There is a house in my neighborhood, which has always interested me-it is only about 10’ wide! Interestingly, it is three stories-so in addition to being very narrow, a lot of floor space is consumed by stairs. Some day ill walk by it and hopefully get a closer look. I’ve seen the world’s narrowest house 9it is In Amsterdam, the Netherlands)-it was built in an alleyway between two other houses. Aside from the challenge of building in such an odd shape, how many people are willing to live in such an unusual house.
Do USA building codes dictate some minimum width of a house?
I saw a show on TLC (or maybe HGTV) about a house in the US that is 10 feet wide. I believe it made it into the Guinness Record books. There was a regular house on the property and then the owner wanted to build another one in the remaining area.
10 feet wide? That’s downright spacious. How about seven feet? 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31199-2005Jan23.html
Though the rest of your description sounds like the history of the house in Alexandria.
Not sure when this picture was made, but when I was passing by this place regularly (back in the 90’s) it was covered with aluminum siding. (yeech!)
I saw that show. Once properly decorated, it looked pretty normal.
How old is the house?
I grew up in Bucks County, PA and the explanation we got from the local schools for skinny tall houses was the taxing system. Taxes were assessed on the frontage of your house, so up was the way to go. But I don’t have a cite so take it with a grain of salt. Most of what I learned at school turned out to be wrong it seems.
In Vietnam and Cambodia, land prices are by the square meter, leading to some fairly narrow houses.
Why wouldn’t it be permitted? Why would the government have any right to prohibit it?
Mind you, I’m not defending the aesthetics or practicality of such a house. Sounds stupid to me. But if a builder wants to build it and someone wants to buy it, why would that not be permitted as long as it meets the usual building codes?
Not picking an argument here. Just don’t understand the point of the question.
I can’t see any reason to prohibit it.
In the UK many houses have a narrow frontage but go waaaaaay back for the aforementioned reasons of reducing taxation.
I remember that house (it was on "What’s Up With That House?). Evidently, the woman that owned the big house next to it, refused to buy the extra ten foot strip of land next to it, thinking no one could ever build on it. So the land owner, built the very narrow house right up next to the big house. On the TV show, they even went into the big house so you could see the walls of the spite house completely blocking in the windows.
Zoning requirements. Most places have laws about how far you must be from a property line.
The houses mentioned probably predate the laws and were grandfathered in.
I bet zoning laws were invented precisely because of stunts like this.
The OP doesn’t say anything about it being unusually close to a property line. Just says it’s extremely narrow. If the house itself is wierdly narrow but no closer to the property line than other more normal houses, my question stands.
(A later post talks about a different house on the properly line, and sure, I can see the need to prohibit that.)
Shotgun houses used to be popular many years ago. My family lived in one in Louisville (see picture in the link) back when I was a sprout. Mom always believed the frontage reason for the houses’ particular shape.
I’d think they’d want to ban them in some places with severe weather conditions (i.e., where the wind will blow the darn thing to kingdom come).
And then there’s Britain’s smallest house, in Conwy, Wales.
I saw (and toured, if you could call it that) the house during my month-long trip to the UK two years back. It’s about 6 feet wide by 10 feet high. Not sure about the depth, but I’d be very surprised if it’s more than 10 feet, and I’d expect it to be less.
But all of the places shown so far have been of the row house type (a.k.a. terraced houses, a.k.a. townhouses), which means they were built all the way to the property line. All of them also look old, so they probably predate modern zoning laws. Row houses are still built, often under names like “towne homes”, gratuitous olde tyme “e” optional, but I suspect they’re zoned as apartments to allow them to touch one another.
While property taxes based on frontage may explain why row houses in general are narrow, the very narrow ones linked to in this thread all seem to have been built as a way to use up a very narrow lot of land left over between two existing houses. Pack 'em in, the land ownder must have thought, if the demand for housing is there somebody will figure out how to use it.
I just gave a walking tour of the Village last month in which I spent a lot of time in front of this house, where the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay lived for a while in the 1920s (that’s what the red circular plaque on it says.) More importantly to my mind, the novelist Richard Yates lived next door (the house to the left, at 75 Bedford Street) and wrote about it in his best short story “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired.” (The walking tour concerned Yates’ homes, hangouts, etc, many of which of which still stand.)
They’re called Spite Houses
From the Washington Post.