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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

And backyards are getting smaller.

If you look at the whole trend, houses are bigger, lots are smaller. One of the more interesting things I found in England when my sister was living there was that many folks had a small house but a large garden, because they spent most of their 'home' time in the garden rather than indoors. Whereas in the US there are a lot of people for who the 'garden' (or the yard as we yanks refer to it) is just a maintenance nightmare. Going so far as to install artificial turf to reduce the time burden of keeping it looking nicely.

I think it is sad if people don't get out much, but recognize that more and more of folks leisure time requires more electricity than is available out there.

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You really have to be specific about where you're collecting your anecdotal data.

If you live in Texas or much of the Southern US, being outside during the summer is nasty. As though the heat isn't bad enough, the mosquitoes are positively vicious. When I lived in Texas, we spent most of May-September indoors. It was great to have a big house there.

Likewise, you need to consider how snowbound many portions of the US are during the winter months. Being outside from November to March in Minnesota is a great way to freeze, but gardening isn't really possible.

When I lived in California, the weather was beautiful and the bugs were few. We lived in smaller places and it didn't matter since we were outside so much of the time.

It's a big country with many different climates.

It is very common for new house constructions to either tear down a few adjacent house and build tightly placed houses on the land, or tear down a single house and build a larger house on it. This is specially true in high cost areas.

I'm surprised that you got that impression. I'm from the UK, I have visited the US once and was in the Philadelphia suburbs. I would say that the UK has smaller homes and gardens. In the UK most people live in dense cities and towns as opposed to suburban sprawl in the US, this limits space available.

I would agree that in England we spend more time gardening (though "most of their 'home' time" would be an exaggeration, possibly true in summer). There is strong separation of gardens in the UK as well, not having a fence would be very unusual, whereas where I was in the US back and front yards weren't clearly delineated.

That is an issue, there are a lot of different neighborhoods in both the US and the UK. So allow me to narrow my comment down somewhat.

In the San Francisco Bay Area and the Las Vegas metropolitan area, both places where I've been able to keep up to date on for about 30+ years, later neighborhoods have smaller lots and larger homes. In what started as the 'suburbs' in the peninsula like Sunnyvale, Campbell, Cupertino, and Los Altos. You can see pretty this pretty clearly from aerial imagery in Google Maps if you also know approximate neighborhood dates. We've had a number of towns propose or pass 'zero lot line' ordinances which restrict the building of residences that go right to the edge of the lot. And lots themselves have gone from 1/2 acre to 1/3 acre then to 1/4 acre, and now often 1/6 acre.

On the east coast, where I spent some of my childhood, back lots were commonly unfenced and effectively like mini-parks behind the houses out front, whereas in California fences are the norm. In Las Vegas fences are also the norm and lots have shown a similar drop although there was a lot of desert around so it has not been as pronounced as it has in the Bay Area.

My sister lived in Birmingham UK for a while and noted how much more invested folks she met were in their gardens than Americans were.

Interesting, my guess would've been that yard sizes were at least staying the same. I've chiefly associated new construction with "further from the city center" (from living in suburban Texas for most of my life until recently) where the amount of available land increases dramatically as the radius from the center increases.

The Census PDF breaks things down into inside- and outside-MSAs, and they've both been getting bigger, but I'm not sure if the MSAs have stayed constant size or gotten bigger themselves...

At least in Seattle, most new construction seems to be taking one large lot, and either building one larger house with a smaller yard, or building multiple townhouses with little to no yard.

This is really obvious in the town where I live. Older houses are smaller with larger yards, even considering proportions.

I have no personal use for a yard or a giant house. I would rather live in a small house with many acres of space for natural growth for the area (prairie, trees, sagebrush, etc)( I really dislike the "lawn" look. :-)).

My plan is to have a apartment/condo for a time, then - if I have enough career freedom - move to a more rural region where acreage is cheap.

Part of my thought is that we need to design homes to be habitable and extensible. This is very different from the slap-it-up construction suburbs have tended to use. I'd like to be able to modify my own space, add new buildings, etc, as needed. Christopher Alexander talks about this style of building in his writings some.

I know a couple of people who live like that, they have a pretty spartan condo in San Francisco and then larger places out in Portola in one case and Morgan Hill in the other.

My thought is it sounds lovely, if you can afford to keep two places running :-( But maybe an AptBnB kind of thing, work apartment by the week or something.

I don't see myself with the two-home lifestyle. I have enough issues with multiple computers. Maybe this will change, but I see the house as a home, a place to abide. (Which, incidentally, realigns priorities for debts and expectations: the home isn't an asset, it's not for sale :-) ).

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