It’s mostly greed. Land is expensive and if you can slice it up and slap more houses on it, you’ll make more money.
Corollary: Land developers, in general, suck. They don’t care very much about a development’s impact on the neighborhood or the local environment. If the bulldozers aren’t moving, no one’s making money.
Yeah, here’s my neighborhood. These are tiny lots, the larger houses are maybe 1200 SF and most of these houses were built in the 1920’s. Yards got bigger in the 1950’s with the rise of the automobile.
Well that’s what I mean… they’re BIG houses and yet the gardens are barely half the size of the footprint of the house. Some of them don’t really appear to have any yard, just a pool. Over here, if you bought a house that size you’d expect to get a couple of acres of grounds, and Britain is an overcrowded island…
It’s not “Americans” that want huge houses on tiny lots. It’s city folks. There are many, many upscale homes with lots of land around them. If you fire up Google Earth and go hunting for cities, you’ll find this phenomenon for all the reasons listed in the thread so far. Try rural America and your stereotype falls apart.
Most of the million-dollar+ homes around here have multiple acres of land.
We get this kind of thing in Australian cities too. My mother in law is moving into a nursing home soon - her smallish house built in the 1960’s will be sold. We would like to buy it but it’s more than likely that developers will buy it at a premium price, knock the house down and put three gigantic houses with no gardens on the land. (Housing prices are still booming here).
This is happening to a lot of older suburbs, and new homes are being built on smaller and smaller blocks. People are expecting much larger houses these days and they will sacrifice outdoor space to get an extra bedroom, garage or home theatre room.
My inlaws live in this kind of thing, but it’s a “site condo.” That means it has the legal definition of a condo but the homes aren’t townhouses or in any other form or shared, attached, or common building. For them it’s all about the yardwork. They want a home big enough to entertain in (like they’re used to) but without worrying about as much yard (important as they age, and as they travel more).
Of course, there are plenty of non-condos with this arrangement. Although it can be attributed to lifestyle changes and may seem repulsive to some of you, some planners advocate this kind of building as better: high population density wherever there are dwelling units (with houses close together and minimalist yards), while within the development you set aside larger common greenspace for people to enjoy jointly. This setup is also supposed to enhance neighborliness, support walkability, and allow for more preservation of various habitats and environmental features (in the larger communal park areas).
I’m not saying that’s what’s being accomplished in all these developments, of course. But there is a neo-urbanism movement that sees this kind of thing as a step forward, not just a reflection of a bunch of assholes who are too lazy to mow but still want big foyers,3-car garages, and bonus rooms. I will say that the nice thing about cramming more houses into a set acreage–even if I don’t like the way it looks–means that you have to gobble up less agricultural land and/or wilderness area per house. That sounds good to me, but maybe that’s because I live in a township that’s only just gotten its hands around outta-control sprawl.
But more importantly, if you bought a new-build house of equivalent price over here…?
Or two houses. In my neighbourhood, two older (40s or 50s-era houses) were sold and torn down–and two new houses appeared on each previously one-dwelling lot.
You guys are missing the important issue of city zoning, and the many lobbyists/activists that get zoning laws passed. For good or ill, there is a huge movement towards keeping cities as small as possible, with little growth and keeping as much open space as possible. Open Space is the magic phrase.
The result is that new developments cram a lot of houses into smaller spaces–not only because of greed, but because of city requirements–and it’s actually quite difficult to build a development on larger lots. Around here, developers are not allowed to build on large lots; if you want a lot of yard, you can buy an older house (not so easy–many of them are in demand), or find one of the very scarce acre plots outside the city limits and build yourself. I have several friends who have actually purchased 5-acre plots further out, in order to have yard space.
For many people, it’s just not possible to afford a house with a good-sized yard. So they buy as much house as they can get and go to the park.
Some local goverments do mandate these things, but there are apparently loopholes. My town requires lots be a minimum of 2 acres, yet there’s a new housing development in town that has lots not even a third of that size. I have no idea how they got around the law, but clearly they have. If they’d loosened the restriction across the boards my neighbors wouldn’t be in trouble still for having an undersized lot, but they still are. Doesn’t seem fair that a single house is held to the standard, but if you build an entire neighborhood of ugly houses, you can get a waiver…
This demographic, at least, probably prefers being packed in, at least because it’s what they know. Although I imagine the new move-ins have trouble sleeping at night without hearing footsteps over their heads.
sigh
Well, thanks to this thread, I finally got that “Send Me an Angel” earworm out of my head.
“Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
little boxes all the same
There’s a green one and a pink one
and a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
and they all look just the same…”
Oh, thanks a lot. I hate that “Send me an angel” song, but here it is. I don’t actually know the tune to the ticky-tacky song, thankfully, though I know the words. The funny thing is that Daly City is considered pretty cute these days.
I’ll second the ‘want a big house, don’t want a yard’ statement mentioned earlier.
Our house is on .22 acres, and is a pretty good sized house, and when we first moved in, I didn’t mind the yard work or upkeep. Two kids, depression, and marital issues (since blissfully conquered) and the nasty weed infested backyard is NOT a project I’m particularly looking forward to next year.
How do you conquer your kids? 
I send them out back to play with the coyotes, owls, snakes and other Open Space riffraff.
Actually, they can’t take a punch, and aren’t very good at un-tieing knots yet.
(I keed, I keed!)
But you’re not going to have that in the Arizona desert, even if you did have a lot of land. Desert plants don’t tend to have broad leaves, so they don’t provide a lot of screening.
Oh, and you probably don’t want to spend a lot of time walking around naked outside in the Arizona desert, either- you’d get a pretty nasty sunburn.
Arizona is another place that is popular with retirees, like Florida, so the small lots may be intended to appeal to them.
I live in a 1920’s style subdivision. If you look, you’ll notice there’s two main house types. I’ve got the bigger style, the one that used to be a duplex. The houses are really close together on the sides, decent front yards, and huge backyards.
-Lil
It’s ironic - people retire to Florida for the weather, then hardly spend any time in it.
When they replaced the shopping center down the street from me, they built houses exactly like those mentioned in the OP. It’s not for open space - there is a park across the street, and the development wasn’t big enough. I don’t think it was for cramming, since the I doubt they could have gotten much more in. I rather suspect it is because house prices are a function more of house size and number of rooms, rather than lot size. They built them two stories for the same reason - almost no houses here are two stories. Few fliers for houses for sale mention lot size, and they all mention square footage.
I took a tour, and the yards are dreadful. Put a grill and a table in, and there is no room for a family. The front yards are tiny also. Our lot is fairly big for the area, but still much smaller than we had in New Jersey.
The people who moved in are not retired, btw.