In my experience of American suburbia (Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Conn., Virginia and a few other states) there are not very many streets with the uniform housing design that is typical in an Irish or British housing development. That is, a street will typically have a mix of large and small housing, some bungalows, some two-storey etc. The different houses on most of these streets look like they were designed and built at different times. This makes sense in a rural area that became a suburb but the same is true of housing streets closer to city centres. I know newer developments in Cleveland, Chicago etc. suburbs do often have uniform houses but how come this type of development wasn’t that common hitherto? I imagine it is cheaper to build a street with the same schematics than with various differing designs. What am I missing?
I think it has to do with the way suburbs sprawl here. Also the American preference for detached houses with nice yards. Formerly rural farms often become absorbed by the cities. Originally many of the houses might have had yards and lots that were acres across. Then as the years go by and the area gets more densely populated, the big lots get halved and parceled out at different times, so new houses are built every generation.
The older cities in Ireland and England maybe are more homogeneous in part because disasters or city improvements led to rebuilding sections all at once. You might not tear down one house out of a row instead of just leveling the whole block and starting from scratch.
In my city in Ohio, a lot of the land was originally the property of the wealthy Sieberling and Firestone families. You can see clearly where they had their enormous properties (some of it is now a national park), where the wealthy executives lived with big lots of their own, where the cheap houses were put up for the factory workers, where the middle class started building, and where the first wave of suburbs went and so on.
On the outskirts, there’s an area that was all farmland and golf courses when I was little, today it’s mostly development housing (identical houses with similar designs) or shopping areas. You’d only get identical houses if you’re doing a whole street at once. Aside from developments though, what you usually see are wealthy families moving out where they can get more land and then eventually the city sprawls out to meet them, so they sell off their former lots, usually a little at a time, and then move again farther out.
At least that’s how it looks to me. I’m installing SimCity as I type this so it’s all on my mind. 
A lot of the typical suburban American housing developments I am familiar with date from the years after WWII.
When a person first sees them they might give the impression of a variety of housing styles but as you look closer you begin to notice that there might be several hundred houses in one area that are all variations on 3 or 4 basic layouts.
The suburban subdivision I grew up in north of New York City was like this, 90% of the houses were one of two basic floorplans, “ranch” and “colonial”. They all had minor differences like colors of siding, roofing, and orientation (our house was the mirror image of the one next door because the builder refused to put two identical houses right next to each other). Then as the houses age they get painted and added onto so that the similarities become even less apparent over time. The subdivisions where I live now outside of Boston are similar.
My completely unsubstantiated WAG is that the builders were trying to cater to the American desire for individuality by seeming to offer a variety of possible houses, while at the same time keeping it economically feasible to crank out a lot of units.
Do you know what era these British and Irish housing developments date from? Where they generally publicly or privately financed?
I think Laughing Lagomorph hit on it. Essentially builders do not build houses until they are bought. And when you buy, you get to specify which model and floor plan – out of a handful – you desire. I went through this exercise once and even got the builder to add 4 feet to the floor plan.
Then the builder went bankrupt and everything fell through. But I got my measly $500 deposit back.
What happens in Ireland? Do builders just create an entire neighbourhood and then sell the already erected houses?
Around here, in northern California, they do build whole neighborhoods–you can buy the house before it’s built or when it’s finished. They used to build them with just 3 or 4 floorplans, but now you get more variety in a neighborhood–I suppose they found that customers like it better, so there are probably 8 floorplans instead of 3. The houses all match, though. The exteriors differ somewhat in my neighborhood; some stucco, some wood, with differing amounts of brick or stone facing in spots. In a slightly less expensive neighborhood it will all be stucco, with less variety in floorplans.
We tend not to have two-story houses because it’s too hot. There are some, especially now that lot size is shrinking so much, but not many, and the cooling bills are astronomical.
They sell the houses off the plans usually. However, some developments aren’t that popular to begin with so end up being built with a significant proportion of the houses not yet sold. These houses/apartments are typically divided into 1, 2, 3, or more bedroom so there is some variety but not a whole lot.
My sister lived in a housing development from the 1940s, all of the houses except perhaps corner houses had the same interiors and exteriors. There were maybe 500 houses in her neighbourhood, all essentially the same. Over the years the owners had changed the facades and built on extensions to some of the houses but they still all looked similar. I’ve seen other developments dating from the same time as this one in other parts of Dublin that look the same. My mother’s house was built I believe in the 1960s and all the houses on that street except the corner houses are very similar, again with individual customisations over the years.
I wonder if a postwar utilitarianism-through-neccessity became very much ingrained into a much longer-term British and Irish expectation of what new housing should look like.
Another vague thought is of my grandfather’s very long-term thinking, which proved to be very fruitful. In the late 40s they were starting a family and buying a house in suburban London. He identified a large new development in what’s now Zone 5, and bought the house off the plan. Not because the house was spectacular, but because the plot of land was a big triangle which was wedged in by the railway and other houses, so their garden would be enourmous and they’d always have control over it.
It was sold not long ago, for a nice sum, and there’s now a block of apartments going up on the site. No doubt being sold off the plan, buy-to-let.
It depends on the pattern of building. Where my parents live in Connecticut, the area was probably rural once apon a time. That is to say, the area consisted of windy roads crisscrossing between small town centers dating back to the Colonial days with vast wooded areas between roads. People would probably come in and buy one to several lots as needed and then develop houses individually. Basically everything grew very organically.
As demand increases, you start seeing more planned subdivisions. In those cases, a developer will bulldoze a great swath of woods and plop down a bunch of new streets and houses from a similar template.
Your question, asked from the US perspective (“Why do all suburban houses in the UK look alike?”) a couple of months ago.
http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showthread.php?t=31953
Basically, UK: very large homebuilders (Bovis, etc) building a mass product for a country with a relatively uniform climate. US: more mom-and-pop builders – especially in smaller metropolitan areas, and slow-growth cities like Cleveland and Buffalo – and architectural influences not just from around the country, but around the world, in a nation with a varied climate.