Ordinary Homes of the United States

  Time period: Late 20th century to present Location: Suburban downtowns and car-centered cities across the country How to provide lots of apartments, while hiding the parking. Key features - Mid-rise apartment building wrapped around a multi-story parking garage. - Requires large piece of land. - Higher density than garden apartments, less dense than a podium building. Everything's bigger in Texas - including the apartment buildings. After World War II, advances in air conditioning technology made urban living in hot and humid climates more desirable. Texas was also going through an oil boom. While oil fields tapped out and production peaked in the 1970s, the state's early lead in oil production locked in its position as a headquarters for oil companies, as well as banks and suppliers that supported oil drilling elsewhere in the world.  Since the 2010s, the fracking boom has brought a new wave of oil related jobs to Texas. While its main Sunbelt rival - California - went down...

  Time period: 1990s to present Location: Houston, Texas In a city with few zoning restrictions, this is the housing type that the free market found most profitable. Key features - Detached 3-story house on 1,400 square foot lot (such as a 35' by 40' lot) - Typically built by subdividing a larger lot into 4-10 lots, with larger subdivisions containing up to a few dozen houses. Small lot homes answer this question: Why should one be required to buy 5,000 square feet of land, if they only want 2,000 square feet of house? Houston is famous as by far the largest city in the US that doesn't have zoning. However, while there are a few odd sights, such as skyscrapers next to single-story houses, for the most part, it looks like any other US cities.  That's because while Houston doesn't limit building height or what type of business or home you can build, it does have development standards. These include minimum parking requirements, which are similar to most US suburbs, as...