Why is there no overhead lighting in living spaces in California?

January 31, 2020 2:57 PM

Between internships and new job, I have lived in 5 Bay Area apartments within the last 3 years. None of them had overhead lighting in the living room or bedroom. All had overhead lighting in the kitchen. One had overhead lighting in the bathroom. I thought it might be age related, but the last internship had me in a brand new apartment building. What gives. I miss overhead lighting.
posted by apex_ to Grab Bag (26 answers total)

My current CA apartment has overhead lighting, as have my previous apartments, so it's definitely not universal! I will say that I actually almost never use the main lights because I prefer lamps.
posted by pinochiette at 3:05 PM on January 31, 2020

Along with kitchen and bathrooms, I had overhead lighting in the bedrooms at a couple apartments when I lived in LA. One apt had a chandelier in the dining area but not in the main area. So maybe lack of overhead lighting is more of a Bay Area thing? As to why, I have no clue.
posted by acidnova at 3:14 PM on January 31, 2020

I do not know what gives, but they don't have overhead lighting in the Bay Area houses, either. Anyone I know who has overhead lighting had to install it themselves once they bought the property. It's infuriating.
posted by toastyk at 3:15 PM on January 31, 2020 [6 favorites]

My south bay house was the same way but I always put it up to age - the house was built in 1952 and they were just plain old cheap back then. There were 3 ceiling fixtures in hallways, but nothing in rooms. Not even wires and boxes.

But a brand new apartment building with no overhead lighting? I'm stumped. My only explanation is cost cutting.
posted by GuyZero at 3:17 PM on January 31, 2020

Oh, and yes, I installed overhead lighting in 4 bedrooms and 3 other rooms. But I always figured it was just my house.
posted by GuyZero at 3:18 PM on January 31, 2020

Hmm. I live in the Bay Area, and all of my family members here have houses with overhead lighting. I just looked through some random real estate listings of older homes and they all have overhead lighting as well (though I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't the case in houses that haven't been updated).
posted by pinochiette at 3:23 PM on January 31, 2020

I think the expectation is that overhead lighting is for "task" or "work" areas - kitchens, garages, hallways, and home offices. Overhead lights are harsher (brighter, fewer sources of light), cast reflections on big TVs, and are less flattering than several lower sources of warmer light.

The builders could install a ton of recessed lights, or track lighting (with the lights pointed at the walls for diffusion), but real estate is so expensive in urban California that costs are already cut to the bone.

(both my home built in 2008 and parents' built in 2000 have no overhead lights in bedrooms or living areas)
posted by meowzilla at 3:44 PM on January 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

I have lived in 3 Philadelphia apartments, none with overhead lighting in the living room or bedrooms. I was wondering the same thing.
posted by i_am_a_fiesta at 3:57 PM on January 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

More anecdata: 100 year old California craftsman bungalow in Oakland from a kit has what I am reasonable sure is original overhead lighting In all rooms except the living room, which is large and has a large window.

Trying to remember all the details of the pre-1906 Victorian flat in SF we lived in but pretty sure it was much the same. It had those decorative medallions.
posted by vunder at 4:02 PM on January 31, 2020

The only place I've ever lived without overhead lighting was in California, so I feel OK accepting the premise of your question. But my guess (and it's just a guess), is that the reason is not geographic but building age.

As far as I can tell, new homes in CA have overhead lighting in all rooms like everywhere else.

But the "the light switch controls a random outlet in your room, if you even have one" setup was typical for the postwar building boom (which is when most of CA's housing urban stock was built) because it was cheap and CA needed to build a lot of houses and apartments quickly and cheaply in that period of mass migration.

Maybe prewar buildings have overhead lighting because they were just all around more expensive (see The myth of ‘We don’t build houses like we used to’ for a look at this). Or maybe prewar buildings are more likely to have had significant electric work done, which is a good time to modernize the lighting. Postwar is kind of a sweet spot for "your home is old but not we-replaced-the-plumbing-and-wiring old".
posted by caek at 4:14 PM on January 31, 2020 [4 favorites]

Reporting in from another roughly hundred-year-old Oakland bungalow. We have original overhead fixtures in the living room, dining room, hallway, and bedrooms.
posted by tangerine at 4:51 PM on January 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

25-ish year old house in the North Bay Area. No ceiling fixtures in living areas or bedrooms. But there are wall switches connected to a nearby outlet in most rooms.
posted by ericales at 5:59 PM on January 31, 2020

I live in the Sacramento area and my apartment is lit just like yours: only in the kitchen and bathroom areas. I assume cheapness.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:00 PM on January 31, 2020

Staying in the Indianapolis area, every single apartment I've been in here (more than 10 properties, less than 30) has had overhead in the kitchen and no where else, but they have switches with outlets connected for floor lamps. I've never understood it and chalked it up to apartments don't want to have to change bulbs or be responsible for the electrical maintenance.
posted by AnneShirley at 6:29 PM on January 31, 2020 [3 favorites]

I've noticed this too and I always thought it was because there are no ceiling fans in coastal California, so they don't run electric overhead.
posted by bradbane at 6:43 PM on January 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm in Utah in a big complex. The living room and bedrooms do not have overhead lighting. They do, however, have an outlet controlled by a wall switch. Therefore you plug in a lamp or two that are controlled by the lightswitch. Do you have any light switches in those rooms? If you're longing for it you can easily hang pendant lights on cords, even with command hooks for no-damage installation and removal.
posted by Crystalinne at 6:44 PM on January 31, 2020

IMHO, this is one of those things that has multiple originators.

A huge percentage of Bay Area housing is from the postwar period, when drywall was beginning major adoption (it's older than that, of course, but it was much more of a niche product until WW2 came along). People were still sorting out how to use it, and ALL of it was more brittle than what you get these days, so GCs avoided certain things out of a desire to avoid trouble. You're doing 75 houses in a subdivision, you don't wanna deal with fiddly details you can avoid.

[this is, coincidentally, why crawlspaces suuuuck in the Bay Area; crews just tossed any concrete left over from the perimeter foundation into the crawlspace zone to save time, so now you have these spiky craters all over the goddamn place and not only do you need to worry about nails from above but also ridiculous concrete rock craters below]

...so it's largely a matter of being cheaper and simpler to construct. You have the framing crew finish, you send in the MEP guys, and then you close it all up. Cutting through a sheet of drywall that's on the wall in order to find the outlet that's nailed to the side of a stud is one thing, you can do that with a short tape, but cutting through a sheet in an attempt to bullseye an electrical mount that's in the middle of a 20x20 room is quite another (no laser rigs in 1959). So then you gotta cut down from above, and to do so you send a guy into the now-closed-up rafters? Fuck that. Put the ceiling in, skim it, and move the hell on.

Of course, once everyone in a given area expects there to be no ceiling lights, then why the hell would you put them in? You don't have to, so you don't. It's still cheaper to NOT put lights in the ceiling.

My 1959 Bay Area house has ceiling lights throughout, added in 2016. Dude spent like a week up in the attic, which definitely sucked for him.
posted by aramaic at 7:06 PM on January 31, 2020 [4 favorites]

I lived in a house in the Bay Area that survived the 1906 earthquake. I believe there were overhead lights in all the rooms (maybe not the living room). Of course, that was in 2006, so there were plenty of opportunities to for the lights to have been added. (No idea whether the house was built with electricity. I lived in an apartment in Minneapolis from ~1916 that wasn't (you could see where wires were originally run), but those big old wooden houses in Berkeley were not built for the working class, which my apartment was.)

I also lived in a recently-built apartment in the Bay Area. That also had overhead lights.
posted by hoyland at 7:13 PM on January 31, 2020

On the other hand, my best friend lives in a duplex in Oakland (wooden, probably quite old, but not sure) that does not have overhead lighting except in the bathroom and maybe kitchen.
posted by hoyland at 7:14 PM on January 31, 2020

I’ve lived in 6-7 houses and apartments in Berkeley and Oakland. Not a single one has had an overhead light in the living room. Mixed on bedrooms, always in the kitchens and bathrooms. I currently live in a 93 year old Berkeley house, overhead lighting everywhere but the living room (which does have an outlet controlled by a light switch). No idea when the overhead fixture were installed or which are original though.
posted by JenMarie at 10:19 PM on January 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

I grew up in the East Bay, in a late 80s construction house. There was overhead lighting only in the kitchen, and a sort of chandelier in the dining room. I remember track lighting becoming a thing in the 90s, recessed spots around 2000. But you had to put them in yourself, of course.
posted by Standard Orange at 3:04 AM on February 1, 2020

I've never had an apartment with overhead lighting except in the kitchen and bathroom. I assumed it was standard.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:31 AM on February 1, 2020

1950s CA tract house here. No overhead lights in the bedrooms, and the one I put was complicated and expensive. Tracts were cheaply and quickly built. Pain in the ass.
posted by fingersandtoes at 8:21 AM on February 1, 2020

My parents had to request overhead lighting in their home built in 1965 in Ohio. We paid extra to install overhead lights in the bedroom in our 1969 house in San Jose area.
posted by metahawk at 7:21 PM on February 1, 2020

San Francisco Victorian duplex here, dating from the 1880s, with overhead lighting in all rooms. When the house was first built it had gas lighting (still have the gas pipes in the attic) but it was converted to electricity starting in the 1920s (still have some knob-and-tube wiring up there as well). So, not a universal thing here.
posted by Quietgal at 7:40 PM on February 1, 2020

I live in an older Palo Alto apartment complex and my bedroom does have overhead lighting -- however, it's built into the ceiling fan. So YMMV if you don't have a ceiling fan in the bedroom.
posted by serelliya at 4:33 PM on February 3, 2020