Florida lacks the clay to make bricks. There are no brick manufacturers in-state; the bricks must be brought in from out of state _ often from the same manufacturers, Bird said, who supplied the bricks for this area 100 years ago.
A brick house was the right choice for the three little pigs. Now builders and the brick industry are hoping to persuade buyers it's the right choice for them.
With a new kind of brick available, and with builders hoping to carve out a special niche in the traditional concrete-block-and-stucco Florida market, buyers may be seeing more brick houses in the future. Industry representatives point to what they see as brick's look of tradition and quality, which they hope will appeal particularly to Northern transplants who will be reminded of houses back home.
They stress brick's low- or no-maintenance qualities _ it doesn't need painting, won't peel, chip, rot, fade, or dent. At a time of volatile lumber costs, they point to its stable price. They note that it is termite-proof and stands up well to severe weather. They say that heating, cooling and insurance costs are lower. And they claim that, while brick is initially 3 to 7 percent more expensive than masonry, it adds 6 percent more to a home's appreciated value than do other sidings. (Not everyone agrees with that claim.)
"It's maintenance-free, and it'll look the same in 20 years as it does to this day," said John Cordell, president of Cordell Homes of Riverview in Hillsborough County. The son of a brickmason, he has been building brick homes since the 1970s, and his brick model in the Ashley Oaks subdivision in Riverview won a Grand Award in the 1992 Hillsborough Parade of Homes.
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Brick was the material of choice in years gone by in Florida for homes, for commercial construction, for streets. Just look at some old warehouses in Ybor City, the streets in older sections of our cities, homes and courthouses and hospitals. More recently, brick has made an appearance in rebuilt sidewalks or streets in downtown Tampa and St. Petersburg and in new schools in Pasco County. Bricks have been used as accents in home construction and for streets and walls in subdivisions.
But as far as modern home construction is concerned, "Florida has typically been a concrete block and stucco market," said James R. Bird of Coloroc Materials, a Tampa-based brick supplier.
That's because labor rates for block masonry work are low, Bird said, and the raw materials are readily available. Florida lacks the clay to make bricks. There are no brick manufacturers in-state; the bricks must be brought in from out of state _ often from the same manufacturers, Bird said, who supplied the bricks for this area 100 years ago.
Brick is created by mixing clay or shale with water, molding it, and burning it in a kiln at 2,000 degrees. The Brick Institute of America says there's no difference in performance between clay and shale brick. Bricks come in a variety of sizes and finishes.
One motivation for builders to use brick is the ability to offer customers something different. "Builders have gotten to the point where they feel they need to offer more value, more tradition, a change in the look," said Bird of Coloroc, the brick supplier. Typical masonry homes are "cookie cutters. They're nice homes," he said, but as you drive down the street past one similar house after another, "you might miss your own house, it looks just like your neighbor's." Hence the desire to offer a different look, he said.
"We try to be unique, to offer something different that other builders aren't offering," said Richard Turk, president of Oldsmar-based Westfield Homes, which builds one-story structural brick homes at GlenEagles and Coventry Village, two North Pinellas subdivisions, in the price range of $115,000 to $119,600. The homes appeal to younger buyers, he said, because of the "long-term ease of maintenance." He also points to brick's physical and architectural appeal. Some buyers will always want a pastel masonry house with a palm tree out front, he said, but "I'm absolutely convinced that if we can continue to build a certain line of our houses out of all brick, there is a market who will buy it."
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There are two kinds of brick construction. In face, or veneer, construction, brick is applied over a concrete-block or wood-frame wall that supports the roof. In structural brick construction, the walls themselves bear the load.
The old brick cigar factories in Ybor City were constructed with walls several bricks thick in order to bear the load of roof trusses, Bird said _ clearly an expensive and time-consuming method of construction. Homes like the ones built by Westfield use a Norwegian structural brick that can support walls a single story in height.
The home featured here, which Florida Dream Homes completed recently in East Lake Woodlands, uses a new kind of hollow-core king-sized brick. This structural brick home requires no backup block or frame construction and is self-supporting; it can be used in two-story construction. A large core hole through the brick allows steel reinforcing bars ("re-bar" in the trade) to be inserted and then grouted in place to create a load-bearing structural wall. "There is no wood at all in the exterior walls of this home," builder Judy Behan said. "It's totally brick."
The house is one of two demonstration projects (the other is in Chicago) using brick produced by Tennessee-based General Shale Brick Co., which formally unveiled the hollow-core brick at the National Association of Home Builders convention in Las Vegas in January. Structural brick homes are expected to be built shortly in Lake Padgett Estates in Tampa and in St. Petersburg, and a two-story office building is to be built in Ybor City.
Supporters of structural-brick construction say building with veneer or face brick means double the work, hence higher costs _ you build the block wall, then apply the brick over it. They say a concrete-block and stucco home isn't a one-step process either: You need three subcontractors _ the mason, the stucco worker and the painter. But if you build with structural brick, they say, once the wall is up, it's done.
Still, brick is expensive to buy and labor-intensive to put up, said Leon Wetherington, assistant professor in the School of Building Construction at the University of Florida. "Your first cost is relatively high."
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Brick does well from an energy standpoint. Light-colored brick absorbs 35 to 50 percent of the heat striking it, according to the Florida Solar Energy Center in Cape Canaveral. That compares to 40 percent for beige stucco, 45 percent for cream-colored paints, 45 percent for white or gray aluminum siding, and 50 percent for light-gray paint. Light-red brick absorbs up to 60 percent, and burnt red brick can absorb up to 70 percent, near the amount absorbed by the darkest-color paint.
The dense mass of brick means it keeps the temperatures inside a house from fluctuating greatly, but that's also true of any dense or massive material, including concrete or concrete block, said Wetherington of UF.
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If the only color brick you can think of is schoolhouse red, think again. "There's a tremendous palette of colors available now," said Bird of Coloroc. There are "colors designed for the Florida climate or the Florida look _ buffs and tans and pastels, pinks and corals," he said. One reason for that is the reflective character of lighter brick, "but more so is the aesthetic appeal."
As for brick's ability to withstand hurricanes, there's virtually no difference between concrete block and brick when it comes to resisting heavy winds, Wetherington said. Hurricane Andrew didn't blow walls down; the destruction in South Florida came when inadequately fastened roofs were ripped off by severe winds.
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As for the claim that insurance rates are lower for brick, they are lower than rates for wood-frame houses, because of the lower likelihood of fire damage, said spokesmen for State Farm and Allstate, Florida's two largest insurers. But their rates for brick and for concrete-block homes are identical.
Rick Hill, an appraiser with Balseiro & Associates in Hillsborough, was skeptical of across-the-board claims from the Brick Institute that "brick _ unlike vinyl, wood, cedar or aluminum _ adds 6 percent more to a home's appreciated value." Hill acknowledged brick's durability, low maintenance and resistance to insects, but said, "There are too many variables to say yea or nay," and pointed out that real estate values in the Tampa Bay area have been essentially flat for the last several years.
Market demand is a factor too, pointed out appraiser Bill Mallette Jr. of Gregoire & Gregoire in St. Petersburg. If buyers aren't interested, there's no guarantee values will rise.
Still, said Wetherington of UF, if a no-maintenance home is your goal, brick is "the closest thing to it I'm aware of."
He added: "If you can afford it, it's a house you can pass on to your grandkids."
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