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Notes -
I've forgotten the name of a writer, whom I think was introduced to via The Motte: The webpage that was linked to was a long piece on female physical attractiveness to men, with good examples of convergence in art (e.g., depictions of fertility goddesses) and less persuasive evidence from porn and sex dolls. The author also had an argument that almost no homes should be built with attached garages, and a zoning scheme that would purportedly accommodate everyone having a SFH with a detached garage. (He was much more persuasive that attached garages generally make facades ugly than that attached garages are a net negative. Part of the argument was that cars don't strictly need to be stored indoors, and other things could be stored in a shed. However, most of the things you would store in a garage are things that are designed to be used outdoors, but would benefit from being stored indoors, and cars are far and away both the most expensive of these things and the most likely to be resold to fund their replacement - if you can park in a garage, you should.) Anyone recognize this description?
Why on earth is a detached garage a good idea? Just complicates electrical service and makes the house insulation less efficient.
I really regret having so many shitty outbuildings, but it's optimal for property tax purposes. The only one I wouldn't rather be connected to the house is the wood shed.
Unless the house has a very wide and/or particular facade, attached garages are ugly. (And, if you have a large enough lot that you can spare the outdoor area, the indoor area might be put to better use.) In every other way, attached garages are superior, though he believes that most garages are unnecessary and detached garages are a lesser evil, more precisely.
This has nothing to do with attached garages and everything to do with garages being the most prominent part of house facades. The latter is indeed bad, but an attached garage is neither necessary nor sufficient for this to happen.
I think this has to do with the lots getting narrower and narrower in the US. You can no longer build your house next to a garage without violating various bylaws about setbacks. Look at "Walter White's house", a two-car garage takes up literally half the frontage. You would need to replace the house with a two-storey one to be able to get rid of the garage on its façade and even then it would be a squeeze: the lot is 72 feet wide, with two 6-foot side setbacks it's just 60 feet, a nice two-storey house is 40 feet wide, which leaves just enough space for an attached two-car garage that doesn't crowd the facade.
Are lots getting narrower in the US? It is my impression that they are getting wider.
I have seen US houses built on agglomerations of four 25′×110′ lots. Obviously, a 25-foot-wide lot would have approximately zero buildable area under most modern zoning codes (example). But such a lot was perfectly buildable back when the lot was originally laid out, one or two hundred years ago.
This video I watched says they are: https://youtube.com/watch?v=b8wnnFUazOY
I think you’re both right but looking at different time periods. Two story houses built on deep, narrow lots were the rule throughout much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in what were often called the “streetcar suburbs.” As the name suggests, residents originally relied primarily on public transportation and so didn’t need lots large enough to accommodate stables, carriage houses, or garages. That changed during the post-war era, when modern suburban neighborhoods with their one story houses on relatively large lots became the norm. Most newer subdivisions these days seem to contain relatively large houses on lots that are smaller than those of the 1950s but wider than those of the 1910s (though not necessarily much larger in terms of total square footage).
The wider your roads, the more the logic of efficient land use pushes you towards deep, narrow lots (in order to get as many square feet of lot per square foot of road as possible). Nathan Lewis points out that the US has had very wide roads by international standards since before the invention of the car, and therefore deeper and narrower lots for most of the late C19/early C20.
After car ownership became widespread, the US avoided the problems of wide roads and deep, narrow lots by insisting on lots which are incredibly large for the size of the house. Levittown mostly consisted of 800 sq ft houses (not counting the garage) on 6000 sq ft lots.
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