting a house, and more worry about whether owning is right for you.
No one in Chicago likes Windy City Rehab or the host (I don’t even know her name). Everyone knows she’s a piece of shit who does shoddy work and scams the people she works with. I have no idea how she still has a show.
But nobody ever imagined what would happen if Airbnb were to collapse. What would happen if there was, for example, a pandemic where people stopped traveling?Thanks to all of the bailouts in the wake of the mortgage crisis of the 2000’s it’s not surprising that people just assume someone will just come and rescue them. I’m sure many would blame the banks for lending them all that money, so it’s the bank’s job to save them. If the bank can’t do that then the government should save the day.
There is only one house person on these shows, and he’s not on HGTV. He’s on DIY. It’s Mike Holmes. Mike Holmes is the guy.Allow me to make a pitch for Maine Cabin Masters, also on DIY.It sounds somewhat esoteric (fishing / hunting cabins & cottages on Maine lakeshores), but they do show practical home building, carpentry work, and landscaping. They’ve actually had some enlightening discussions on roof pitches and roof flashing, of all things.
Cabin Masters is the bomb
I would like to recommend “Cottage Life,” which is a sort of Canadian HGTV/Nat Geo/History blend that I enjoy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottage_Life_(TV_channel). Last time I was in Canada they had a marathon of a show about auctioning big farm equipment like combines, and I watched that for hours.
I live in a rural town and there’s a twice-yearly farm equipment auction. I must say, I’ve always wanted to go, just to see how much this stuff goes for. AND then I wonder if I could afford one of the big tractors that take up both lanes of traffic. AND then I imagine myself picking my kids up at school in one (once in a while, a kid gets picked up in one and my kids are like “that’s cool”. )
The epitome of DIY shows
I’m glad she’s talking about the actual cost of homeownership, because generations have grown up and into their thirties believing that owning a home is cheaper than their rent. No, it’s not. Not by a long shot. The repairs and maintenance on the inside of the home are breathtaking, and the outdoor maintenance if you have any kind of land can be crazy. (Guess how much it takes to get 2 large trees cut down so their roots don’t grow into your pipes!! Take your guess and add few grand.) And, yeah, if your toilet or septic tank explodes, it gonna be you wading around in your own shit trying to clean it up, and footing the bill for repairs. So, monthly bill might seem like less, but the overall cost is much, much more. I do think she’s being a bit unfair to Flip or Flop. I don’t know if they think they’re brilliant designers, they’ve always been pretty clear about designing so the house sells. So, trendy shit works. It’ll sell the house. Their only honest-to-god blind spot is choosing a color scheme for the house. I have no idea why they always go with “greenish baby poop,” but I’d like to let them know that no one wants their house to be that color???? I do think the show is less enjoyable now that they went through a tabloid divorce and we have to hear about them beyond squabbling about the actual house.
Citations Needed dunked on HGTV hard- they deserve it.
“The popularity of HGTV house-flipping TV shows can’t be
overstated: In the second week of July, HGTV was the fourth highest
rated cable network, behind only Fox News, MSNBC and CNN, making it the
highest rated entertainment network in the United States. Its most
prominent programming: the reliable, risk free formula of home flipping
shows. All of these shows—Flip or Flop and its many regional spinoffs,
Good Bones, Flipping 101, to name just a few—share a basic formula:
house-flippers, usually a family business in the form of a husband and
wife team or parent and child with a folksy rapport, buy a neglected
house on the cheap—cue zoom-ins on mold, water damage, decaying wood,
dust and dead bugs—that’s often in a relatively poor or gentrifying
neighborhood.They then turn it into something they describe as
“beautiful”, to be sold at a much higher price to, most likely, young
white people looking for a “funky” home in an “up-and-coming”
neighborhood. But at what cost do these glossy, get-rich-quick reality
shows entertain us? What ideologies do they promote, and how do they
erase the working class black and brown families whose housing was
condemned, and communities were systemically neglected, before the
camera’s even began rolling?On this episode—our Season 3
finale—we take a look at these shows to understand how and why HGTV
became a glorified commercial for house-flipping and gentrification,
examining its indifference to housing instability and its dead-eyed
cheerleading of “middle-class” bourgeois aspirationalism, no matter the
social cost.Our guests are culture writer Ann-Derrick Gaillot and Atlanta-based community organizer Kamau Franklin.”https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-116-the-pro-gentrification-aspirationalism-of-hgtvs-house-flipping-shows-ad142cd3a934
Roxane Gat is way more progressive than me, so I’m surprised she doesn’t have an issue with the shows filmed in exotic locales.Aren’t they always about retiree couples from the US/Canada looking to move to cheaper cost of living locations? Isn’t that exploitive?
On Home Town they are always telling folks that the electric and plumbing need to be updated. Also the actor guy who bought the house so someone could rent it, it was part of a rent to own program.
The first day, the toilets, plural, exploded? Like, all of them?
More power to you, because if that happened to me, I’d have started looking for a way to make the fire I set look like an electrical malfunction.
Here’s my HGTV story; I am a lighting designer / commercially licensed interior designer near Washington DC. Back in 2006-2007 I was contacted by a production company to consult on a show they were producing for HGTV. It was about residential lighting design and renovation construction. For people who really wanted the cool atmosphere of an architectural lighting plan in their homes. It was unpaid, but sounded like fun, so maybe two meetings in to this writing process we’re having a great time at the meetings and they ask me to host the show. I used to be a salesman, did a lot of public speaking, not camera shy, strictly average looking, 5′-8″ average stature White guy (nice hair though, thanks mom’s side of the family…) anyways, they get me a producer and we go out and film a screentest. It goes really well, they’re excited up the ladder, and send my demo off to HGTV for an official blessing. Meanwhile we schedule my clients and arrange logistics for filming in their homes. Then- nothing. “Ghosted “ in today’s parlance. I mean, we’re days from scheduled filming and suddenly I can’t get a call answered or an email replied to for days. My clients are like “WHAT is going on? You said we were going to be on TV.”
Finally a junior production person finally has the decency to respond and tells me, yeah, everyone loved your screentest and you can definitely do this, make a demo reel and sell yourself -but HGTV wants someone “different”, and being a (then) a 42 yr old, married white guy wasn’t interesting to them. So I was just dumped and the show format scrapped, just like that. They ended up filming something in LA with a gorgeous spokesmodel woman who talked about table lamps and candles. I think it only aired a single time. The only “construction” item mentioned in that show was in a bathroom and it was a violation of the National Electrical Code.
The experience turned me off so badly I never followed up. I helped them out for free. Then they made me look like a dumbass to my clients and wouldn’t even speak to me about it. I look at some of the half-wits they’ve aired over the years and I always think “I was THIS close….” just a few days from filming.
Not sure if it’s been mentioned here yet, but everyone should listen to the episode of Citations Needed podcast that breaks down these types of shows as really reinforcing gentrification, displacement, and normalizing home ownership as a commodity. I scanned this article, saw some mention of working class communities, but no where did I see the word “gentrification.”
Like others, I really like “Home Town”. Yes, it is Mississippi and maybe they are showing it in the best light possible, but these shows are not doing dark and gritty. I like it because they DO show the problems and many of the houses are realistic in price points. I think they only had a few big ticket homes. Buying a house for $50,000 and putting the same into it is way more realistic than the Flip or Flop flips that cost a million bucks.Seriously, how do these people buy these homes? Even when the buyers are diverse they have to be the 1% of each diverse group. A million dollar home? Just to get a mortgage you need at least $100,000-$200,000 down and your monthly payment is $5,000! For 30 years! Who in the heck can afford that? Who would want that boatanchor around your neck for three decades even if you could afford it?And I do know people who have tried to “flip” houses and all of them have stated it is nowhere as easy as they make it look like on TV. First is you need an honest and good AND reliable contractor (good luck) on board and as a partner from the ground up. A lot of contractors are crappy and lazy. Then if you think there will be five buyers lined up with 20% down payments and great credit as soon as you are done like on TV? hahahaha
Most of television is just plain addictive, and absolutely designed to be so, as Gay makes perfectly clear. My solution is that I just don’t watch all of this shit. I’ll sample 10 minutes of a first episode just to confirm what I already know. And parents might want to consider this. Your kids just want to connect with someone. It’s hard to resist becoming a hedonist when you watch capitalism acting out its worst impulses before you have even learned to speak.
What happened to the days when you actually had designers doing; you know, design on the network? Now its all greige flip fodder and kitchens so white the glare can be seen on the moon 24/7. Not that much of the design 15-20 years ago on the network was that good, but I’d much rather see some failed attempts at design than the same white and black color combinations with “Live, Laugh, Love” murals painted in the kitchen.
I tried a few episodes of Home Town one day, but those paintings…. I’m out.
It drives me crazy on Flip or Flop when they “carry the design” from the kitchen into the bathrooms. Why would you want where you eat and where you eliminate to look the same?
My wife an I dream of getting on one of the “hunter” shows and completely fucking with the production crew. I’m going to annoyingly mispronounce common items by stressing the wrong syllables (the gra-NITE counterTOPs and cabiNETS), upon entering the en suite I’ll tell her “I can definitely see you going to the bathroom in here!” Asking if the beams are strong enough for her “special swing”. She’ll mention the shower is big enough for the neighbors, but I’ll tell her we have to see what they look like first, and the guy has to be shorter than me. Hopefully one will have a bidet (BI-det) so we can discuss where to keep our drinking glasses nearby.
She’s such a dumb fat idiot.